Warren Brown’s 2011 Cannes Diary – Day Three from the Cannes Promo and Activation jury room
Warren Brown, creative founder of BMF Australia, is president of the Promo & Activation jury. He has just finished day three of judging and writes exclusively for Campaign Brief. Other Aussie and Kiwi jurors will be contributing exclusively to the CB Blog over the next 10 days, so make sure you check in daily, hourly, every minute…
After a three day travel odyssey our judge from Argentina finally managed to join us with a ready made case study of his efforts to escape the cloud. http://vimeo.com/25215569
We voted on it and from memory I think we gave it a Gold.
No show is complete without a Trojan horse idea or two. It must be one of the longest running campaigns ever, the idea that just keeps on giving, we also came across a beer campaign’s insight that drinking beer can make you feel less than perfect the following morning, reeeeeally? I had no idea, to think for all these years in Cannes I’ve been blaming it on the sea air and sunshine.
It’s also amusing to see people with misplaced optimism prepared to spend 10 times the budget they had for their idea on entering Cannes in an effort to try and snaffle a Lion. Mind you there was a student who had a go by submitting himself as a Promo, like it, big thinking, it’s just as easy to fail at the top as it is at the bottom so why not start at the top.
There are some very clever ideas and plenty more that claim overwhelming responses that tend to leave you feeling underwhelmed at best but the gems are gradually being unearthed.
If you were to believe every word of the case studies up for consideration it’s hard to believe that people have enough time to experience all the phenomenons and world firsts created by our industry. Not forgetting the ultimate experiences, who needs class A drugs when advertising is pumping out all this amazing experiential stuff into society?
The judging has had its lighter moments though, like Titanium was created for work that didn’t quite fit in any category I think there’s enough evidence to suggest Cannes could do with a WTF category as well.
Looking forward to the shortlist and fine tuning the past three days efforts.
Cheers.
Brown (pictured top right) with Cannes festival chairman and fellow Aussie Terry Savage.