An FCB/Six will have a pretty good chance at a Lion on Wednesday after being nominated four times in the Creative Data Lions and once more in the Creative Strategy Lions, for Go Back to Africa.”

Created for the travel and lifestyle company Black and Abroad, “Go Back to Africa” highjacked the phrase “Go Back to Africa” for a pan-African tourism campaign that shared photos of black travellers enjoying happy experiences while visiting Africa.

“One of the campaign’s goals is to effectively strip the perceived power away from those who use the phrase “Go back to Africa” with derogatory intent,” said Eric Martin, co-founder of Black & Abroad when the campaign was launched in April.

According to FCB/Six, “the heart of the project is an innovative digital platform designed to locate, quality control and gain permissions to use aspirational images of African Americans traveling in Africa. The platform, fuelled by Google Vision and crafted by FCB/SIX, is an AI-powered content marketing engine purpose-built for the travel and tourism industry.

“The platform looks for images and ingests thousands of pieces of user generated visual content from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, then uses Google Vision’s image recognition technology to filter through content by location, subject, quality, and relevancy—all in real-time.”

It would seem the judges in Cannes are impressed by the work.

The Creative Strategy Lion are new this year, created to “celebrate the idea behind the idea, how strategic planning can redefine a brand, reinvent its business, and influence consumers or wider culture.”

Go Back to Africa was nominated in the Retail/Travel/Leisure category. The only other Canadian entry shortlisted in Creative Strategy is “Endangered Syndrome,” for the Canadian Down Syndrome Society by FCB Canada Toronto.

The Creative Data Lions must “demonstrate how the execution/campaign was enhanced or driven by the creative use, interpretation, analysis or application of data.”