When you’re an advertising creative, the Cannes Lions Festival is the best place on Earth. You can meet creative talents, see the world’s best work and party after a year of hard work.

The problem: because of the recent recession, DDB couldn’t send its creatives over this year.So we (Matthieu, Marc, Olivier, Paul, Laurent, Benjamin and Alexis), creatives from the agency, came out with a solution: Autarky Project, the idea that could send seven creatives to Cannes.How?By asking all our clients for their products for free, we could go to the Cannes Lions Festival and live there for one whole week, without spending a single dime.

We produced content every week to motivate our clients and gain new fans. And soon, we got fans from 20 different countries, all supporting the project. Those many supports helped us convince our clients to join the project. And the more clients joining the project we had, the more fans we gained, and the more fans we gained... Well you got it. At the exact moment we’re writing these lines, we already have fans from 20 different countries and 37 clients who happily joined the Autarky Project. We turned this simple idea into a unique self-promotion campaign, allowing us to show the world DDB Paris has a large amount of clients, covering many markets, from automotive to food, communications or holiday club resorts: enough clients to travel and live in autarky.

We gained fans from 20 different countries and satisfied 37 clients who happily joined the Autarky Project. We showed to the world that DDB Paris has a large amount of clients, enough to travel and live in autarky; we grew its Facebook fan base by a third; and we created more than 350,000 posts impressions in a few months. And more importantly, we reinforced our relationship with our clients and prove once again that whatever the problem, DDB Paris can find a creative solution to it.