FCB Chicago scored a major victory at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, winning two Grand Prix awards—Design and Digital Craft—for its groundbreaking new film and TV captioning system, Caption with Intention.
The system, developed over six years in collaboration with the Chicago Hearing Society, Rakish Entertainment, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, represents the first significant upgrade to captioning in over half a century. It syncs word-for-word with dialogue and incorporates expressive typography that reflects tone, volume, and timbre, along with color-coded character attribution to clearly identify speakers.
The innovation has already earned a Technology Oscar and is now the official captioning standard for films submitted to the Academy Awards.
“This is a design system that brings emotion, depth, and context into the caption experience,” said Design Lions Jury President Jessica Walsh, founder and creative director of &Walsh. “It will transform the viewing experience for anyone using captions.”
Elsewhere at Cannes, Innocean Seoul took home the Entertainment Lions Grand Prix for Night Fishing, a 13-minute sci-fi short for Hyundai’s Ioniq line, filmed entirely with the car’s built-in cameras. Shown in Korean theaters as a standalone film for a $1 ticket, the work marked South Korea’s first-ever Entertainment Grand Prix win.
Calling it “branded entertainment of the highest order,” Entertainment Jury President David Rolfe (Global Head of Production, WPP/Hogarth) praised the film for marrying cinematic craft with the Ioniq brand’s identity.
In the Music category, DDB Latina Puerto Rico won the Grand Prix for Tracking Bad Bunny, an immersive digital scavenger hunt promoting the artist’s sixth album. The campaign used Google Maps, Spotify, and out-of-home media to engage fans while spotlighting Puerto Rican culture. Jury President Seiya Matsumiya, CEO of Black Cat White Cat, praised the campaign’s creativity and cultural defiance.
Other Grand Prix winners included “Haaland Payback Time” for Clash of Clans in Entertainment for Sport; “Telstra – Better on a Better Network” in Film Craft; and “Nigrum Corpus” for IDOMED by Artplan São Paulo in Industry Craft, which used 3D design and AI to combat racism in medical education.
For full up-to-the-minute Cannes coverage, go to our sister publication, Reel 360 News.
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