Paul Catmur’s Cannes Diary: Day Three

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.

The world’s financial morass don’t seem to have made much of an impact on Cannes, other than that the rise of the Kiwi dollar means it’s not quite as outrageously expensive as in previous years. I haven’t met anyone from Greece yet, but shortly 12,000 delegates from around the world will be turning up demanding Lions and Heineken in equal measure.

Day three judging was relatively untaxing for me as I’d got my head down all week and had gone through the last of my allocated entries by lunchtime. James from the UK had finished ahead of me and there’s no doubt that it makes it much easier judging hype tapes if you’re a native English speaker. 

As usual, there’s much muttering from judges about the quality of the work and how only a small percentage is actually any good. Yet those same judges will have all entered work themselves and probability would deem it rather unlikely that their entries are all good ones. It’s a sad truth that it’s easier to judge other people’s work than your own. The preliminary shortlist will be revealed to us tomorrow, so I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

I spotted Sir John Hegarty today who’s here as president of the Film Jury. You’d have thought by now he’d have had enough of looking at ads in dark rooms full of strangers and would be off growing wine, saving dwarf giraffes or designing golf courses. Apparently not, and the magical lure of Cannes week has pulled him back like anyone else who can cadge a flight of their holding company.  Or perhaps all his money had been tied up in Greek banks.