Considering Cannes: Patrick Collister offers his views on what to expect from this year's Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity
As delegates descend upon the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès for the 60th year of the Cannes Lions, the only thing surer than the weather is the quality of work on show. Here Patrick Collister explains the pull of the world’s biggest ad festival, while creatives from around the world predict the winners.
Cannes Lions has changed in nature over the years, as well as changing its name from the Cannes Festival of Advertising to the Cannes Festival of Creativity. And I don’t think this is just a smokescreen.
Last year, for instance, if you look at the number of people who registered as delegates, a quarter of them had the word creative in their title: in other words they were copywriters, art directors or creative directors. That means that three-quarters were either suits, planners or clients.
20 years ago creative luvvies like me used to go, dress our wounds and celebrate the best work that got away the year before and think ‘you lucky bastards’.
There is still that retrospective part of Cannes which is the awards, but for me the really important part now is the lectures, the workshops, the seminars.
I worked out that there were 123 hours of seminars last year, talks and workshops that you could go to and in many ways it’s like going through an entire university term in marketing studies within a week.
There are some really great speakers – as well as some crap ones. What people have learned is that you don’t stand up on the stage of the Debussey and bang the drum for your agency or show your agency showreel. Delegates will show their feelings strongly by whistling and booing, so you have to be interesting.
In 2012 Cannes dished out 1,004 awards. A point comes at which they get devalued, and that point hasn’t quite been reached yet as they are now the de facto award to win over any other awards. 25 years ago it would have been D&AD in the UK, but now it’s definitely not.
This year no new categories have been added. Last year they added mobile and branded content, but this year there are no added categories. The most popular one of them all still remains press with the largest number of submissions every year and that’s probably because it’s the easiest one to scam. At least a third of all the press work that you look at is a scam. Every year you see ads there that can’t possibly have run!
As to what do I expect to win big this year - that would have to be Felix Baumgartner's Strata Red Bull jump. It was an epic piece of PR, running live on 113 different channels around the world. It was just gob smacking. That will certainly win all kinds of Grand Prixs.