Yekaterinburg street art campaign wins big at Cannes creative festival

An ad campaign from Yekaterinburg has won four Golden Lions at the Cannes Lions International Creative Awards, a leading festival for communications and advertising. Make the Politicians Work, a campaign to remind state officials of their responsibilities, was shortlisted for seven prizes and picked up Golden Lions, the second highest award, for PR, social responsibility, guerrilla marketing and media.

The campaign was the work of local company Voskhod, led by creative director Andrey Gubaydullin, that had previously started the website ura.ru to prompt politicians to action.

Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth largest city, has some of the worst roads in Russia. To help solve the problem, Voskhod asked local street artists to paint the faces of the governor, mayor and deputy-mayor around the potholes, and film it with hidden cameras. The official response was to paint over the faces, but not fix the potholes. The artists responded by writing “Painting it is not fixing it” next to the potholes. Footage soon went viral, with traffic to ura.ru doubling. Over the next two months nearly ten kilometres of road were fixed.

Voskhod beat off competition from two other Russian projects: Agency Y&R Moscow’s alternative audio guide scheme to encourage museum visitors to go to erotic museum G Spot in Moscow; and Leo Burnett Agency’s campaign for McDonald’s in Kazan.

Russia’s other big winner at the awards was Yota Devices’ two-screen hybrid phone, with one screen being an e-book-style electronic ink display. The smartphone, which was also hailed at the CES 2013 tech fair, was awarded a Golden Lion for Innovation.