The Trojan Fax

At this year's Cannes Lions, one of the most talked about winners in Print & Publishing wasn't built on cutting edge technology at all. It ran on a machine most people assume died sometime in the 1990s. "The Trojan Fax," created by BETC Paris for the IUCN French Committee in partnership with Fujifilm Print, stood out in a year dominated by AI powered ideas and digital spectacle. Awards: Gold Lion, Print & Publishing, Cannes Lions 2026; Silver Lion, Creative B2B, Cannes Lions 2026.

The insight behind the campaign is deceptively simple. Environmental organisations send an enormous volume of reports, studies and policy recommendations to local governments every year. Most of it disappears. Emails get buried in crowded inboxes, PDFs go unopened, and urgent conservation data ends up lost somewhere in municipal bureaucracy before it ever reaches someone with the power to act on it.

BETC's answer was to stop competing for attention on screens altogether. In many French town halls and local government offices, the fax machine never actually left. It remains, for various administrative and legal reasons, a trusted and still functioning channel, one that produces a physical, undeletable document the moment it arrives. So instead of sending another report that could be ignored, archived or scrolled past, the team used the fax as a kind of Trojan horse. Wrapped inside a format nobody thinks to be suspicious of, IUCN's conservation data walked straight past digital fatigue and landed, printed and unavoidable, directly on an official's desk.

Fujifilm's involvement grounded the idea in its own territory of paper, print and image reproduction, reinforcing the notion that an old fashioned physical format can still outperform a digital one when the goal is simply to be seen. It's a clever piece of lateral thinking: rather than trying to make environmental messaging louder online, the campaign made it physically impossible to overlook offline.

Cannes juries this year praised the entry specifically for showing that print innovation doesn't require new technology at all, just a sharper understanding of how an old one is actually still being used. In a category increasingly filled with generative tools and digital gimmicks, "The Trojan Fax" was a reminder that creativity often lies less in invention and more in observation, noticing an overlooked channel that still commands trust, and using it to say something that actually matters.