In the world of advertising, winning a Cannes Lion is the ultimate prize. But what if winning means breaking the law and then bragging about it? That’s the question at the heart of a recent scandal, where a Budweiser campaign won one of the festival’s highest honors, the Grand Prix in the Audio & Radio category, for using one-second clips of music from artists like Beyoncé and The Beatles without paying for them.
In its award submission, the agency behind the campaign, Africa Creative DDB, openly boasted, "...since we used only 1 second of each song, we didn’t need to pay for music rights." The premise was as simple as it was false, and the resulting backlash has illuminated a much deeper problem at the intersection of advertising, technology, and intellectual property.
The oversight comes as no surprise to Marcel Alexander Wiebenga, founder of the sync license transparency platform Ringo, and 15-year veteran of the Cannes Lions festival. He is also the former strategy director at music agency Sizzer where he oversaw over 1,000 projects for global giants like Mercedes, Dior, and Heineken. For Wiebenga, the scandal isn't an isolated mistake, but a glaring symptom of a broken system.
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A lack of understanding: "When a brand utilizes cultural capital to effectively sell their products or services, they need to acquire a sync license. And that is often not happening at all." The problem isn't always malice; it's a lack of understanding by brands. "The decision makers at brands do not always understand music licensing and they don't understand music rights. In general, brands don't always understand copyright."
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The one-sip fallacy: Wiebenga sees an almost comical level of hypocrisy if the brand roles were reversed. "This is the equivalent of an artist going into a supermarket, going over to the Budweiser shelf, and opening up all the bottles and taking one sip out of each of them and expecting, 'Ah, the first sip is for free!'"
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The billion-dollar cure: Widespread infringement is a direct result of an archaic licensing system that was never built for the speed and scale of modern media. "The system of sync licensing is built around superstars. It's almost a privilege to be able to license big tracks. Because it's been made so difficult, it also means a lot of opportunities are being missed, especially on social media."
We are building that system. It's a billion-dollar question, so I'm setting out to build a billion-dollar company.Marcel Alexander Wiebenga - Founder | RingoIt's a problem Wiebenga is determined to solve with his new platform Ringo. "We are building that system. It's a billion-dollar question, so I'm setting out to build a billion-dollar company." His goal is to create a modern solution for "micro-licensing at scale," unblocking what he sees as a critical chokepoint in the creative economy. "This is also the bottleneck in overall content production."
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A sickness of incentives: The Budweiser scandal isn't just about a flawed licensing model; it’s also a product of a toxic awards culture. Wiebenga notes this isn't the first time a contest has been won under fraudulent circumstances, and he points to a powerful motive. "Advertising is obsessed with awards. Winning a Cannes Lion is like winning the Champions League. This has become part of the KPIs that people inside the company have. So now people start cheating in order to meet those objectives."
Ultimately, Wiebenga says the underlying story isn't just about a brand that potentially skirted a law to win an award, but that they felt comfortable touting a cynical disregard for the value of art. Wiebenga worries that the cultural capital that musicians spend a lifetime building can be been reduced to a disposable commodity, not a craft to be celebrated.