Ant Keogh’s 2011 Cannes Diary – Day One from the Cannes Press jury room
Ant Keogh, executive creative director of Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, is representing Australia on the Press jury. Keogh just finished day one of judging and writes exclusively for Campaign Brief. Other Aussie and Kiwi jurors will be contributing exclusively to the CB Blog over the next week, so make sure you check in daily, hourly, every minute…
After a quick briefing we begin. The 5000 print entries are split into thirds amongst about 18 judges. Today, each of us will look through about 20 heavy folders full of ads.
A big German guy puts the first folder on my desk. On the cover, it says ‘Toiletries and Cosmetics’. I open the folder and begin to go through the work then I realise there’s been a mix-up. I go to one of the officials and say, “I think this folder is labelled wrongly. It must be for all the scam work.” He says, “No, that’s Toiletries and Cosmetics.” I say, “Okay. That’s fine then.”
We have barcode scanner to set a score for each entry. You point it at the ad -beep! then at the score – beep! This data is uploaded later into a computer. That way, they say, they can tell if you’re giving your agency or your country a biased score. Overall, the work I guess mostly falls into the ‘pretty good’ category. There aren’t that many what-were-you-thinking? entries.
And every now and then you get something great. I must admit the work that is most often spectacular seems to be for products which have made spectacular ads in the past; the kind of products whose benefit can be visually exaggerated to a ludicrous extent. Hardly any headline-driven ads. Lots of great photography and illustration. Lot’s of big pictures and tiny logos. It’s certainly impressive how much work has been put into all this advertising.
4 Comments
Love Mr. Keogh’s sense of humor. He’s totally wrong about the scam part of course 😉 But very stiff competition it seems in my category 🙁 Great to have him in the jury. Can’t wIt until tomorrow when the Shortlist is out. Fingers crossed.
the kind of trophy i’d like to win at cannes: http://tiny.cc/h32ly
How did you get that low-angle shot?
Shortlist, 12:42! Subtle!