by Mark Tungate
Cannes is not the only awards ceremony on the advertising calendar – far from it. Others include the D&AD Awards, the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) Awards, the Clio Awards, the Cresta Awards, Eurobest, the Epica Awards, The London International Advertising Awards, the New York Festivals and The One Show. Then there are numerous regional and local events. At the end of it all an influential publication called The Gunn Report (compiled by former Leo Burnett creative chief Donald Gunn) tots up all the major awards the leading agencies have won during the year and provides a ranking. Advertising agencies love receiving awards because these shiny hunks of metal and glass are tangible proof of their most ephemeral asset – creativity.
There’s something special about Cannes. It’s big, glossy and a bit over the top. And it can afford to be – although the organizers decline to provide an official figure, it is said to make a profit of €10 million a year on an income of €20 million. This is hardly surprising with entry fees of between €430 and €1,275 for each piece of work (depending on the category) and an individual delegate fee of €2,550. The event is currently run by the British publisher and events organizer EMAP, which acquired it in 2004 for a reported £52 million.
But to uncover the history of the Cannes Lions, we must visit an elegant art-filled apartment in the sedate 16th arrondissement of Paris, and take tea with the man who transformed the festival.
The man behind Cannes
Roger Hatchuel was the figurehead of Cannes for almost 20 years. EMAP bought the event from an offshore trust, but it was Hatchuel’s name that appeared in headlines when the deal was announced. As he recounts, the week-long festival began as a subdued occasion run by an intimate circle of cinema advertising contractors. And every other year, it took place in Venice.
‘The story started in 1953,’ explains Hatchuel, who is trim, dapper and polite, with a hint of steely determination that has no doubt served him well. ‘At that time the only audiovisual medium available to advertisers outside the United States was cinema – commercial TV had not yet begun in Europe. Investment in cinema advertising was nonetheless very low, which is why you had this small group of independent contractors who all knew one another. They banded together to form an industry association.’
In order to promote themselves, the contractors decided to hold an annual festival to which they would invite potential clients. And as they were closely linked to the cinema industry, they decided to stage the event in the two European cities associated with film festivals: Cannes and Venice. The Venice link explains the adoption of the lion as the form and name of the award. (A winged lion is the symbol of the city’s patron saint, St Mark.) The first winner was apparently an Italian spot for Chlorodont toothpaste.
The Screen Advertising World Association was based in London, largely owing to the prominence of the contractor Pearl & Dean. Hatchuel, who had previously been head of advertising at Procter & Gamble France, came across it when he was hired to run the French cinema advertising contractor Mediavision. Reluctantly, he allowed his boss – Mediavision co-founder Jean Mineur – to talk him into becoming chairman of the association. ‘I felt it would be terrible for my personal image, because as far as I was concerned the association was run very unprofessionally by a bunch of old guys. But I respected Monsieur Mineur so I went along with him. This was in 1985. A year later, I told them, “Look, I’m not going to stay involved in this festival if it’s run in an unprofessional way as a non-profit organization. We need investment, marketing and manpower so we can turn it into a real business.” Bear in mind that, until the early eighties, they had refused to accept entries that had been shown only on television, because they saw themselves as a cinema advertising organization.’
By then Venice had been dropped as a location owing to the frequent transport strikes and lack of affordable, central accommodation for delegates. From 1987, Hatchuel took a financial stake in the Cannes festival and began to develop its activities. ‘I wanted to turn it into the Olympics of advertising as far as awards were concerned, the Davos in terms of networking and seminars, and the Harvard in terms of opportunities to learn.’
Progress was slow: Cannes did not accept print entries until 1992. (Internet, media strategy, direct marketing and radio categories have been added over the years.) Hatchuel tried to steer the image of the festival away from sun, sea and sex towards something more serious. In 1991 he established a slogan: ‘Less beach, more work.’ This later became: ‘No beach, all work.’ ‘The strategy was not 100 per cent successful,’ he says, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘but I was able to convince people that the festival had genuine value – that it was not just about having fun in the sun.’
For Hatchuel, at least, the festival was often a source of stress. There were accusations of underhand voting tactics and ‘ghost’ ads – those that had been created purely for the festival and never run in reality – and the clash of egos among the highly strung creatives on the jury could be spectacular. Their decisions were never less than controversial. Hatchuel still shudders at the memory of 1995, when a jury chaired by the combative Frank Lowe considered that none of the work merited a Grand Prix, to the extremely vocal displeasure of the awards night audience.
In 2004, when it became clear that his son Romain did not want to take over the running of the festival, Hatchuel decided it was time to bow out at the age of 71. And so EMAP stepped in. Delegates who returned to the festival under its new ownership noticed little difference – a few more seminars, perhaps, a few bigger names in the lecture halls, an earnest air of professionalism. But the Gutter Bar appeared entirely unchanged.
Counting the cost
Agencies spend thousands of dollars entering work for Cannes and then going along to see how it does. An article in Creative Review reported that in 2001, one agency spent US $500,000 entering awards (‘What’s Cannes worth?’, 1 July 2003). Occasionally, agency people suggest that the Effie Awards – a rival prize-giving event that judges campaigns on sales effectiveness rather than on creativity – is more relevant to the industry. But despite this occasional grouching, most advertising heavyweights defend creative awards.
