One of the key buzzwords at the Cannes Lions is ‘change’. How is technology changing? How are consumers changing? How are the needs of clients changing?

It makes for a great selling point for the Festival. If you want to get – or stay -ahead in your industry then what better way to do it than by listening to inspiring thought-leaders who know before anyone else where the world is heading and what we will be experiencing when we get there.

But as much as technology is changing and allowing agencies and advertisers to do new and exciting things, it’s also very clear that we must not lose sight of the key traditional skills that made advertising such a creative and exciting industry to work in the first place.

The two Grand Prix winners revealed last night in the Outdoor category provides a great example of how both the traditional and new can be equally as compelling.

Whereas one celebrates an incredibly innovative campaign that simply couldn’t have been created without the technological enhancements of the last few years, the other rewards a more simple execution, which works so well thanks to striking imagery and traditional craft skills.

Neither is from the UK, but chances are you’ll have seen at least one of the two Grand Prix winning spots before.

The former is an ambient installation for Mercedes Benz, created by German agency Jung Von Matt.

The execution features a car covered in LED lights and strategically placed cameras to create the illusion that it is invisible, as a way of illustrating how the car’s impact on the environment is also indistinguishable.

It’s an extremely clever campaign and it comes as no surprise that a video showing the work went viral.

But whereas the appeal of the Mercedes Benz campaign stemmed from its awesome use of technology, the other Grand Prix winner, for Coca-Cola, could not have been more simple.

Ogilvy Shanghai recruited twenty year old art student Jonathan Mak Long – the designer behind this famous Steve Jobs tribute image – to produce a graphic poster that plays on Coca-Cola’s iconic white ribbon motif.

The result (pictured above) was a hyper-minimalistic creation that elegantly expressed the Coca-Cola philosophy. A simple design that is inherently universal.

It’s testament to how the Outdoor industry is evolving that two such different campaigns can both win the same prestigious award. But more refreshingly, it also shows that whether you’re using the world’s most sophisticated technology or nothing more than a pen and paper, it’s still the idea that really matters.