Cannes Lions Tuesday key points: Winners of Direct Lions, PR Lions and Promo & Activities Lions announced, SapientNitro’s – global brands vs. global celebrities makes waves, Coca-Cola’s chief marketing and commercial officer, Joe Tripodi, talks

Puerto Rico won their first ever Grand Prix in the PR Lions category for ‘the most popular song’ by JWT San Juan for Banco Popular De Puerto Rico Bank. UK agencies Brooklyn Brothers and Ogilvy & Mather took home Gold and Silver Lions respectively. Brooklyn Brothers took a Gold Lion for the Promote Iceland campaign - ‘inspired by Iceland’; the Silver Lion was awarded to Ogilvy & Mather for its ‘Dove ad makeover’ campaign.

Also announced today was the Promo & Activations Lions which saw Crispin Porter and Bogusky’s American Express ad take home another Grand Prix. Three UK agencies were recognised in this category with AMV BBDO winning a Silver Lion for its Wrigley’s ‘the night jar’ audio iPhone game. Mother and Grey also collected Bronze Lions, the former for its ‘green box project’ for Beck’s, the latter for its British Heart Foundation ‘Vinnie’ campaign, fronted by Vinnie Jones.

Cyber, Design and Radio Lions shortlists were also announced today with those awards scheduled to take place on Thursday 21 June.

Still dominating discussion at Cannes and on social networking sites is SapientNitro’s: global brands vs. global celebrities seminar from yesterday. The debate saw SapientNitro VP of Global Brand Strategy & Marketing Darren McColl come up against House actor Omar Epps in the discussion of who’s the smarter marketer; the brand or the celebrity?

Omar Epps said, during the seminar, “…we [celebrities] set the trends, Lady Gaga’s littlemonsters.com, lebronjames.com, and Beyoncé’s beyhive.com will set the trend for the next generation of celebrities to build their brands across all verticals.” He concluded with the example of BeeYou, a platform which allows celebrities to share and control their content. “With over 200 celebrities with 1 million to 60 million followers across their social networks, BeeYou can act as a matchmaking service to connect brands and celebrities, which is more powerful than a traditional endorsement and benefits both the brand and the celebrity”.

The discussion over who’s the smarter marketer is still on-going this afternoon on the Cannes Lions twitter hashtag.

One of today’s most popular seminar’s was - The Coca-Cola Company: new rules of marketing and consumer engagement, this saw Coca-Cola’s top marketer explain how the company is adapting to a world led by the “mob of consumers relentlessly sharing media across their large and growing digital networks”.

Joe Tripodi, chief marketing and commercial officer at Coca-Cola discussed how the changing ways in which people communicate require a parallel revolution to take place from marketers to try and engage them. This mostly came down to developing “strong, shareable pieces of communication”.

He revealed that Coca-Cola could roll out its Project Rebrief ‘Hilltop’ campaign across newer markets next year and said should another campaign be chosen for a revamp, he would choose Coca-Cola’s ‘Mean Joe Green’ ad for such treatment.

“Our culture today, as we know, is very youth driven and star-struck,” said Tripodi. “It's music enthusiastic and media savvy, environmentally conscious, revolutionary, and open to change.” With 42 million Facebook fans, which equates to roughly 5 per cent of all Facebook users, Coca-Cola feels well positioned not only to join the revolution sweeping the world but, also, to lead it.