Tony Bradbourne’s 2011 Cannes Diary – Day Two from the Cannes Direct jury room
Tony Bradbourne, executive creative director of Special Group, Auckland, is representing New Zealand on the Direct jury. Bradbourne just finished day two 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…
Cannes is a nice place – sunny, beaches, families swimming, little dogs, really, really tanned old people walking around smiling – so it’s feels a little bit wrong to be mean here.
But that’s what we’ve spent the last two days doing – basically saying ‘no’ a lot. Phillip Thomas the Cannes CEO said at the opening dinner that only 8% of all entries are shortlisted, about .5% get gold. So with over 29,000 odd entries this year that means a lot of no’s.
Each day we have to get through about 140 entries, mainly hype vids. It’s a lot per day. Top hype vid soundtracks so far this year? The Strokes, MIA, Arcade Fire, Florence and the Machine, Phoenix & Vanilla Ice.
Each day we’re split into a different mini jury of 5. And after 3 days we will have the shortlist. I guess that is when the conversations and debates will change from what is ‘not so good’ to what is ‘brilliant’.
On the first day Jury head Alexander Schill gave us an engraved gold-plated bullet to remind us about what we are looking for – the best ideas that directly hit the hearts of our consumers. I look forward to explaining that to customs officers in France, London, L.A. and NZ…