John Mescall’s Cannes Diary: Day One and Two

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John Mescall, ECD of McCann Australia, is one Australia’s representatives on the Cannes Lions Promo+Activation jury. Mescall, along with most of the Australian and NZ jurors, is reporting exclusively for CB.

Before you judge you have to get here, and in my case getting here involved sharing a plane from London to Nice with Lionel Ritchie and his surprisingly modest entourage. 

Here’s a tip: if you ever want to earn some money on the side as a drug mule into France, just make sure that Lionel Ritchie is in the immigration queue next to you. The customs guys will be so busy making eyes at the relatively famous celebrity that they won’t even look at you when they stamp your passport. I could’ve had 50 kilo’s of heroin strapped to the outside of my body and customs wouldn’t have noticed.

Right, the judging. It’s a huge category with well over 3000 entries, so during the shortlist stages we only see a few categories each. Our group kicked off the day with Guerilla. Two things about guerilla: firstly, it seems to be the home of ‘maximum effort for minimum return’. A massive agency effort for a beer coaster that 11 people will see… sure, ok. Of course, there’s the odd gem to keep you interested. 

Second thing about guerilla: probably more than half the entries were from Brazil. If you were ever in Sao Paulo in the last six months, the whole place probably felt like one giant trade fair there was so much promotional activity seemingly going on.

In charity, it’s all about fresh drinking water and Africans this year. But some really lovely stuff in this category (as there should be). It was a joy to judge Publications and Media; as newspapers and magazines struggle to maintain relevance in a digital world, they are finding some pretty amazing ways to reinvent themselves. Some really lovely stuff.

We probably have the most open category, in that there are so many different interpretations of what Promo+Activation actually is… and the entries vary wildly in format from one to the next. Over the next few days when we start discussing as a group, we’ll all have a much better idea of how the category is shaping up this year. Right now it’s about culling the herd.

Here’s a pic of Levi Slavin (above left) and myself, looking all chipper and bright-eyed right before judging started. We weren’t so chipper 12 hours later, as we were wrapping up Day 1. 

But later that night we sat on the Carlton Terrace (before all the bigwigs get in, you can actually get a seat there) reading D&AD’s twitter feed. We were both lucky enough to score Pencils, so we drank to our good fortune while watching the town gear itself up for the onslaught of ad-people. 

It was a very good night to be in advertising.