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2025 Cannes Innovation Recap:
- The Fourth Judge (00:03:00): Jeremy shares a mind-blowing AI-powered judge for boxing from Big Time Creative Shop in Riyadh. Discover how AI is tackling subjectivity and bias in sports, trained on a century of boxing history to provide unbiased real-time analysis. Is this the future of fair play?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcLlNta1deE - Daisy vs. Scammer (00:06:00): Tim introduces us to O2's ingenious AI "granny" from VCCP London, designed to waste scammers' time. Laugh along as Daisy hilariously stalls fraudsters and ponder the potential for this tech to be integrated directly into our phones. Could this be the end of spam calls?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV_SdCfZ-0s - Shakespeare Bic (00:09:00): Rick reveals VML Sao Paulo's incredible campaign for Bic's 75th anniversary. Learn how AI recreated Shakespeare's lost handwriting, complete with authentic variations, and a robot penned an entire Romeo and Juliet manuscript with a single Bic pen. A beautiful blend of history, tech, and product demonstration!
https://www.vml.com/work/one-bic-one-book-two-classics - Grand Prix Innovation Winner: Sounds Right Campaign (00:12:00): We dissect AKQA's groundbreaking "Sounds Right" campaign, which monetizes nature sounds for environmental conservation. Explore the concept of "Nature" being credited as an artist and debate the true definition of "innovation" in today's tech-saturated world. Is it truly innovative, or just a new application?
https://www.akqa.com/news/sounds-right-wins-the-cannes-lions-innovation-grand-prix/ - News Story of the Week: The Velvet Sundown Hoax (00:16:00): Jeremy breaks down the viral sensation of "Velvet Sundown," an AI-generated 70s-style band that amassed 50,000 fans overnight on Spotify before being outed as an art hoax. We discuss the implications of AI music creation (like Suno, which created our intro music!) and the ongoing conversation about AI's role in the art world. How did they get so big, so fast?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/ai-band-hoax-velvet-sundown-1.7575874
Have thoughts on these innovations or want to chat with our hosts? Email us at Innovationcanada@vml.com
Creators and Guests
What is Why Didn't I Think of That??
Curiosity piqued? "Why didn't I think of That?" is your weekly dose of Canadian ingenuity, brought to you by the Canadian Innovation Team. Join our team for a relaxed, round-table chat where we break down the latest in innovation – from the complex world of tech to surprisingly simple, yet brilliant, creative initiatives. We'll cover news, offer deep dives, and share fascinating interviews, all through a distinctly Canadian lens. Whether you're a fellow innovator or just keen to learn about the exciting developments shaping our nation, this podcast is your go-to source for understanding what's new and next in Canada.
At VML Canada Human-First Innovation is at the heart of everything we do. We are doers, innovators, and big thinkers dedicated to leading and inspiring what's next.
"My objective is that. The text should not be seen other than, holy crap, this is awesome." - Tim Voet
Welcome to "Why didn't I think of that?" The podcast, exploring creative campaigns that push technological boundaries, breakthrough AI tools, and emerging platforms that solve real problems. We bring you the stories and insights that could spark your next big idea.
I'm Rick Brown, and I'm here with Jeremy Lenz and Tim Voet. Jeremy and I are both creative directors for VML Canada, based out of Toronto, and Tim is our Chief Technology Officer, technology and innovation out of Montreal.
Okay, let's start with our top innovation picks from can. But first, huge congratulations to VML Canada for winning a Cannes silver lion for “Balikbayan Magic: Philippine Oriental Food Market” (Coca-Cola). Just an amazing campaign – and three short lists for EGALE’s “See the person, not the label.” Congratulations to everybody involved.
