DDB Mexico’s Data Tienda for WeCapital won two lauded Grand Prix accolades at the Cannes Lions 2022 Festival of Creativity.

The campaign was lauded as an exemplar of harnessing the power of data to create a modern solution for an old problem.

A large majority of women living in Mexico have no credit history, according to data cited in the campaign’s case study, thus “Data Tienda” created a way for these women to build bank-recognized financial data from pen-and-paper bookkeeping. WeCapital’s program allowed users to input the information for local businesses where they’d been participating in pay-later shopping for their lifetimes, then sending simple forms to those shopkeepers to fill out. That database then populated the previously unreachable data into a credit score, allowing women in Mexico to take out loans.

Why it won

Alan Kelly, jury president and chief creative officer of Rothco Ireland, said he loves “what if ideas”—ideas that simply asked if it was possible to take something old, like written loan records, and turn it into “the solution to a very real and new problem.”

Another key was the effort’s ability to find success and scale for continued use. Rather than rely on a large team of data collectors, it employed WhatsApp bots to deliver its form to the nearly 50,000 shopkeepers that had participated as of the time of the case study. And it worked—over 10,300 new credit records were generated, allowing participants to move forward in modern banking.

See the work here