Dave King’s Cannes Diary: Final wrap

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IMG_1187.jpgDave King, Kiwi expat and ECD, Innocean Worldwide is Australia’s representative on the Direct Lions jury. King, along with most of the Australian and NZ jurors, is reporting exclusively for CB.

Wrap. There were 3070 entries in Direct this year. By the time we got to Cannes there were just over 2,000 following pre-judging. At the end we’d given out 1 Grand Prix, 15 Gold, 25 Silver and 34 (I think ) Bronzes. Just 2.4% of the original entries got metal. And that number would have been even lower had we not been ‘encouraged’ to bump work up. At one stage we were told we were the toughest Direct Jury in the history of Cannes.

IMG_1185.jpgAs always, there was great work awarded and great work that missed out. There was also poor work that was awarded. The Swedish Number won our Grand Prix and did so convincingly, the only challenge coming from Colenso’s Brewtroleum. McWhopper from Y&R New Zealand was also well-liked but fell away at the end as a number of judges weren’t convinced it wasn’t a charity job.

Sadly none of the IMG_1203.jpgAustralian work really caught the panel’s attention to a huge degree. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t done or entered, it just didn’t end up in front of the full judging panel. The first three days of judging sees work evaluated by five people only. There’s just too much to get through otherwise. But based on the great pieces that were called back by judges after not making the shortlist,IMG_1258.jpg great work can easily miss out

We weren’t allowed to call scam, but my radar was going off constantly. And the repugnant thing was most of the scam work was taking advantage of tragedy, following death or chaos. Like the miserable people who developed the Eye Sea app, there was a lot of dodgy work for charities. I had to call one as the case video was impeccable but so clearly didn’t happen. It was also a case of one of the judges putting it forward for another member of the panel. Sadly, that shit and block voting still happens, but you probably knew that.

Mark Tutssel our president was great. Very fair and got all involved. There were also some great jurors, passionate and fun.

So learnings. Make sure you make it clearly direct. Make sure you enter the right category. Make sure you tailor your entry to that category. Try and get your video down to 90 seconds and try and make it funny, if possible. Enter copywriting. Enter Automotive. Try and do the best work on your biggest brands, there was a real movement away from charities this year. But most importantly, try and do really simple, clean ideas that make people smile. Watch the Swedish entry and the baby stroller thing from the States and you’ll see what I mean.

Now to spend the rest of the weak learning and mangling this beautiful language. Cheers.