Alright, let's start with Jeremy. What's your top pick? There was one campaign that I liked a lot. It was called the Fourth Judge. It was a, a place called Big Time Creative Shop. Never heard of it before. It's in Riyadh, which is probably why I've never heard it before. But I thought this was really smart and if you go check it out, I mean it's basically they created an AI powered judge to help judge boxing. I didn't know that boxing is actually very subjective. So obviously when there's, when you go nine rounds, I don't know if it's nine rounds, I should know more about boxing. But if you go that many rounds and there's not a winner yet, obviously there's a vote taken on who won that bout, basically. But of course there's, anytime there's a vote, there's gonna be biases, there's gonna be favorites, there's gonna be things that humans see or things that humans inject. So they created what's called the fourth judge, so I'm assuming there's three other judges. And they created a fourth one, which is basically trained on a hundred years of boxing history and the different styles of boxing and where certain styles of boxing won versus lost. And it's able to actually create a bit more of a. I guess it's a historically biased pick, but which obviously would ladder into more of an unbiased pick for that boxing match. So the reason I like that is obviously I'm not much of a boxing person because I've probably butchered any boxing terms in that. But I liked this because obviously adding an AI element into a subjective sport like boxing helps overcome this bias. But I loved that. They didn't rely a hundred percent on the AI for, for this judgment.
They still had human judges. They still had, obviously there's gonna be some subjectivity in the human judges, but they had that kind of canceling judge that could come in and say, here's the unbiased facts. Here's my ruling based on these unbiased facts. And that kind of helps overall make it a little less subjective.
So I thought there's a lot of different applications for that. Did they? If you explain how it actually works, was it like real time or, yeah. How did it work? So it was real time, so they basically, it was watching. Match in real time and studying basically how the boxers move where they are in the ring, especially during the last round where they're in the ring.
Are they on the defensive? Are they on the offensive? Are they attacking, are they blocking? What's the kind of, what's the kind of movement overall in the boxers that suggest whether or not they're winning or losing? I think that was really interesting because obviously it's taking that, all the movement data that it's pulled from a hundred years and now it's.
Using it to judge them in real time as it was going through the ring. That's amazing. And did you say that wasn't in the innovation category? It was not awarded in the innovation category, so they entered it into that category, but it shortlisted and it got a silver and a gold in entertainment for sport, which I guess also makes sense, but that's also where we can talk about the innovation category and its role at can.
Because I think that there's innovation throughout every single category. Obviously even the subcategory for the fourth judge, it won gold and innovation in sport. I'd love to hear Tim's because I, I think Tim's got a good one too. Mine was actually from the innovation category, and I'm not sure whether the long there for the same reasons we discussed is it's innovative, but is it an innovation category?
Is it for something else? It's actually daisy versus scammer, so this comes outta London. Done by VCCP on behalf of O2, which is one of the big time and comms there. So everybody and their aunt, uncle has seen or heard scammers calling around trying to get you to do something on your computer. Well, O2 created an AI to essentially waste scammers time.
So there are people that do it on the internet that Jim Browning, one of the UK's YouTubers that does this. I've done it when they call here. Typically when I'm in the car driving somewhere, I love wasting these guys' time because I figure if they're wasting time with me, they're not harassing somebody else and they're not getting through to somebody else.
What they did is they created this granny that essentially is program to just stall conversations anytime you try and get anywhere with their, the clips are actually really good that they've submitted to Ken. You getting her try and do something is, oh, it's showing me a picture of my cat. Fluffy. You want me to tell you about Fluffy? No, I want you to type this… Yeah. But it's showing me a picture of Fluffy. I want to tell you about Fluffy now. Like typically like this 80, 90-year-old grandma, just happy to be alive and trying to pretend to be scared about these scammers. But the results that they published are actually insane. They've gone through and what they were doing is any call detected from there was essentially routed through this ai. You could report numbers to them so that the scammers would route to the granny. There's a whole multi-level sting here. Wouldn't it be amazing if somehow there was a button on your phone or an app where you could transfer that call to that? Yeah. Yeah. And we, they say approach to this would actually be having. The own maker. So Samsung and Google and Apple do it directly. I'm an Android guy. Full disclosure, I get it. I'm shunned because of it. But one of the beautiful things that comes with every pixel is call screening. Any call coming in, it's built into the phone. You can just screen the call. It says A person you're trying to reach is using an automated transcription service.
Please state your name, your purpose, and we'll try and connect you. Built into the phone, like, I don't have to do anything. This isn't through my provider. This is built into the pixel phones. It would be amazing for them to say, Hey, this is a spam transfer to it, and then have these OS developers or these phone manufacturers take that and then they could start processing the same data and start detecting them to enrich both the spam filtering.
