11238: Latino Lions.

From Advertising Age…

Hispanic Shops Alma, Gallegos, La Comu, Lapiz And LatinWorks Win At Cannes

Pan-Latino New York Restaurant Comodo Run By Agency Execs Picks Up Lion In Mobile Category

By Laurel Wentz

In a good year for the U.S. Hispanic market, five Hispanic agencies won eight Lions at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Independent Grupo Gallegos won two prizes for a long-running campaign for the California Milk Processor Board to encourage Hispanics in California to drink more milk. A Silver Lion in the film category recognized TV commercial “Battle,” depicting a child’s fantastical dreams from drinking a glassful of milk before bedtime. A Bronze media Lion went to the “Bedtime Stories” campaign children to bed with a bedtime story. The agency also created a series of bilingual story books, distributed through pediatricians’ offices as well as downloaded from a website, that feature milk in a heroic role in the narratives.

Alma DDB won two Silver Lions, in the outdoor and promo & activation categories, for “The Glad Tent.” Alma tackled the issue of sustainability, developing giant Glad trash bags in the form of tents. Ten Glad Tents were distributed at SXSW to attendees who promised to live in them and then use the tents as a giant trash bag to dispose of rubbish at the end of the festival. The Glad Tent was perfectly targeted to millennials who care about the environment but wouldn’t normally feel a connection to Clorox’s Glad brand.

Omnicom-based LatinWorks won a film Silver for “Pool,” a spot promoting a parental control bar for the internet offered free by nonprofit WRAAC. And Cine Las Americas, an Austin, Texas festival for Latin American films that garners creative awards for LatinWorks every year, picked up a radio Bronze for “Maduro.” The campaign features absurd but genuine speeches by Latin American leaders, and always ends with the tagline “If this is our reality, imagine our films.” This year the presidential campaign by Nicolas Maduro after the death of Venezuela’s former leader Hugo Chavez was a gift to LatinWorks. The agency seized on one of the most absurd moments of Mr. Maduro’s campaign, when he started making bird calls on the campaign trail and claiming he had been visited by Mr. Chavez in the form of a little bird.

Miami-based independent La Comunidad, run by Argentine brothers Jose and Joaquin Molla, picked up a Bronze outdoor Lion for Converse shoes’ “Converse Highways”, a series of outdoor art installations that brought life and culture to otherwise dismal spots such as space under bridges. The installations were done in three countries in Latin America.

Lapiz, Leo Burnett’s U.S. Hispanic agency, a frequent award winner for its Procter & Gamble work for the Latino market, took home a bronze Press Lion for a print campaign for P&G’s Gain With Oxi, for ads “Soccer”, “Horror Movie” and “Zombie”.

In a surprise win, two former ad-agency executives from Latin America who quit their jobs and opened pan-Latino restaurant Comodo (Spanish for “comfortable”) in New York in July 2012 won a Bronze Lion in the mobile category with an Instagram menu. To generate buzz for the new restaurant, promote the cuisine and highlight the eatery’s playful personality, the hashtag #ComodoMenu was added to the restaurant’s real menu. Guests were invited to add and browse different dishes.

Although Comodo’s agency is not Hispanic, Comodo’s owners Felipe Donnelly and Tamy Rofe met while working at Ogilvy Mexico—Ms. Rolfe is from Mexico City and Mr. Donnelly grew up all over Latin America. The campaign was done and entered at Cannes by Romanian friends who formed Brooklyn-based creative collective Raul X Mihai X Mihnea.

The U.S. had one Hispanic-agency judge at Cannes this year. Sergio Alcocer, LatinWorks’ president and chief creative officer, was on the film jury in his second stint as a Cannes juror.