James Hurman’s Cannes Diary – day two from the inaugural Creative Effectiveness jury room
Colenso BBDO Auckland planning director James Hurman represented New Zealand on the Creative Effectiveness jury. Here’s a few thoughts after day two, exclusive to CB…
There was a lovely line from a one of the campaigns we looked at that didn’t make our shortlist. It was a christmas campaign for Macy’s, involving a film about a little girl struggling with her faith in father christmas. The wise counsel from her mother was that “Believing in Santa isn’t something you prove. It’s something you do.”
Well in the case of judging Creative Effectiveness, it’s quite the other way around. It’s not just about being effective, it’s about proving it.
I worry that with our tiny shortlist, people might think there were only ten effective creatively awarded campaigns from last year.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. All of the papers that Sudeep and I and the others looked at were examples of campaigns with amazing commercial results. What our ten shortlists papers did was manage to prove beyond any doubt that the effectiveness result was caused by the creative work. And anyone who’s written effectiveness papers will know how extremely difficult it is to do that.
But this is Cannes. It’s about achieving the extremely difficult. Any creative person knows how easy it is to conceive and then execute a Titanium Lion winning campaign. Not fucking very.