Paul Catmur’s Cannes Diary: Day Four

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.

Day Four was spent, still on our own computers, going through the entries one last time. There had been hardly any discussion about anything other than the cost of beer, so when we were finally presented with the shortlist on the morning of Day Five there was a lot of adjusting to be done. A large number of sub-prime entries had sneaked through so the culling began.

It was great to finally put personalities to the backs of heads I’d seen up until today. The jury are a really good bunch and I think we’re all heading in the right direction. By that I mean nobody’s yet told me to sit down and shut the frick up.

There was a lot of blood on the walls, but we were feeling very happy with the way the shortened list was looking when Phil, the Cannes CEO, wandered into the room. He wasn’t happy, and gave us a rather heavy-handed slap on the wrist for changing the list so much and would we please not do it any more.  We nodded politely, then quietly carried on once he’d gone.

After four days of individual judging followed by twelve hours of debate we were finally ready to judge metal. Unfortunately a technical glitch (ie a broken photocopier) meant we wouldn’t be able to start for an hour so we unilaterally decided to head home and come back for an early start in the morning.

The big debate, which will no doubt continue tomorrow, is about what constitutes a digital video and how, if at all, it should be judged differently from a TV ad. My thought is that as consumers don’t differentiate a piece of film as to whether they see it on TV or online, neither should we. This would suggest that we actually only need a single jury that would judge film of any description. Don’t hold your breath.