• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, June 19, 2013

The Barbarian Group has won the Lions Grand Prix Award for Innovation, a new award category that was issued for the first time at this year’s festival. The award was confirmed in Cannes Wednesday morning. The ad festival also awarded Lions in the mobile and outdoor categories.

While most Lions are issued for ads and campaigns, the Barbarian Group won for its software technology called Cinder, an open-source tool for creative coding.

The software program was originally written as an in-house tool for implementing the iTunes visualizer for Apple and later used for an augmented reality issue of Esquire magazine. Now, per the supporting brief, the program’s development community is global, with a user base that includes ad agencies, visual effects companies, production companies, design and technology firms and academic institutions.

The Innovation Lions are not sorted by Gold, Silver and Bronze winners like the other categories.

In addition to the Grand Prix winner, just three other Innovation Lions were awarded, including one to Yota Moscow for developing the first Android phone with a liquid crystal display screen on one side of the phone and an electronic paper display on the other. Another Innovation Lion was awarded to the firm De-De for its development of the social media platform Thunderclap. Getin Noble Bank of Warsaw also won for developing the MasterCard Display Card, the first debit card to display the account balance.

In the mobile category, DDB Manila won the Grand Prix for a campaign that promoted client Smart Communications’ effort to convert analog phones into a new type of e-reader for school textbooks.

In the outdoor category, Ogilvy France won the Grand Prix award for an IBM corporate image campaign that brought attention to sustainable ways the client utilized city spaces to improve quality of life .