Reef Relief: The Journey to Cannes
Published on 21st June 2024Three years in the making. Countless hours of research. One Cannes Lion Bronze award. Reef Relief is the world's first sunscreen designed to feed coral and be UV-safe for humans.
Reef Relief has made waves at Cannes, picking up a Bronze Cannes Lion award in the Innovation category.
Cannes Lions is one of the world's most respected benchmarks for creative excellence. The Innovation category celebrates ground-breaking innovation, technology and problem-solving ideas that turn imagination into impact.
"There aren't many ideas we come up with that could genuinely change the world, as much as we might like to think so. This one actually could. The simple brilliance of a suncream that, instead of killing, nourishes coral - turning the problem into the solution - is so exciting to us. And with global interest quickly growing, the world seems to feel the same way." - Jon Elsom, Group Executive Creative Director
Below, hear from Alex Smith, Senior Copywriter, and Fred Corazza, Senior Art Director, the creative duo behind the tide-turning idea. Dive in and discover the passion that brought this award-winning concept to life.
- What inspired the idea for Reef Relief? We're both huge lovers of our oceans, but every time you open the news it seems to be one horror story after another from plastics and pollution to our beautiful reefs dying in only a few years. We looked into a bunch of reef-building and ocean ideas until we fell in love with the idea of an edible sunscreen for coral. We thought surely this had been done before, yet after checking again and again and again to see if it exists, we presented the idea to Jon and Ciara and the rest is history.
- Can you summarise the process of bringing Reef Relief to life? Long... to give a full account would be an essay, but in a nutshell, it was a lot of research, finding partners, and learning more about coral and the sunscreen industry. Fortunately, we had an incredible team who were much smarter than us and supported the project since day one.
- What is your long-term vision for Reef Relief? We love that we are the world's first coral-feeding sunscreen, but we hope we're not going to stay the only one. The more people using sunscreens like Reef Relief the better in our eyes.
