Dylan Harrison’s 2011 Cannes Diary – Day Three from the Cannes Promo and Activation jury room
Dylan Harrison, executive creative director of DDB Sydney, is representing Australia on the Promo & Activation jury. Harrison has just finished day three of judging and writes exclusively for Campaign Brief. Other Aussie and Kiwi jurors will be contributing exclusively to the CB Blog over the next 10 days, so make sure you check in daily, hourly, every minute…
Day three kicked off with a wonderful integrated entry from our Argentinian judge who was stranded by the Chilean ash cloud. He traversed the globe via planes, trains and automobiles for the past three days, arriving this morning in true promo and activation jury form with a short video documenting his mission to get here. Warren can take the glory in posting the link to his film, but all credit must go to my fellow juror and his commitment to the cause. It would have been all to easy to say ‘I cant make it’. It reminds me of what an honour it is to judge that someone would be so stubborn so as not to miss the opportunity of a lifetime.
So what has he walked into? I’ve always observed a rough rule of tens in advertising. You want a portfolio? Write ten campaigns. Ten good campaigns? You’ll need to write a hundred and ten percent will be useable. You need three ads per campaign? Write at least thirty for your CD and ten percent of that should deliver what you’re after. Same goes for judging. Over 2000 entries, feels like we’ll be discussing about 200 come tomorrow when we tackle the shortlist.
Some more random observations from round three on what’s doing well and not so well:
DDB founder Bill Bernbach said: ‘if you can’t outspend them, out think them. Same appears true here. Time and time again, offering free stuff or cash prizes as incentive is no match for meaningful experiences imagined for a specific audience. Likewise, if it’s a low budget campaign, don’t say part of the business problem is ‘you had next to zero budget’. All you’re saying is you’d prefer to do TV but can’t afford to, rather than you had a great ida and it offered impressive ROI.
Reverse engineered insights from a creative execution stick out like the proverbial pair on a dog. Some corkers from today include: ‘people who drink don’t feel 100% in the morning’… ‘kids were growing tired of boring alcohol’… and ‘housewives preferred their china unchipped’.
The irony of judging a category like this, where the best ideas should use the opportunities afforded by new media, it still comes down to a film. The importance of being able to tell a complex tale with moving pictures, to simplify and emotionally engage in a couple of minutes, is paramount. It all depends on authoring an idea which has an interesting story to tell.
Yes it has to be a deeper and longer idea than traditional TV, but if you’re formulaic, ‘amazing results’ and ‘the blogs went wild’ soon starts to sound like ‘whiter teeth’ and ‘cleaner laundry’. Basically, you still need to be able to make a good ad, for your ad.