Paul Catmur’s Cannes Diary: Day Two

June 15 2013, 10:36 pm | BY Lynchy | No Comments

Paul Catmur, creative managing partner at Barnes Catmur & Friends, Auckland is New Zealand’s representative on the Cannes Lions Cyber jury. Catmur, along with most of the Australian and NZ jurors, is reporting exclusively for CB.

Firstly, thank you to Dave Bowman for shouting me a pizza last night, while I did my best to repay him by recounting several of the rasher moments of my youth. I think I got the better part of the deal.

Another beautiful Cannes day and I was glad to see that my stand in favour of shorts is spreading with at least five other members of the jury joining in. I’ll have them all in jandals soon.

We’ve been split into groups of five to better handle the 2,500 odd entries.

There’s still not much discussion among jury members as we sit hunched over our screens, but at least we’re allowed go at our own pace rather than watching in a group when you have to go at the pace of the slowest member.

Gratifyingly the New Zealand and Australian work stands up very well amidst all the international competition. I wouldn’t be surprised if it does as well here as it did at D&AD, across all the juries.

I have saved up most of the copywriting entries to judge tomorrow. There are a quite a number of them, unsurprisingly almost all in English. I personally have my doubts about the legitimacy of having copywriting at all when it’s being judged by a jury for most of whom English is at best a second language. That’s not meant as a criticism of my fine fellow jurors (several of who are much bigger than me) merely to question the fairness of the task they’re asked to perform.

I personally would really struggle to judge copy in a foreign language, my own limitations having been sadly exposed at the age of 19 when I first came to the Riviera and tried to chat up French girls.

No doubt Dave Bowman’s really looking forward to hearing that story.