So identifying what is a spam increase. The machine learning that goes into the call transcription and you know it's a spam call, right? You just had a human say, Hey, transfer to spam. You know that Microsoft is not calling you because your computer's got a virus. They're like, it's not happening. Yeah. You transfer them so they can start getting into those scripts and those repeats and like just flag it to it and you're essentially making the machine better at identifying those calls.
What Daisy does really well, I mean it focuses on one kind of scammer, the one that we all hate so much. Like the duct cleaning guys or the Yeah, the Microsoft. Your computer needs an upgrade, guys. We'll see. It's funny, they injected so much humor and so much storytelling just into Daisy that even I want to call her, I want her number and I want to call her and I want smile on my phone.
I want we having a, you get out a day of nine hours of meetings like Call Daisy in your commute home and just to talk to Daisy just seems like exactly way. Put a smile on your face. What really pushes an idea like this over the top is that it's not just the technology. You want to talk to her, you want to hear from her, but when I was looking at kinda the results and everything like that and the conversation around Daisy, it was people pulling little quips from her, which I thought was really, I thought that meant that really meant something That was, they obviously transcended some kind of cultural wall there where the technology went beyond just the technology and now it's more of a cultural piece as well.
My favorite campaign was the Shakespeare Bic, and it was done by VML Sao Paulo. And I didn't choose it 'cause it was a VML company, I just love this idea. There was just a lot of things happening all at the same time. That worked beautifully together. It was the 75th anniversary of the Crystal Bick Pen, which is the classic pen that we all have a million of. And it was back to school and, you know, they kind of did a deep dive and looked at the, you know, the books that. That kids read in school and everything, and they realize that, you know, pretty much all of Shakespeare's original manuscripts have been lost over time.
They don't have any of them. So, they took Romeo and Juliet and they recreated it in Shakespeare's handwriting. So they had to, first thing they had to do was find any scraps of, of samples of his actual handwriting, which was just very little of, and then they analyzed it used AI and then. They recreated the font and they didn't do it. You know, the way they normally do a font where all the letters look exactly the same, and you can kind of tell it's a font, especially with scripts and stuff like that. They actually had variations of the letter, so it really did look authentic. And then they had a robot write out page by page.
The, the, the manuscript was just beautiful. is just. Really brought his, his manuscript back to life. And then once it was all done, they donated it to the Royal Shakespearean Theater in his hometown. And it's on, on display. The, the other thing I should mention is that, you know, each of, each of those pens, you know, their thing is that it has three kilometers worth of ink.
So they wrote this entire book with one pen and had ink left over. So it just, it just worked on every level for me anyway. I loved it. So our next topic is the Grand Prix winner in the innovation category for 2025, and that's the Sounds Right Campaign by AKQA. So, Jeremy, you comfortable giving that an overview on that? Sure. So basically what they've done is they've recorded, they've recorded a whole bunch of sounds coming from nature. You've got bird song, you've got babbling Brooks, you've got trees rustling, all these beautiful nature sounds that are basically free and readily available for all of us to experience when we go outside and they've found a way to monetize it for the greater good, or they're monetizing it to help obviously give back to the environment.
And the way they're monetizing it is they're basically. Asking artists, so recording artists, and basically anytime you play one of these songs and have these samples, these nature samples in it, the royalties would go to go to the environment. It's all through the un, so it's all legit, but I think they've raised around, at least by the time they made the case study, they raised around like $280,000.
The great thing about royalties is obviously. They don't end right. As long as people are listening to the music, you're making money. So they could easily make quite a bit more money off of this in the future as well. Oh, they're projecting. I think $10 million a year. Eventually the, and just look back up for a second on this one. The thing that they're saying is the innovative part of this is that it was the first time that they've had a verified non-human. Recognized as an artist. So when you look at the credits on a, on one of these tracks, that's using those parts. So it might say David Bowie and Nature, so it gets the songwriting credit and that's how the royalties are then divided up and set their way, which then become a donation to a number of different sort of conservation funds, which is amazing.
Is that innovation though? It depends on what your definition of innovation is. I would say. This could also fit into something like business transformation category or some kind of data category as well. Creative data or something like that. It's definitely innovative, but that's the difference is innovative versus innovation is like, just feels like a bucket of things.
