Regan Grafton’s Cannes Diary: Day Three + Four

Regan Grafton, executive creative director at DraftFCB, Auckland is New Zealand’s representative on the Cannes Lions Radio jury. Grafton, along with most of the Australian and NZ jurors, is reporting exclusively for CB.

The last couple of days have been pretty full on. We spent the morning of day three re listening to everything independently and re marking it. Then from about 4pm we got into the juicy part which was debating what should stay on the shortlist. Anything that was sitting towards the bottom of each category was on thin ice. We were each giving an  opportunity at the very end to bring back one campaign for reconsideration. This process worked really well and quite a few bits of work got through and even picked up metal.

We didn’t finish debating the work until 12.15am. But we were all happy with the standard of the short list.

I tried to do some celebrating afterwards but a couple of beers was all I could muster.

Day four was deciding metal.

I think we gave out 10 golds, 14 silvers and twenty odd bronzes. Not too many from 1500 entries. There was a lot of debating especially around the innovative radio and grand pix category. Thankfully we finished at a reasonable time of 7.30pm.

Then there was the opening gala which was down on the beach in front of the Carlton I think. That was pretty cool.

The Carlton is where a lot of juries are staying. The Radio jury however, is at the park suites which is down a side street about thirty minutes away.

Catmur was showing me photos of his balcony and a sea view. I have a view of a sex shop and the motorway. Nice.