“The good news is that these weren’t commercials.” - Steve Golin\, founder of Anonymous Content and producer of BMW’s The Hire In 2001, BMW paid Guy Ritchie to throw Madonna around the back of a car. It was one of eight short films called The Hire, made by Fallon Minneapolis with David Fincher’s production company. The directors read like a film festival programme: John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-wai, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guy Ritchie, then John Woo, Joe Carnahan and Tony Scott. The rules were few. Clive Owen played The Driver, and The Driver drove a BMW. They didn’t run on television. In the days of dial-up, you had to go to a website to watch them, and people did: about 11 million views in the first year. BMW’s sales rose 12.5% in 2001 and 17.2% in 2002. The whole series cost around $25m. Tony Scott’s film has James Brown racing the devil, played by Gary Oldman, to renegotiate a deal he made decades earlier. In June 2002 the films went to Cannes, and the festival didn’t know what to do with them. They weren’t TV ads, posters, direct mail or press, the boxes Cannes mostly sorted work into in those days. In the end they won the Cyber Grand Prix, because the internet was the only box they fitted. The person who decided this was ridiculous worked for a rival. Dan Wieden, co-founder of Wieden+Kennedy, went to the festival and proposed a new award for work that broke the existing categories. In 2003 Cannes launched the Titanium Lion, and that year it gave out exactly one. It went to The Hire. The jury brief still asks for work that “causes the industry to stop in its tracks and reconsider the way forward”. Since 2022 it has been called the Dan Wieden Titanium Lion. Why did a room full of the world’s best creative judges struggle with the most original work of the year? Because new ideas make people uneasy, even people who say they love them. In 2012, Jennifer Mueller, Shimul Melwani and Jack Goncalo published a paper called The Bias Against Creativity. Participants told the researchers they valued creative ideas. A hidden association test told a different story: under uncertainty, they linked creativity with words like “vomit”, “poison” and “agony”. Even evidence that the idea would work didn’t change their minds. Judges reach for categories for the same reason the rest of us do. A box tells you how to judge something. A thing with no box makes you nervous, so it tends to lose. Three ways to give new ideas a fairer hearing 1. When an idea doesn’t fit the brief\, ask whether the brief is wrong. The Hire didn’t fit a single category at Cannes. Wieden’s answer was to build a new one. 2. Judge it by what it does\, not what it looks like. Nobody would have called a ten-minute film an advert in 2001. Eleven million views and a 17% sales rise suggest it was one. 3. Find your Dan Wieden. New work often needs a champion from outside the team that made it, someone with nothing to gain who is willing to say the rules need changing. Twenty-five years on, branded films are everywhere, and BMW is still making them. The Calm, with Uma Thurman, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023. When brilliant work keeps falling between the categories, it’s usually the categories that need changing. Want to create award-winning advertising? Check out our Advertising Masters mini mBA today.