The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas received top honors Wednesday at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, a premier international awards contest for advertising and communications.
The resort and its digital ad agency, Digital Kitchen, received a Grand Prix design honor and a Gold Lion award for hundreds of digital displays throughout the resort. Those include giant columns in the hotel lobby wrapped with digital screens featuring videos by celebrity and little-known artists. The resort's outdoor marquee also shows artist videos alongside marketing messages.
Cannes jurors said the multimedia effort set a new design standard for hotels.
"Our brand is about delivering on the promise of giving guests stories worth telling and we do that every day by delivering fresh, innovative and provocative content with a strong commitment to art and design," Christopher Burns, Cosmopolitan's director of content and entertainment curation, said in a statement.
Cosmopolitan's assignment for Digital Kitchen, according to the design firm's website, was to "give the building itself a personality, a perspective, a voice. Our solution was to transform each digital display into a living art canvas."
One of the videos playing in the lobby features blurred images of a man and a woman who appear to be moving inside the columns as if they are made of milky glass. Another video shows an image of a bookshelf stocked with hard-bound books that appear to glow and fade.