Citizen won a Pride of Lions for the at the 2015 Cannes Lion International Festival for Creativity. The Cannes Lions festival has been running for 62 years and is the world’s biggest celebration of creativity.
Citizen won this years Promo & Activation Gold and Silver Lions for “Changing Horizons”, which is Citizen’s first global advertising campaign in their long history.
Citizen’s “Changing Horizons” Campaign?
Citizen’s “Changing Horizons” advertisement came after the launch of their brand statement, Better Starts Now. Citizen explain the mean of this brand statement on their website as “Better Starts Now is the belief that, no matter who you are and what you do, it is always possible to make something better and now is the time to start doing it.”
The “Changing Horizons” campaign focused on Citizen’s 2014 flagship model, the Citizen Eco-Drive Satellite Wave F100. Citizen wanted to demonstrate the unique ability of the watch to automatically adjust to the correct local time zone anywhere on earth within three seconds. They did this by filming photographer Simon Roberts and ex-NATO pilot Jonathan Nicolin in a “race against time” as they chased the horizon. Citizen’s website explained it as “an endeavour to live in the same hour for as long as humanly possible.”
The advertising campaign was created by Wieden+Kennedy Tokyo and Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam. The short film starts in Reykjavik, Iceland and was put together by acclaimed documentary director Tristan Patterson (Dragonslayer) during a short window of time in February where the days are still long, but before the sun no longer sets.
Chasing The Sunset
The team set off from Reykjavik, Iceland and they moved into a new time zone every single hour. In each new time zone Simon captured a photograph of the sunset, while the Eco-Drive Satellite Wave F100 set itself back an hour – ensuring they were living in the same hour.
The team kept up with the same sunset for one night before they landed at their final destination on the Arctic Circle. The Citizen website explains that the mission resulted – “in a completely unique series of sunset imagery, taken at exactly the same hour and same minute, in the same day.”
Simon Roberts explained, “As a photographic artist I never thought I would make a series of photos about sunsets, but here was an idea that literally took the concept to the edge of what’s possible. By chasing the sun around the earth, existing in a perpetual twilight hour, we were pushing technical and physical boundaries. It was simultaneously exhilarating and challenging.”
Citizen’s Awards
The five minute short film (which you can watch here) picked up the prestigious Gold and Silver Lions in the Promo and Activation category.
This isn’t the only award that Citizen have won this year, as their “Light Is Time” campaign picked up the Gold Pencil Award in the Design category at this years 2015 One Show Awards. The “big 3” awards in the advertising industry are the One Show Awards, Cannes Lions and the CLIO Awards. Citizen have managed to win awards in two of the three awards already this year, few would bet against them picking up another award in the CLIO Awards when they take place in September.