Is it? Innovation? Sure. But it's more innovative in a specific category. Tech for tech's sake isn't innovative. It's different. It may be new, but it's just tech. Innovative is something that can be done, is done in a new way, is done differently, is done outside the norm, or could never be done. And today we say AI is innovative.
No. AI is being used in innovative ways to make things work better, faster, more efficiently. Putting power in the hands of people who couldn't before, like going out today. And the example that we talk about, 'cause it's all over the news, is. You can build a professional website in 90 seconds now. Yeah, you can. Is it going to work? No, but you can put it in the hands of somebody who could do it. Innovative is great. Innovation just seems like a label that's overused. Let's AI everything. Let's just innovation everything. Sorry. It's a, it's an idea done in a new way. There was a case from 2019 here in Toronto where BBDO sampled a whole bunch of tracks from a local, local symphony, and they sold that to even Taylor Swift. And Taylor Swift did a track, and they're still getting royalties and that's helping create funds for this group. Awesome. Okay, let's move on to our news story of the week. And this is one that's heating up in a really big way. Jeremy, you wanna take it? The Velvet Sundown, and I don't know if you've heard of Velvet Sundown, but Velvet Sundown is, I'm gonna call it like a seventies, like a classic seventies style band. I think like early Peter Gabriel or something like that type of band. And they showed up on Spotify literally like a week ago. I'm gonna say 10 days ago, and they instantly had this huge following, so instantly they had 50,000 fans overnight. So already people were like, who are these guys? And how did that happen? And then they started showing up, of course in everybody's for you on Spotify. There were all these recommendations coming from Spotify to listen to this velvet sundown. And it didn't take very long for people to start saying, Hey, this is looking a little suspect. So they were outed as an AI band like a week ago, like not long after they launched.
And there was a lot of controversy around these guys and they did finally come out or whoever. Started this came out yesterday finally saying that yes, the Velvet Sundown is an art hoax. They used Suno. It's a really great music creation software, and they use it to create this seventies band that you can still listen to on Spotify, at least as as I'm talking right now.
Yeah, they're not bad. You should take a listen, but I just think the conversation around this has been very, very interesting because obviously I think there's a very negative outlook on AI taking over jobs or taking over kind of the art world. And of course, music is one of these things. So I think that it did leave a little bit of a bad taste in people's mouths, but I thought it was an important thing to bring up for sure. I'd love to know how they got that big of a following so quickly. All it takes is the right timing, social media to get some kind of buzz viral. Hit out there and even then is today you can use AI to generate a lot of account with a lot of noise. I wanna learn how they did that because like if you can get a following that quickly, that's so useful for so many things.
What's interesting is that that getting that following so quickly is what outed them, right? It actually did a disservice to Velvet Sundown. These guys generated their music using a tool called suno. And full disclosure, that was used to create our intro music. Have you used Sono? I have. So we went through a prototype, call it a month ago.
So for a client, I don't know whether I should name them or not, but as client of ours, we're trying to find an interesting take on audio and music and just trying stuff out and we actually generated five different songs and five different themes, five different genres. Did a country, did a rap, did a hip hop, an r and b, and I forget what the fifth one was, just to see, just to play around and see what we could do. Their client is trying to play in a different space than traditional advertising. Don't know if we're gonna go with the idea whether it makes sense long term or not, but it was an absolutely eyeopening experience. We uploaded a transcript to it and said, Hey, generating a song based off these lyrics in this style, and just hit a button and go. Yeah. Super powerful. Like, Rick, when you were making the intro to this, I think we sat down. Tried a few things out and we were getting, the quality we were getting from it was unbelievable. Honestly. It was almost scary listening to some of the things that it was coming up with. I think we had a real Green Day style intro. At one point. I think we tried to go down like an electronic craft work style. We had hip hop. We tried a few different things, and every time it was like, whoa, this is.
This is almost sounding too good. Like we wanted to, we almost wanted it to sound ai, right? We wanted to pull it back and make it sound AI.
If you'd like to talk to the hosts of this program or any of the leadership at VML Canada, email us at Innovationcanada@vml.com.
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The views and opinions expressed on the show are solely those of the participants and do not reflect those of VML, WPP or their respective affiliates or employees.