Edelman won the Titanium Lion at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity for logistic giant DP World’s sustainability initiative, “The Move to Minus 15.”  

It’s the first time that a legacy PR firm has won the top creative prize at the Cannes Festival.  According to the Festival the Titanium Lions “celebrate game-changing creativity,” that “breaks new ground in branded communications...[and] that marks a new direction for the industry and moves it forward.” 

“Tonight, we’ve scaled the ultimate mountain,” CEO Richard Edelman wrote in a blog post following the win. The campaign also won a Gold Lion for the Sustainable Development Goals category and a Silver Lion in the B2B category. 

For the campaign, Edelman identified that DP World could lead sustainable change in global frozen food supply chain by challenging the standard temperature for freezing food that was accepted for 100 years— -18 degrees Celsius.  

The firms commissioned a panel of experts that concluded that the -18C could be raised to -15C, saving 5% to 7% of energy in the process and 17.7 million tons of carbon every year.  

“The simple action of turning the dial up by three degrees costs nothing, wouldn’t harm the food, but would be transformative for the world,” Edelman said in a statement.  DP World made their research public and within days, 60% of the global shipping container industry had joined “The Move to Minus 15 Coalition.” 

Watch the case film about the effort here.  

The Titanium capped Edelman’s best year at the Cannes Festival since it began competing for awards a decade ago. It also won four Gold Lions, six Silver Lions and five Bronze Lions for a total of 16 trophies.  Winning work came from 9 different campaigns across a range of categories including creative commerce, social & influencer, digital craft, B2B, entertainment for gaming, direct, sustainability and PR.