‘Ideally you want to be top of the creative awards and top of the effectiveness awards,’ says WPP supremo Sir Martin Sorrell. ‘But I certainly don’t think the two are mutually exclusive.’
Phil Dusenberry, the BBDO creative legend who drove home the mantra ‘the work, the work, the work’ during his career at the agency, said: ‘Creative awards are your report card – they enable you to keep track of how you’re doing. But you can’t let them become your goal. The best reward is making the cash registers ring.’
But these days, big clients such as Procter & Gamble go to Cannes too. ‘Award shows are an important part of the advertising industry culture,’ a P&G spokeswoman told Advertising Age. ‘We are delighted to see our agency partners recognized for the work they do in industry forums.’ Marlena Peleo-Lazar, vice president and chief creative officer for McDonald’s USA, added, ‘Between the movies and luncheons that people think happen at Cannes, there is an ongoing dialogue about work… This really reminds you of the brilliance that does happen in the business’ (‘Are advertising creative awards really worth the cost?’, 15 June 2006).
Erik Vervroegen, the multi-award-winning international creative director at Publicis, believes that attitudes to the festival are changing. ‘In a world where millions of pieces of communication are screaming for attention, clients realize that creativity is the only thing that makes a difference. When you consider the amount of work the judges have to look at, they are in an even more extreme position than the public, because they are obliged to make a decision based on what they see. Any piece of creative work that emerges from the pile is obviously effective.’
He adds that an agency that wins awards has no problem attracting bright young creative talent. ‘If you’re not winning, you’re considered insipid.’
Kevin Roberts, worldwide chief of Saatchi & Saatchi
, would agree. ‘The people who complain about Cannes are the people who never win,’ he says. ‘Creative people generally need to be liked and recognized. In my view awards have nothing to do with clients or new business – they’re about inspiring your creative talent. At Saatchi, we’re only as good as our creative talent. So when Saatchi wins a lot of awards, guess what happens? Our creative people want to stay, and other creative people want to come and join us. We’re in the ideas business, ideas come from creative people, and creative people need to be motivated by recognition. Simple.’
Cilla Snowball, the boss of much-awarded London agency AMV BBDO, says, ‘It’s important for us to feel as though we’re punching above our weight in creative terms. But how do you measure creativity? Cannes is one of the ways of doing that… Awards are a measurement, a beacon, a stimulus, they give people a sense of achievement, and everybody wants to win one.’
And there’s no doubt that Cannes is incredibly influential. The creative reputation of not just an agency, but also an entire country can be boosted by a good run at Cannes. Such was the case in the mid-1990s, when Stockholm agency Paradiset DDB won a string of awards for its off-the-wall advertising for jeans brand Diesel, culminating in its client being named Advertiser of the Year in 1998. For a while, it seemed as though Sweden was the new hotbed of creativity. The spotlight has since moved on – although the Swedes still make pretty sharp advertising. Spain, Brazil and Thailand have all benefited from this halo effect at one stage or another.
So how do you win an award at Cannes? One of the criticisms levelled at the festival is that specific cultural references are unlikely to make it past the international juries: what may seem like a terrific joke in your domestic market will probably leave the rest of the world cold. Wordplay in any language other than English is clearly out. You need a big, crowd-pleasing visual idea that expresses what advertising people invariably call ‘a universal truth’.
Richard Bullock of production company Hungry Man advises: ‘Cannes is a good way of seeing new work and measuring yourself against your peers, but there’s no shortcut to winning. On a day-to-day basis, you focus on solving the problem you’ve been given. If you try and win an award, the chances are you won’t.’
19
New frontiers
‘The future is being invented in Beijing or Shanghai’
There have been promised lands before. In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, advertising agencies scrambled into Central and Eastern Europe at the behest of their impatient masters. General Electric, Colgate, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and RJ Reynolds were among the clients keen to exploit this virgin territory. The death of socialism brought into the world millions of potential customers – almost 40 million in Poland alone – some of whom had been clamouring for years for access to Western goods. Philip Morris and Gillette had been probing the region for more than a decade. McDonald’s opened its first branch in Hungary as early as 1989; so did Ikea. Playboy was equally keen on Hungary, and quickly signed a licensing deal for a local language edition. Cigarettes, scented soap, expensive toothpaste, cheap furniture and glossy sex: welcome to the free world.
But it was not easy going. In 1991, food was still being rationed in Moscow. Advertising executives from the West found themselves grappling with antediluvian telephone systems and sophisticated corruption. Gillette struggled to translate ‘The best a man can get’ into Czech. Agencies discovered that Eastern audiences did not respond well to one of the basic standbys of advertising: authority figures such as dentists and scientists explaining the benefits of fluoride or biological washing powder. Specially tailored advertising was required, but Western clients were uneasy about devoting large budgets to markets where they were unlikely to see big profits. The concept of branding was largely unknown and local companies tended to think in terms of one-off ads rather than long-term strategies.
