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VIDEO: The Creative Disconnect at Cannes Festival
Bob Garfield Interviews Lee Clow
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| Lee Clow explored creating an alternative to the Cannes Festival. | ALSO: Comment on this report in the 'Your Opinion" box below. |
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"It's very hard to figure out how you can create simple award shows around these more complicated media ideas," he said. "But it's one of the big challenges of our business.
"Until creative people really believe that they can get as lauded and recognized doing a brilliant kind of interactive discovery idea rather than a TV spot, they're still going to concentrate on doing the cool [TV spots]."
"Trying to change [Cannes] is going to be like pulling teeth. But if a new show could open and figure out a way to celebrate the new [kinds of creative work], it could become a role model, and the other shows would have a model to evolve to," he said.
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The event focuses on TV commercials for several good – but flawed – reasons.
First, the context of a TV commercial doesn't matter much, so you can load dozens onto a reel and judge them fairly equitably. Most other communications are affected on their time and place. A billboard message often comes to life because of its location. An item of point-of-sale will look completely different whether it is in a supermarket or in say, an Apple store.
Second, TV commercials are made to appeal to broad audiences, so panelists from around the world who are unaware of the nuances of the local culture can nonetheless appreciate them.
Third, the commercials that win are generally original and entertaining, rather than what consumers might respond to, which are messages that are informative and engaging.
When professional marketers get swept away by the hype of Cannes they shortchange the entire industry. The management of marketing communications requires extreme skill and judgment, and has to take into account the rapidly changing mindset of the consumer in each unfolding situation. Marketing professionals – at least the good ones – need to be vastly more sophisticated than the jury at Cannes.
Tom Beakbane. MARS Advertising Canada
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