THE BARBARIAN GROUP | CINDER | 2013
The Day the Ad Industry Won a Grand Prix with a Weapon Made for Itself / THE BARBARIAN GROUP "CINDER"
At Cannes Lions 2013, the very first Grand Prix in the newly created Innovation Lions category went to a development tool made by an ad agency. And it's one they give away for free. It sounds like an odd thing to win an award for, but the reasoning behind it makes complete sense.
The problem
Cinder is a C++ development tool that came out of The Barbarian Group's work building a visualizer for iTunes. Code they originally wrote just for their own production work was released for free in 2010, and it spread around the world, ending up used in projects for MIT, Google, and Nike.
The insight
Jury president David Droga described Cinder as a tool "built to move things forward," not just for the industry's own sake. The people who made it said the same thing in their own way: sharing it makes it better and helps it evolve faster. That refusal to keep it to themselves was exactly what got recognized.
The idea
It's a C++ toolbox that brings together graphics, video, audio, and networking, and it's especially good at powering installations and music performances that react in real time. The judging itself also took a new form, done as live presentations.
What happened
It beat out 270 entries, made the shortlist of 25, and won the Grand Prix. The following year it also won an award in the Intellectual Property category at the One Show. There's some irony in the fact that being open source makes it hard to profit from, but that's a separate, business-side issue.
Afterthought
Sharpen your own weapon, win an award with it, then give that weapon away for free. The order of events here is just plain cool. It really makes you think that an ad agency willing to share its tools, rather than hoard them, ends up making the whole industry stronger. Cinder is still running on GitHub today.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Grand Prix 2013
