MANILA, PHILIPPINES — All eyes are on the Olympics — as so they were on Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, too. Apart from the eerily equal number of categories each has, BBDO Guerrero’s Creative Chair David Guerrero said the two have more in common than one might think.
“Cannes is the one that people pay attention to. It’s worth winning for that reason, but you’re not going to get there unless you enter all these other awards [shows],” he shared while filling the screen of all the competitions two-time Olympic gold medalist Carlos Yulo had to thread through.
A longtime juror in regional and international shows, and one of this year’s for the Film category at Cannes Lions, David advised clarity for a breed that’s “still one of the most difficult to get right.”
The same way a single athlete would not enter every sport, knowing where to compete is paramount — with David making an example of the decidedly world’s fastest human, Usain Bolt, to demonstrate his point.
“The difference between the fastest man in the world and the guy who didn’t get any medal at all is about 5/1000 of a second. It seems like a crazy comparison but this is the kind of margins that happen when work is being judged.”
Painting a picture of the room where the better vie for the best – i.e. the deliberations room without a window looking outside the Palais – David enumerated the idiosyncrasies that can chuck an entry off the final leg: type, logo, copy among them. Because when it comes to the impeccable works below the sifter, it is down to the “most passionate debates” to cross the (Grand Prix) line — and a very fine line at that.
From his observations, Philippine agencies have a stronghold on the classic creativity of film, radio, and outdoor. David explained, “Specialization is the key,” not meaning that they cannot branch out into other categories but that “We need to train, we need to think where we’re going to compete. We need to know the competition.”
In true athletic fashion, David said that preparation is intense even in his own agency where they toil for months for each case film. To sum up the tedium and toot of it all, he played this:
Ultimately, in his insider piece, he regards awards as “the currency of acknowledgement, acceptance, approval, and admiration,” and for further encouragement to the creatives in the room, said:
The spirit of the competition pushes you to be better. The reason to look at what is going on around the world is that it inspires you to do better.
And while two colossal events they are individually, the Olympics and Cannes Lions intersect in the 4As General Members Meeting room in the form of brand congratulatory posts to the Philippine winners and delegates… To David’s jest that Kidlat Awards might just create a special category for Olympics reactive posts!