‘There has been a lot of ad agency over-enthusiasm about Eastern Europe,’ a Young & Rubicam executive admitted to Marketing magazine. ‘Anyone going into the Soviet Union… needs a lot of patience and deep pockets… Russians tend to think that if a product needs advertising it’s either substandard or there’s an oversupply’ (‘Ignorance blunts ad firms’ forays in East’, 12 July 1990).
Years later, agencies were still struggling to get it right. The Wall Street Journal reported that ‘cultural gaffes’ were common and that adapted Western commercials showed ‘scenes and products irrelevant to the everyday lives of Central European consumers’. Even worse, there was a consumer backlash against expensive Western goods and nostalgia for defunct local brands (‘Ad agencies are stumbling in East Europe’, 10 May 1996).
One of the more promising markets was the Czech Republic. The aspic-preserved old town of Prague attracted so many tourists that an article in Adweek described it as ‘the ultimate theme park… a real Magic Kingdom’. It added: ‘And those millions in Western currencies pouring into the country can’t hurt, either.’ Finally, it seemed, the cash registers were beginning to ring. Local adman Jiri Kartena commented: ‘Around the time of the revolution, we went through the seventies. Now the eighties have begun. Everybody wants to be in business. Everybody wants to make money. Everything is fast, fast, fast’ (‘Let the 80s begin’, 23 May 1994).
Having been classed for more than a decade as ‘an emerging market’, at least half of Eastern and Central Europe has now gone ahead and emerged, although ad spend is only a quarter of that of the West. The Czech Republic and Hungary are considered mid-sized European markets. Russia, we’re told, is experiencing a genuine boom. ‘There are more Rolls-Royces on the streets of Moscow than there are in London,’ says Perry Valkenburg, European president of TBWA, who built the agency’s network in Eastern Europe. Agencies have set their sights on smaller markets like Romania, which still fit into the ‘emerging’ category. But even in Poland, salaries remain low, unemployment high and agencies continue to struggle. Despite the large population that made it look so promising, it has yet to live up to its potential.
Asian creativity
Thanks to cultural differences and the economic turmoil of the 1990s, the Western advertising networks have hardly enjoyed a smoother ride in Asia. Since 2000, however, their attitude to the region has remounted from a steady simmer to bubbling enthusiasm. China gets them excited the most, but the country is expected to tug smaller markets such as Vietnam and Indonesia along in its slipstream. Vietnam, certainly, has a growing economy and clutches of young, brand-hungry young consumers in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. Mature markets such as Japan and South Korea are recovering from their economic travails. India is the world’s largest democracy, with a growing middle class spurred by technology expertise.
The big agencies have been in Asia for many years now. J Walter Thompson opened an office in India in 1920 – a fact that is likely to be a source of pride for Sir Martin Sorrell, the boss of its parent company WPP and a confirmed Asia enthusiast. McCann-Erickson opened an office in Tokyo in 1960. Other networks moved into the region in the seventies and eighties.
One old Asia hand is Neil French, the former WPP ‘creative godfather’ who is often credited with having brought the creative revolution to the Far East in the 1980s. French began his advertising career in Birmingham (which he describes as ‘a splendid place to come from’) before moving to London in the late 1970s. In 1983 he arrived in Singapore as a creative director of Ogilvy & Mather. After spells at Batey Advertising and the Ball Partnership, he rejoined O&M as regional creative director. He was eventually made worldwide creative chief of the WPP group, but left in 2005 after making controversial remarks at a conference about women in the advertising industry, which caused a stir in the trade press. (He suggested in blunt terms that their maternal instincts tended to get in the way of their careers.)
Recalling his arrival in Singapore, French says the market was unsophisticated – almost a blank canvas for somebody steeped in the creative ambience of 1970s London. ‘There was no distinct styl
e when I rocked up. All I had to do was mimic my betters in London, and bingo. After a year or so, I realized that if they’d buy rip-offs, they might buy something a bit original.’
One of the agencies on French’s CV had a considerable impact on the advertising output of South-East Asia. The Ball Partnership was established by Michael Ball in 1986 and had no qualms about shaking up the scene. ‘Don’t you wish your ads stood out like Ball’s?’ read one of its promotional posters. At the time, said Ball, ‘Singapore had the ugliest advertising outside Africa. It was hideous, dominated by reversed type in which the ink invariably ran into the letters, making them barely visible’ (‘The world’s hottest shops’, Campaign, 22 January 1993). Whether it was working for big overseas clients like Mitsubishi or small local firms like the Yet Kon chop shop, the agency injected drama and quirkiness into Singapore advertising.
Risky ads didn’t always go down well with authorities, however. The Singapore government cracked down on posters that it felt introduced inappropriate Western sentiments to its citizens: images of youthful rebellion were received particularly badly. But this was the natural by-product of cultural colonialism. Western agencies in Asia employed large numbers of expatriates, and few of them were as talented as French. Fewer still had a detailed understanding of the cultures they were attempting to infiltrate. But that, too, began to change with the turn of the millennium. As the old guard drifted back to senior roles in London and New York, young local executives were placed in top slots. And in 2004, Cannes finally got its first Asian jury president in the form of Piyush Pandey, head of Ogilvy & Mather India.