CANNES – This year there were almost 6,000 submissions in Outdoor, from truck driver-targeted condoms (ambient>small-scale special solutions) to Darwinian games on a billboard (live event). The coffee machine could barely keep up with the posters. With such a high volume of entries, inevitably a few good ones fell by the wayside. Still, there was something about the best pieces – they survived round after round and still retained their sparkle.
Win out there before you get in here
Much of the best work had already earned accolades outside – not from award shows, but from the press and the general public. Xbox’s Survival Billboard, ING’s The Next Rembrandt, and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Van Gogh AirBnB were on my radar because I loved the ideas when I encountered them in my online streams. Judges are exposed to information overload as much as anyone else not in advertising. It’s just a little easier to recognize great work that’s a little more familiar, not in an award show way, but in the “my-sister-sent-that-to-me-on-Facebook” way.
Too much painstaking technique, not enough big idea
Yes, you spent 10,000 manhours graphing, wireframing, sculpting and terraforming it, but all it says is “gets you there.”
Sometimes it’s cultural and not everyone gets it
Cannes jurors are a diverse, international lot. We share a passion for excellent work, but sometimes we don’t laugh at the same things. That’s both personal and environmental. That’s also why we have regional shows, to allow creative work with strong cultural nuances to come forth and be recognized by a jury that is geographically and culturally more familiar with it.
Meaning and feeling
There’s a kind of ad that’s like a puzzle to be solved, with a little dopamine hit when you figure out what it’s trying to say. (“Why is that box there, and that box here… oh! It’s a metaphor for the decay of civilization!”) Humans (which could include jurors) now have less than the attention span of a goldfish, and less patience for puzzles. Deceptively simple layouts with powerful meaning and emotion payloads stood out amidst all the stimuli.
Keep calm and VR on
It’s early days for VR and already a campaign called “Actual Reality” has been awarded for thumbing its nose at branded VR experiences. We have much to learn and much still to do in VR. Let the innovation frenzy die down a little bit. Then we’ll all get to see more meaningful, human-centered work, no matter which category or reality we happen to be in.
