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CANNES (AdAge.com) -- Japan's NEC and Spain's DoubleYou have each won a Cyber Lions Grand Prix Award at this year's Cannes Lions International Advertising

A Cyber Grand Prix went to NEC Japan's Ecotonoha Web site designed by Yugo Nakamura.

Festival for the best online advertising projects of the year.

"We were trying to come up with two winners that were different but represented the best of what we think is happening in our field -- and with a view to the future," said the jury chair Robert Greenberg, CEO and chief creative officer of Interpublic Group of Cos.' R/GA.

NEC captured the top prize with its NEC Ecotonoha Project Web site, designed by Yugo Nakamura. DoubleYou, of Barcelona, won for its San Silvestre Vallecane integrated interactive campaign for Nike.

Reaching a 'new level'
Many of the judges emphasized that this year's entries represented the interactive platform coming into its own. "The promise of the Internet and interactive advertising is in our reel tonight," said Mr. Greenberg, referring to the Cyber winners. "The industry has come to a new level as of this year. There was a misunderstanding of interactive and how important it would be in marketing. Now it's being recognized by the agency groups. Jurors felt that [the winning work] holds up with the best of the TV commercials."

Mr. Greenberg said there were roughly eight pieces in contention for the Grand Prix and that the 16-person jury was unanimous on the Nike Grand Prix selection and unanimous save one abstention in choosing the NEC project.

The NEC site supports the tech company's Ecotonoha environmental initiative through which NEC plants trees on the Kangaroo Islands in Australia. Visitors to the site may add leaves, in the form of comments, to a virtual tree, and NEC plants a tree for every 100 leaves, or signatures added.

Juror Sasha Kurtz of i-shop Dotglu in New York noted that while the NEC site was "explosive in its use of technology," the Nike site was "technologically small" but equally effective. The Nike campaign features banner ads and a site that employs basic Flash animation and a race between

A second Cyber Grand Prix went to DoubleYou of Barcelona for the running bears Web site it created for Nike.

man and bear to convey a compelling idea about running. DoubleYou's Nike effort was "exciting visually and emotionally," said juror Kevin Flatt of Publicis Groupe's Fallon. "It rewarded on numerous levels. You can put it against any campaign out there -- TV, online, print, whatever."

The winning NEC site represented "beautiful visual implementation but also the building of a community," Mr. Greenberg said, and the Nike San Silvestre site had an effective simplicity and an emotional quality that he said had been missing from the category up to a only a few years ago. "What was really obvious, at the center of winning, was an incredibly strong idea," said juror Simon Milliship, executive creative director of WPP Group's Wunderman Interactive Europe, Middle East, Africa.

Subservient Chicken
U.S. work was prolific among the 102 gold, silver and bronze Cyber awards, with U.S. work capturing a total of 22 Lions, including eight golds. Among the gold-winning efforts were Crispin Porter & Bogusky's wildly popular "Subservient Chicken" site for Burger King Corp. that many had pegged for the top honor this year. That chicken site also claimed a bronze Lion.

Mr. Greenberg called Subservient Chicken a "remarkable project," and an "example of a client allowing an agency to do something courageous." For the Grand Prix honor, though, he said that the jury was looking "for something with more depth to it and more content," and also noting the Burger King site's intentional lack of strong branding.

Crispin was also recognized for its work on Virgin Atlantic Airways, which was awarded a gold campaign prize for online advertising.

Omnicom Group's Goodby Silverstein & Partners won a gold campaign award for its comically simple series of "Rejected Ad" online spots for Budweiser. The agency also won gold for the online ad "Bouquet" for Hewlett-Packard and a silver campaign award for Discover Card. Another San Francisco agency, Venables Bell & Partners, won a gold for the "It's Coming Back" execution for Napster. R/GA was cited for two Gold Lions -- for the Nike Lab Holiday 03 and Nike ID sites. The shop also won two bronze Lions in the Web site category -- for Nike Lab Spring 04 and Nike ab Comic book -- and a bronze for the "LeBron/Vince Carter" basketball Internet campaign.

25 Gold Cyber Lions
The jury bestowed a total of 25 Gold Cyber Lions. In addition to its Grand Prix win, Barcelona's DoubleYou scored gold for its Web site for Nike's "The Game" and for viral marketing for Nike's "Bear in My Mind."

Mr. Greenberg also singled out the gold-winning work for Volvo from Forsman & Bodenfors Sweden, as the online experience becomes increasingly important in the automotive category.

"If you were at all interested in this car, these sites could close the deal," he said. "There isn't anything you would want to know about the car that isn't on the site." Mr. Greenberg also cited the gold-winning Vodafone site as "exceptional."

Marketing dollars shifting
He noted that the growing appreciation of the effectiveness and creative potential of interactive is now being reflected in the apportioning of marketing budgets. "Marketers that had X number of dollars to spend globally don't have more money due to multichannel marketing. The dollars in this channel are coming out of things they were doing previously," he said. He cited 10% to 15% increases in marketing spending in the interactive arena.

"The interactive channel grew out of being incredibly efficient in our processes. There is real value in it, which is why interactive is growing every year, or even every quarter."

Juror Shawn Burns of Wunderman Interactive in France noted that the dialog in the interactive space has shifted from thinking about what's possible within the confines of technology and bandwidth to creating "ideas that start as big ideas."

"You see ideas that could not be done outside of interactive," said Mr. Burns, who added that "there were a lot of TV spots that were done for or repurposed for the Web. It says a lot about the placement of media dollars."

Mr. Greenberg said he plans to recommend that the Cannes festival reconsider the way the Integrated category is judged within the Cyber Lions, noting that entries are judged for integration only within the interactive space, instead of integration across all channels. "I will recommend that change," he said.