deux grand prix

Ad Track: Cadbury, 'Halo' ads are Cannes champs; see video

By Theresa Howard, USA TODAY

CANNES, France — The rivalry of Web vs. TV commercials ended in a tie for the top prize at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

A British TV ad with a drumming gorilla for Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate and a series of three-minute Internet videos for Microsoft's Halo 3 sci-fi video game both won Grand Prix as the world's best ads this year among 4,500 entries in the coveted "Film" ad category at the week-long competition.

It was the first time at the ad industry's top annual event that Web-only video was eligible to compete with commercials for TV and cinema use. It had been seen as something of a showdown between traditional and digital media.

The Grand Prix were awarded at Saturday night's closing ceremonies for the festival, at which agencies and marketers had entered nearly 30,000 ads from 85 countries for prizes in 10 categories.

The gorilla ad was a 90-second commercial airing on prime-time TV. The Halo videos were an element of a complex multimedia campaign.

"They are two very different pieces of film," says Craig Davis, global chief creative officer for JWT London. He headed the Film jury that also gave out 21 Gold, 33 Silver and 52 Bronze awards (nearly a third for U.S. ads). "It was fantastic work in both spaces, and it seemed a little unfair to push one through the gate at the expense of the other."

The advertising for the Microsoft Xbox game, which has sold nearly 10 million copies since its debut last fall, also on Saturday won the Integrated Grand Prix for multimedia campaigns and a Gold Lion in Film for the TV commercial. The complex promotion spanned Web, TV and cinema advertising, including a real-world Museum of Humanity, with a diorama of an epic humans vs. aliens battle.

"This is a tribute to imagination," says Marcio Moreira, a vice chairman with McCann World Group, which created the Halo effort with sister agency T.A.G. "This is a huge communication idea that crosses every discipline."