Cannes-cer? Former award-winner Fishlock says the Cannes Lions “is like a malignant tumour”
June 17 2012, 1:32 am | | 17 Comments
In this guest post on Mumbrella, Paul Fishlock – whose early career was ironically helped significantly by winning awards, mainly at Saatchi & Saatchi, The Campaign Palace and his own shop BMF – now argues why the Cannes Lions is like a malignant tumour.
Since departing BMF in 2004 he soon after took the chairman role at The Campaign Palace, until then Australia’s most awarded agency. Last year he commenced legal proceedings against The Palace and started his own shop Behaviour Change Partners earlier this year.
17 Comments
Wow, Paul, think you’re being a bit hypocritical.
You would not have got ANY of your great jobs in this business – Saatchi, Palace (which then gave you the credentials to form BMF with Warren and Matt), then back to the Palace – without a world-class award-winning portfolio, which included several Cannes Lions.
(I also seem to recall you being one of three Aussies featured in the D&AD ‘The Copy Book’).
This sort of advice to talented young creatives will steer them in the direction of mediocrity rather than following the hugely successful paths of the likes of Droga, Premutico, Brown, Nobby, Keogh and before that Isherwood, Mather, Vaughan and Hunt.
These comments by Fishlock must be the most two-faced I have ever seen in this business (and that’s saying something…)
Coming from a man who made his name with awards it is quite remarkable.
I know he has just launched a business and is obviously keen to get back in the news, but there must be a smarter way to get a headline than this?
Finally, a man who’s brave enough to speak his mind.
Great creative work as awarded in Cannes is often the very best solution to a creative problem. [To Paul’s credit – he says as much in his article]. But, that doesn’t mean ‘Cannes’ work is always what’s right for every client. For instance, I think Bunnings’ work is perfect for Bunnings’ – absolutely perfect. It’s never going to win anything at Cannes; but that doesn’t make it any less creative than the work that does. Just like the work for Listerine – hard to imagine anything working better for the client – hard to imagine it winning at Cannes.
Cannes and all the great work that wins there deserves to be celebrated – but that doesn’t mean the Bunnings and Listerines are less deserving of our praise. In short, we need some balance in how we judge what is and isn’t good advertising, because currently, it’s all a little too one-sided. I’m sure Paul would agree.
I was a baby-creative when Paul Fishlock was tearing up the award scene and here’s something most younger (by which I mean under-35) creatives are probably completely unaware of: 15-20 years ago, the sort of work that was dominating award shows (AWARD, especially) also tended to be the same stuff winning effectiveness awards.
Campaigns like The Palace’s Meat & Livestock magazine work.
There are obviously some very welcome exceptions these days, but the majority of work in current day annuals has a distinctive whiff of scam (or “proactivity”) about it.
As a result of conceptual-inflation, anything that makes its point clearly and simply is shot down as “obvious” or, even worse, “been done before”.
Let the rivers of abuse flow, but the fact is Paul’s correct.
The advertising industry has conveniently forgotten that our reason for being is to sell stuff.
Anyway, back to the rocking chair for me.
He’s completely right. And the crux of the argument is right here. If you can’t see that you are retarded.
“Don’t get me wrong, some truly inspiring creativity will be recognised this week – ideas we should all applaud and be humbled by. But self-indulgent nonsense will win exactly the same prizes and – despite the best intentions of the organisers, – shameless cheats will garner identical honours. All will stand shoulder to shoulder on the podium – the show ponies and charlatans devaluing the deserving winners as they do every year.”
Paul’s absolutely right.
D&AD slightly aside, the vast majority of award shows are now thinly disguised profit machines who’ve had to ‘loosen’ their judging criteria as over 50% of their income is from SE Asia. Stop the scammers and Cannes would be vastly smaller festival indeed.
Award this year. A joke. Even more Malaysian posters for the usual Award School products, Mattel board games, pens and ‘tough as nails’ glue.
Ever been to Malaysia? Ever seen what actually runs there?
Proactive scam makes award shows money. And proactive scam has devalued the once mighty Cannes Gold to something most clever scammers expect every year or two.
It was once the Oscar of advertising, now kids with two years under their belts have boxes of them thanks to a CD with a budget to make and run a cheeky print ad in a regional newspaper.
And Paul is, once more, absolutely right when the award tally equals promotion instead of doing the right creative thing.
And those kids get to senior positions without a clue as to how to run a business.
Awards are no longer a judge of a creative’s talent. They’re no longer currency.
Sad.
Get past the slightly sensationalist title and this article is an excellent read.
@Lioness
Awards are no longer a currency in this industry is totally right.
Well said.
Lioness hits it right on the nail.
More so, it’s discouraging for junior and middleweight teams that finally win a couple of hard-earned awards (which in itself is still very difficult to do due to the vast amount of entries being submitted) on veritable campaigns for big clients, only to see a bunch of other young creatives take boxes full of awards on scam work, or one off pieces that ran in a backwater newspaper in Bumfucknowhere, Malaysia.
How do you then discourage future creatives not to do scam work whose sole purpose is to win awards, instead of coming up with ideas and campaigns that will solve the business problem in a creative, head-turning manner?
Unfortunately the genie is way too far out of the bottle to ever be re-corked.
All that being said, having a gold lion for a hubba bubba/ pictionary/wwf/amnesty etc press ad isn’t going to get you far these days.
You can’t really scam an integrated campaign or great digital/direct/promo, so if you want a job in a decent non-asian agency you’ll need a shitload more than a book of nice print ads, and the good CDS knew that 3 years ago. Which somewheta levels the playing field and makes it about ideas again, which is why I am still interested in this job.
The biggest scam at Cannes is Cannes.
I remember when they had three categories, TV under 30, TV over 30 and Cinema.
Then they added Press and Posters, then Radio and now there is a category for everything under the sun. All of which we duly enter because the more categories, the easier it is to win something. Anything.
If Cannes really wants to be seen as the Oscars of the Ad World, they should have one category – Best Idea.
Very well said indeed Lioness.
@ The count of Cannes
mate – wake up! You’ve listed some classic scammers – and I mean classic!
Now that we have hindsight on our side, let’s go through the Cannes finalists so far and read Paul’s article again.
To date, it looks like a smattering of real work mixed in with a huge helping of Tony Granger inspired scam from South America, Dubai and Asia.
Paul is spot on.
all I read from this article is bitterness