Garfield: Cannes Doesn't Matter Anymore
... and Neither Do the TV Ads It Celebrates, Believes Chaos Scenario Author
By
Bob Garfield
Published: June 15, 2009
They should give Crispin Porter & Bogusky every statue on Monday and send everybody to the airport. Gold. Silver. Titanium. Plutonium. Whatever.
Because first of all, apart from Burger King, the advertising year was a black hole worldwide. Besides, at this stage of Cannes' history, what's the point?
BURGER KING: Fast-food 'virgins' in far-flung international locations get their first taste of Whoppers and McDonald's Big Macs.
The International Advertising Festival is convening in the midst of, well, chaos: not merely recession but the growing irrelevance of all the flashy mini-cinema long featured there. Which is why everybody present will mouth the same pieties: "It's not about film or print or outdoor. It's about the idea. It's about solving communications problems and building brands and building customer relationships by any and all means." That sort of rhetoric.
Why not? It's all absolutely true. Then, having recited the new catechism, off they will head to screen TV commercials, or to a yacht party, the Majestic patio, Colombe d'or or the beach.
Because that's what Cannes is about ... as is every other ad festival, more or less. It's simply just not all that entertaining to sit through four-minute promo videos about a website or experiential-marketing event. And it's sure harder, under those circumstances, to suspend disbelief and imagine yourself an artist vs. someone who sells deodorant and cellphones and deathburgers for a living.
But if it really is all about the work, we suggest traveling with plenty of seratonin inhibiteurs du recaptage. It is a disaster.
Or, it is a disaster if the annual labors of Leo Burnett Co. to find the 50 Lion front-runners, based on other awards shows and industry buzz, are any indication -- and they always are. Year in and year out, the Burnett Cannes Predictions Reel has been an uncanny harbinger of things to come. We ourselves have used it to predict, with consistent accuracy, the category Golds and Grand Prix itself. This year it presages mostly shame and disbelief.
LONDON TRANSPORT: A spot promoting safety makes 21 subtle changes.
For instance, on the reel there are only 29 actual TV commercials. Fair enough. In the spirit of recognizing the new realities (see third paragraph, above), Burnett has been agnostic about medium. The problem is, of the 29, only four are by any rational standards award-worthy: Himani analgesic cream (Publicis Ambience, Mumbai) in which real people are used like modeling clay in a cartoonish busy-city tableau; London Transport (WCRS, London), in a new version of "It's easy to miss what you're not looking for" safety campaign, this time staging the denouement of a whodunit, and changing 21 details of the shot before our eyes without detection; a weird, weird, weird but inarguably memorable spot for Esthe Wam depilatory (Ogilvy & Mather, Tokyo) in which a woman bowler glides down the lane with her ball, and loses a perfect game because a single underarm hair peeks through its follicle to change her/the ball's course; and Burger King's "Whopper Virgins" campaign. More on that later.
QUEENSLAND TOURISM: Help-wanted ad for caretaker on Hamilton Island.
This leaves 31 other entries, from online videos to billboards to websites to widgets to experiential-marketing events to publicity stunts. They are for the most part forgettable, too, and some are simply terrible. What could have possessed anyone to flag JC Penney's overwrought, overly long, underly clever, way-underly acted, written and directed 4:45-second viral "Beware of the Doghouse?" The work, from Saatchi & Saatchi New York, is a threadbare battle-of-the-sexes gag, unendurably drawn out, in service of a crap piece of JC Penney jewelry that hardly constitutes a romantic ideal. Equally bewildering were the selections of a childish, highly filthy riff on pornography for Diesel (The Viral Factory, London) and an animated Monty Python Meets Quentin Tarantino bit of violence porn from Amnesty International (Leo Burnett, Lisbon, Portugal).
Sure enough, most of the best ideas had little to do with advertising as Cannes has always known it.
