Nigel Dawson’s Cannes Diary: Day Three
Nigel Dawson, ECD at Grey Melbourne is Australia’s representative on the Cannes Lions Press jury. Dawson, along with most of the Australian and NZ jurors, is of course reporting exclusively for CB.
At 11 tonight we finished refining the long shortlist of 666 pieces.
And as we review them the quality seems to rise at it sits alongside other equally good princes.
A vast mass of over-engineered, under-ideaed work has disappeared. Much of it I suspect has originated in Asia.
But there is still a plethora of work populated by masses of very small people, meticulously illustrated.
And as one of my fellow jurors remarked, there’s an awful lot of ads with objects that are composed of lots of other things. Again the triumph of form over substance.
Another theme seems to be storyboard ads that use a succession of images to tell a story, or a joke. There must be a simpler way.
Much good work is let down by photoshop; images of people with fixed expressions, devoid of humanity. More naturalistic photography immediately warms one to the work.
Is copy dead? Actually no. A number of pieces with proud and sometimes twisted headlines have made the cut. More power to them. But there is no middle ground; long copy is loooooong copy – ridiculously long blocks that cannot sustain the paucity of subject matter.
By far the largest category is art direction, and it has been ruthlessly pruned. I think people sometimes mistake a great illustration or great photography for great art direction. Frankly I don’t think there should be such a category – surely it’s a sine qua non of any worthy ad.
And people still insist on playing with their food; some particularly gruesome work for boneless meat could turn one vegetarian. What happened to appetite appeal?
Our final shortlist is truly mixed. It’s Impossible to see any threads running through it. And that can only be good. Independent thinking, garnering styles and themes from many different places. It may be criticized, but a huge amount of care has gone into composing it. A great celebration of a year in print.
Now for the really tough bit.