Aldi ‘Fresh Prints’, one of Spain’s three Gold Lion-winning campaigns at Cannes Lions 2018, is a brilliant demonstration of how creativity and media can work in harmony.

 

The brief emerged from the insight that many consumers didn’t know that Aldi supermarkets stocked fresh produce. To challenge this misconception, McCann Spain came up with a very modern idea for a traditional print campaign. To highlight the freshness of Aldi’s products, they made sure the print executions were fresh too - the ads on the right-hand page of the newspaper would feature the news from that same edition that appeared on the left-hand page.

 

The ads featured images of Aldi’s freshest produce wrapped in newspaper reporting on the day’s freshest news - an idea inspired by the tradition of markets in Spain wrapping their fresh fruit and vegetables in the day’s newspapers.

 

Both McCann’s Madrid and Barcelona offices and Havas Media Barcelona coordinated with the newspapers the ads were being run in - La Vanguardia’s Spanish and Catalan editions and 20 Minutos’ Spanish edition - who gave the agencies their breaking news stories just before they went to press. This left the teams just two hours to finalise the creative executions and get them back to the publications. The project relied on clear communication and a collaborative spirit to get the job done on time.

 

Two important news stories were featured: Rafa Nadal winning the Barcelona Open and and Pyongyang announcing the closure of its nuclear power stations.

 

At 7:00am on Monday, April 30th, the papers were distributed all over Spain, reaching over a million households across the country.

 

The short deadlines and work on coordination between different parties paid off for the agencies last month, when the campaign became one of Spain’s most successful at Cannes Lions, taking home a Gold Lion in the Media category for use of print / outdoor and a Silver Lion in the Print & Publishing category.