Queensland Tourism, which used help-wanted columns to advertise "the best job in the world" (caretaker on the Great Barrier Reef's Hamilton Island, $8,000/month plus villa) from Cummins/Nitro, South Brisbane; a Red Cross "store" in Lisbon fitted with all the retail trappings to sell hope (Leo Burnett, Lisbon); Fiat Eco-Drive (the Nike Plus of cars, allowing you to download your driving data and analyze it for eco-friendliness) from AKQA, London; an elaborate web experience called Hotel 626 for Doritos from Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco; an exquisitely rendered bit of video mayhem for Philips (Tribal DDB, Amsterdam);
T-Mobile's dancing flashmob at Liverpool Street Station (Saatchi & Saatchi, London); Diageo Pampero Rum (Leo Burnett, Lisbon), which created an audio "Museo Efemero" walking tour of street art about to be eradicated by a Portuguese city; the Barack Obama new-media campaign (Obama for America, Washington) and Crispin's diabolical, astonishingly brilliant "Whopper Sacrifice" stunt, which gave you a free Whopper if you'd de-friend 10 Facebook friends.
ESTHE WAM: Spot for depilatory shows a woman stopped by a single, pesky hair.
For whatever reason, Will.i.am's lovely, inspiring, celebrity-studded music video for Obama -- the one that turned an Obama speech into lyrics -- is not a stand-alone entry, or that would be our Grand Prix choice. In terms of marketers of any scale, that pretty much leaves Burger King, which not only came up with the deliciously subversive Facebook gimmick, but also contrived to do the "world's purest taste test" by taking Whoppers and Big Macs to godforsaken destinations in the Third World and letting the locals pick a favorite. Having ourselves failed for years to acknowledge the post-modern appeal of the grinning King grotesque, we bow humbly before his majesty.
The film category is dead. Long live the King.
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I agree with you that many of the ads that have been celebrated at Cannes don't represent the future of advertising, but I don't think Cannes is dead.
I've always been firmly entrenched in the digital and emerging media world. I believe that all major award shows are in a state of transition and from what I've seen the Lions are the most in touch with the digital world. Combine that with their one country - one vote system and I believe you have a better chance of real global work pushing itself to the top.
Like any festival you have to get past the "creative masturbation", but there's still some great work out there. Some festivals are going to survive this transition. The Clios and One Show are miles behind on digital and I still put my money on the Lions to come out ahead in the future. Maybe this recession is just the taste of reality we all needed in this industry...
-Freddie Laker
Sapient / DigitalNext Contributor
Every once in a while you write something that makes me think you and Ad Age are finally emerging into the real world. Thanks for demonstrating leadership here. It is refreshing when the industry press can rise above the past and start talking about the future.
Is Cannes irrelevant? Not as long as communications professionals want to honor excellence, don Speedos and take a break from work that gets tougher every day.
Patrick Scullin (http://www.thelintscreen.com)
Ames Scullin O'Haire/Atlanta (http://www.asoy.com)
Yes, the best ideas are those which aren't really advertising. It's logical, really, as I would say that it's generally a good idea to try to have ideas about something people actually care about, and advertising really isn't one of those things.
As a commentator described before, festivals are in a transitional phase because of this, and some are in fact they are reevaluating what it is that is celebration-worthy: ideas that truly make a qualitative difference in people's lives, big or small. Stuff that ends up as true product or marketing innovation, not mass media messaging everyone is trying to avoid.
Some new forms of festivals already go this way. As far as Cannes (and the other big ones)is concerned, it's just a question of how fast they can change the image and their definition of which ideas are worth celebrating. It might be harder for Cannes than others as they epitomize the old-school advertising world, regardless of adding new categories and trying to jump on the band wagon.
Alexander Wipf
One more suggestion that might help curtail future nonsensical spending? Perhaps AdAge could reverse its own traditional coverage of Cannes and simply refuse to run countless pictures of agency leaders actually posing WHILE they pat each other on the back while drinking champagne in this year's post-Cannes wrap-up.
