Shane Bradnick’s Cannes Diary: Radio Wrap

Shane Bradnick, executive creative director, DDB NZ is New Zealand’s representative on the Cannes Radio Lions jury. Bradnick, along with most of the Australian and NZ jurors, is reporting exclusively for CB.

All done with judging and the prizes have been handed out. It’s time to join the other lanyard wearing, Google wristband sporting people out and about looking for alternate places to drink Rose´. I’m told the same 70€ bottle at the Carlton, goes for 9€ in the supermarkets. Go figure.

Judging the Radio category was really eye opening. The truth is, there just wasn’t a lot of amazing work. We only handed out 9 Gold Lions, with 2 campaigns getting two each, so in reality there were only 5 bits of work we thought worthy of gold.

The jury was a great bunch of people, but it did feel more like a craft jury at times. Less than half were from agencies with the rest being from the production side of things and a lot of conversations were about the technical and production realities of making radio rather than about the ideas. At one point there was a 10-minute debate on whether or not Queen licence their music, and then when it all was done everyone agreed that the ad wasn’t that good anyway.

It was unanimous about the Lucozade spots winning the Grand Prix. They were well written, well made and well funny. Do they stack up with previous years Grand Prix?  I think so, but I’ll let you decide for yourself.

Winners: canneslions.com/2014/radio/.

It was still an amazing experience, with great people and some really good work. And if I could offer any advice from the experience, it would be to put shitload more effort into your radio; it’s a category there for the taking. That and to read Andy Flemmings Cannes diary, it’s way funnier than this one.