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Being asked to sit on a Cannes jury is international recognition

second only to winning one of the much-coveted lions themselves.

Although there are now four juries - film, print, media and cyber - it

is still a rare honour.

The media competition was in its inaugural year and the cyber jury was

only in its second. However, the print and, in particular, the film

competitions are well established (this was the 46th festival), so there

is a wealth of previous juries’ experience to draw on, for better or for

worse.

Jurors arrive in Cannes aware that they will be imprisoned in a darkened

room while the rest of the world’s advertising industry swans around the

sun-drenched Croisette. They may also have been led to believe that they

will have to spend much of their time fending off the national or

regional block-voting that used to blight the festival.

This year, the festival organisers increased the pressures on certain

jurors by pointing out that this was the last festival of the

millennium, and also (somewhat embarrassingly) highlighting the number

of women jurors - did they want a medal for making a quarter of the film

jury female?

So, what’s the truth about judging the ad world’s most significant

competition?

Is it worthy of the name? Is the process fair and uninfluenced by the

organisers’ desire to see as many awards go to as many different

countries as possible? How powerful is the jury chairman?

±±¾©Èü³µpk10, which last year won a cyber lion and only missed out by a

fingernail this year, asked this year’s British jurors what they thought

of their experiences. (Apologies to the Media Lions’ president, Paul

Woolmington, and the print juror, Richard Foster - we just couldn’t fit

you all in!)

NEW MEDIA

Marcus Vinton was the UK juror for the Cannes Cyber Lions. He is the

creative director, head of interactive communications, at Ogilvy &

Mather

If I were given another opportunity to be a juror at the Cyber Lions, I

would certainly do it again. The judging process itself is incredibly

intense because you have to give it your full attention and there is

masses of work to judge. When you have to sustain that level of

concentration over a four-day period, it’s very hard work.

Because the general standard of entries from last year was pretty high,

I knew that there would be more entries this year, an even higher

standard and more evenly balanced categories. However, I should add that

there are always great pieces of work that slip through the net, and

there was an awareness of other campaigns that hadn’t been entered but

should have.

What was fantastic about the work this year was the attention to

ideas.

So often sites tend to be technically driven, but the better a site, the

more invisible the technology. A lot of work we saw contained great

ideas - whether it was an extension of a brand campaign or whether it

stood as work in its own right. I tend to judge sites in the same way

that I would judge conventional advertising - if a piece of work didn’t

grab me from the start, it was not good enough.

In terms of the standard of entries, the Netherlands, which has

historically been way ahead in terms of design and programming, did not

have a brilliant show this year. The overall standard of the British

work was not particularly strong either, which was a shame, but that was

partly because work that should have been put forward hadn’t. The IBM

work from Ogilvy Interactive Worldwide (New York), which was awarded a

Grand Prix, wasn’t just good work, it made the consumer completely

reassess the medium.

I thought it a shame that in certain categories - such as event

promotions and corporate sponsorship - there were no winners. Although

the work submitted was good, it just didn’t change the game.

There was a lot of strong debate among the jurors. The Americans have a

very clear mindset on how they think things should work. The jury was

incredibly young and, while there are a number of veteran advertising

gurus roaming around Cannes, there were four cyber-made millionaires out

of a jury of 12.

Lots of new-media awards around the world are digital sideshows and a

token gesture. I think these are the only awards that really take new

media seriously. I hope we can pioneer awards schemes in the UK which

can be of the same standard as the Cannes Cyber Lions.

MEDIA

Graham Bednash was a member of the Media Lions jury. He is the managing

partner of Michaelides & Bednash

The media jury was very clear from the outset about what it was looking

for. I thought there’d be some polarity between countries about great

media thinking, particularly because this was the first year for media

at Cannes.

But, after a lot of debate, we decided unanimously that we wanted to

raise the bar on media ideas and reward media thinking that was ahead of

the game and illustrated the future of media. We were looking for great

examples of where media has driven the communications idea. I was not

aware of any partisan feeling and, being the first event of this kind,

we had no baggage.

I would like to be a judge again. It was a very sobering experience.

I’ve learned a lot from other people and how they approach media in

their countries. There’s a sense of self-importance in the UK about the

quality of our media, but the glimmers of brilliance from other parts of

the world contrast with what we are doing. We spent three-and-a-half

days judging - from 8.30 am to 6.30 pm with just an hour for lunch.

The work for Sony PlayStation, which took the Grand Prix, and Kodak’s

work from India were fantastic. You experienced the brand through the

medium and it made you feel differently about the brand, which is also

what great advertising does. PlayStation got the most votes on the jury

because the campaign was one that could be replicated anywhere in the

world.

But there was a huge amount of mediocrity. Around 5 per cent of the work

was stunning, and the rest was ordinary in terms of media thinking.

There were lots of submissions from the large media networks such as

StarCom and the Media Edge. It would be good for smaller media hotshops

to get more involved with the event.

Next year, the Media Lions should use a video format for entries rather

than having to wade through long written entries, which suffered from of

lack of clarity and salesmanship. It was typical of a media agency to

slip in great ideas, which would be buried on page three.

There wasn’t that much talk about the Cannes Media Lions in the UK.

Other countries got behind it in a bigger way. There may be some British

arrogance about where we are in terms of media creativity and so there’s

a feeling among media agencies that they don’t have to prove

anything.

FILM

The UK film jurors were Rosie Arnold, an art director at Bartle Bogle

Hegarty, and Richard Flintham, the creative director of Fallon

McElligott, London

We expected being on the jury to be gruelling - and it was. We expected

it to be riven with nationalism - and it wasn’t. So I guess you could

say we were pleasantly surprised.

Everyone turned out to be extremely respectful of everybody’s national

characteristics - even to the detriment of their own country.

The Brazilian juror, for example, acknowledged that men in his country

have too much testosterone. The Argentinian stood up and announced:

’This film is from my country and it shouldn’t win the Grand Prix.’ We

all applauded him.

Everyone’s been going on about there being five women on the jury, but

it’s not an issue. Everyone’s on it because it’s good. As a group, we

were keen that everyone should respect our decisions - especially as it

was the last festival of this millennium.

About the only difference one could speak of was that the Latins and the

Anglo-Saxons divided when it came to some of the more style-led ads.

That’s how, for instance, the Thai mermaid epic - among others - sneaked

in.

But by and large (and because many ads are dubbed into English) it was

good we didn’t know which countries the ads came from. Although it’s

true - sometimes you just don’t understand an ad from another

country.

For example, it really is a different world in Japan, where their ads

are mostly 15-seconds long. Their work just doesn’t travel, on the

whole.

In the end it came down to outpost.com and The Independent.

And we all felt a responsibility: we were sending a message out about

the direction in which creative work is going, and couldn’t bear to have

another year of violence.

outpost.com is outrageous but it’s a quick hit. It’s just a shock

tactic.

The Independent was outstanding. It’s brave for a client to say: ’Don’t

buy it and don’t read it.’ It could have run in every country. In a few

years’ time, we will both be jealous that we didn’t do that ad.

What we didn’t see was work we’d be amazed by. The other surprise was to

be with people that you’d have thought you’d really clash with and

finding that they all just want great ideas.

We don’t really go looking for trends, but you do see the same thing

crop up. Apart from the violence, we’ve probably seen the end of the

hand-held wobbly camera technique.

We were really depressed by the crap we saw in the first few days,

especially as there was no discussion then.

When there was discussion, we were there until midnight and there was a

lot of humour - even if the organisers did run out of food.