Maybe this year, your own publication could just list the winners and post samples of that awarded work...and call it a day.
"Like any festival you have to get past the 'creative masturbation' "
Kinda like trying to get past all of the flesh at a porn convention, eh?
That aside, you're half-right in that advances in digital technology are killing Cannes.
But it's the ability to easily create convincing fake ads in any medium using digital technology that is the real culprit.
I used to be able to look at award show annuals and reels and recognise most of the work as ads I had seen as a consumer.
Now most of it is BS.
I wonder how many fake Tabasco ads have been entered this year?
CFO's and clients--are you paying attention?
http://takemetoyourleader.com/2009/06/15/why-the-cannes-lions-are-important/
-Freddie Laker
Director of Digital Strategy, Sapient
DigitalNext Contributor
Admittedly, you say that the problem is the lack of thought behind the executions. In other words, the majority of agencies phoned it in and got blown out.
Are people still watching TV, listening to radio and reading print?
Yes.
Then our challenge as an industry is to deliver solutions through every channel that reflects this greta thinking you are talking about. As professionals we should be ashame of the drop-off in the quality of work after the Crispin work. Is this really Cannes fault?
Instead of producing great thinking, we have given up on TV, radio and print - thinking that interactive will do all the heavy lifting. What a foolish thought. Our job is to speak to people where they are, and folks are still in front of the TV at home, listening to the radio in the car, and reading magazines in the "reading room" and bedroom.
Clients should be demanding smart solutions that do their job across the board. And agencies or whatever else you want to call yourselves should be working harder to produce work in that is built upon a foundation of great thinking.
Please notice that at no time did I use the dreaded "C" word, creative. Great thinking is usually recognized as great creative. Who does not want to give their clients great thinking?
We blame Detroit for the cars they made, not the car show. Why should we be any different?
We need to ask a few honest questions. Do awards really represent the whole industry or just the big boys? Do they even matter anymore? Do you judge an agency on a few golds or on a creative culture and ethos? We can all think of dinosaurs that can manage a few golds through quantity rather than quality.
Are there too many awards awarded for who you are more than what you do (the in club problem)? Do too many agencies try to fit their ads into a formulae to just win awards? It's not for me a few other creative directors to decide but the people.
Gorilla (Fallon) won the hearts and minds of a wide audience long before a 12 man jury decided it was good. There are many great piece of creativity that never get as far as the awards but the people rate as excellent. Or bits that just don't fit into any category.
The fact is we live in an internet age not a print one where the people now decide. The future of awards will be replaced with mass opinion. Work published on the web will be judged by many not by a few people in a hotel suite in London, New York or Canne. Isn't that a better value?
This is the way things are heading. Those awards that don't move with the times will be replaced by those that embrace the future.
Chris Arnold, Creative Director, Creative Orchestra, London.
I thank you for the simultaneous inspiration and kick in the ass that I took out from your article, which seemed more of a rant against what passes as creative, rather than the validity of the festival at Cannes.
A collection of great work is wonderful to have and helpful inspiration. But the industry has gone too far in idol worship.
www.nycainsight.com
Their budgets were way beyond what is paid today for a commercial, yet, clients beat a pathe to their door. Co-incedence, I think not. So what we are saying here is "awards and real work have no connection" or the implication is that attempts to win awards are a separate attempt than producing actual spots for clients?
Happenstance? I think not.
Maybe, Adage should try something strange like researching what has happened with all the Grand Lion winners of the last 5 years as far as their business growth. Did these agencies receive more invitations to pitch business? If so, were the accounts bigger or smaller? Sort of a where are they now look.
People are claiming clients don't care about awards but I wonder if the actions of clients prove that to be true?
I think it is the same as those focus groups where participants claim that they don't watch TV but when you start talking about the shows they know everything about the shows, characters and plot but they don't watch TV.
Yeah, right.