Damian’s Cannes Diary – part three

Damian Royce, creative director of Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, isrepresenting Australia on the Cyber jury and writes exclusively forCampaign Brief, the only Australian trade press in Cannes this year.Other Aussie and Kiwi jurors will be contributing exclusively to the CBBlog during the week, so make sure you check in daily, hourly,every minute…

After 4 days worth of connecting to facebook groups and uploading my face to 726 websites (or is that 736…I’ve lost count), the first round of judging is complete. I have now seen everything that has been shortlisted.

Today the mood of the room was somewhat more friendly and relaxedcompared to the first couple of days, as the jury has now got to knoweach other better. Which is good, because it will enable everyone to bea bit more open once we start raising our hands to allocate metal.

The biggest surprise for me today was from the mobile category. Thisarea has well and truly exploded. Mobile is officially ‘now’ and nolonger ‘the future’, mainly thanks to the saturation level of theiPhone. I don’t think it will be too long before they reintroducemobile as a separate Lion category. Time will tell…

Overall, we’ve seen A LOT of ideas that feature mass crowd gathering,dancing in public, death-defying stunts, uploading your face intoaction movies, augmented reality, solving unsolved mysteries,controlling real cars using your mobile phone…and parkour.

Today we review the short list, knock out anything we feel isn’treally part of the set standard and then lock it all down ready forjudging metal…