Adidas’ “Bonded by Blood” Takes Top Cannes Promo Award

The blood of 40 rugby players went into Adidas' poster (shown here, in part) of New Zealand's All Blacks team

Rugby is not only a blood sport—now it’s an award winner.

Adidas and TBWA took the top promotions prize yesterday at the Cannes International Advertising Festival for a campaign that used the blood of New Zealand rugby players to print Adidas’ commemorative poster of the team.

The campaign, “Bonded by Blood,” won the Gran Prix in the promotion category for agency TBWA/WHYBIN. Each year, Adidas issues a poster of the All Blacks rugby team, a souvenir that’s prized by the team’s 4 million fans. Last year, Adidas used the poster as the centerpiece of its effort to bump sales of All Blacks apparel by 15%.

Adidas took blood from all 40 members of the rugby team and mixed it with the ink used to print a limited run of 8,000 posters. The poster, titled “Bonded by Blood,” was displayed at retail; only shoppers who bought an All Blacks jersey could purchase a poster.

Each poster came with a numbered certificate of authentication; the team’s players each got a poster whose certificate matched their jersey number.

A “Making of” video that showed the players giving blood, and the printing of the posters, ran in-store on plasma screens and online at a dedicated site, BondedByBlood.co.nz, as well as the team’s site AllBlacks.com and on YouTube.

Adidas’ sales of All Blacks apparel rose 24%, and some of the 8,000 posters are selling online for about $400 dollars.

The jury awarded Lions to another 20 promotional campaigns, but only one of them was from the U.S. It was “That Girl Emily,” a Court TV campaign created by promotion agency Deep Focus to drive viewership for the TV show “Parco P.I.”

The campaign used outdoor boards and a blog to tell the fictitious story of Emily, a woman who took revenge on her cheating husband by spray painting insults on his car, tossing his clothing out of the house, and other attacks that were captured on video and in the blog. Billboards in New York and Los Angeles helped spark buzz around the blog, which drew more than 2 million page views and spawned 1,600 e-mails to Emily. The effort took the Promo Lion for Best Integrated Promotional Campaign.