Greece has won its first Cannes Lions Grand Prix with a campaign built around a familiar wedding custom: throwing rice over newlyweds.
“The Wedding Rice,” created for Wikifarmer by McCann Athens, won the Grand Prix in Creative Business Transformation at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the festival announced. The category received 152 entries and awarded seven Lions in total, with the Greek campaign taking the top prize.
The idea begins at the church door. In Greece, guests throw rice over newly married couples as a wish for prosperity, fertility, and a good life together. After the celebration, much of that rice is swept from steps, courtyards, and pavements.
The campaign put numbers behind the custom. Greece has an average of 53,896 weddings a year, and more than 200 tonnes of edible rice go to waste through the tradition, according to The Wedding Rice campaign site. The same site says nearly 30 percent of harvested Greek rice is excluded from supermarket shelves because it does not meet specific commercial standards.
Wikifarmer and McCann Athens built the campaign around that gap. Instead of using full-grain edible rice for the toss, the campaign repurposed non-commercial rice from farmers’ surplus. The rice is not sold as food, but the campaign says it is safe for tossing.
Separately, Reuters reported from Chalastra, a major rice-growing area in northern Greece, where a local cooperative had sold more than three tons of broken rice rebranded in white sacks as “wedding rice” since May. Reuters described the rice as grains damaged during harvesting or processing that might otherwise be discarded or used for animal feed.
The project gave farmers another way to sell a product with little value in the regular food market. It also gave couples and wedding planners a version of the custom that did not use rice meant for the table.
McCann Greece says the initiative increased rice sales by 260 percent and drove 110 percent more traffic to Wikifarmer’s platform, according to its campaign page.
For Greece, the award is historic. Cannes Lions called it the country’s first Grand Prix at the festival.
At the church door, it still looks like tradition. For farmers, it gives otherwise discarded rice a second use.