Schofield’s Cannes Diary – part three
Chris Schofield, creative director of DraftFCB, Auckland, is representing New Zealand on theRadio jury and writesexclusively for Campaign Brief, the only Australian trade press inCannes this year. Other Aussie and Kiwi jurors will be contributingexclusively to the CB Blog during the week, so make sure youcheck in daily, hourly, every minute…
Jet lag + alcohol = bad dreams. And last night was no different. Except I had two. The first was one was just plain weird. Mike O standing in front of me juggling Gold Lions and apologizing about something. And he was incredible with these Lions, flipping them around, behind the back, catching them on his neck, putting on quite a show. ‘Come on Mike’ I said ‘this is clearly a dream, the least you could do is apologise to me in real life.’ And he nodded.
Worse yet was the second one. A plane crash dream. And as far as my worst ever dreams go this one was right up there. It went like this, the plane engine catches fire, plane dives, hostess screams ‘we’re going down’. me in the crash position for 2 or so minutes,, plane hits the ground. I jump out of bed. Angry, sweaty, relieved, happy and really looking forward to the 3 or so plane rides home.
By the time you read this you’ll probably know the results of tonight’s radio lions, so I won’t go on.
Yesterday we finished awarding the metal, and it was an interesting process. Interesting in that there were no serious arguments or tanties from anybody. It was pretty much an across the board consensus on most of the work. And if you’ve ever been involved in any ad judging you’ll know this never happens. And I will say that this is a fairly generous year over all, which is good I reckon in light of the notoriously stingy year last year.
There are a couple of surprises, all good ones tho. And I can guarantee there will be a few happy aussies and kiwis. -Maybe not as happy as the guys from Special with their Grand Prix – but then again they maybe. Just maintaining my professionalism there. But well done Special, big congratulations.
This year lots awards went to non-English speaking countries, which proves the accessibility of radio from a craft and budget point of view. I even remember a quite flash entry from Guatamala. Which is great for the on going relevance of the medium.
What else, we just had the press conference this morning, which was a great experience actually. I’ve got to say Cannes is rather very full of self importance – the way advertising should be I guess.
During the press conference there we lots of very curious parties – the South Americans in particular, they’re mad for ads these guys – and some quite curly questions. One of which our English judge had to field, and you’ll see why it was curly when the results come through tonight.
It’s funny to mention that the South African judge blasted his vuvuzela horn halfway through, and as you know those things are deafening. Then in his South African accent yelled, ‘The Power Of Audio mate!’
That’s it for now, tonight there’s a debate on about the role of creativity in shaping the world hosted by Yahoo! with guests Jeff Goodby and Ben Stiller. Looking forward to that. Oh and I met Howard Draft last night, the owner of our company. Seems like a good guy.
Ka Kite.