Dave King’s Cannes Diary: Day One

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IMG_1093.jpgDave King (near left), ECD, Innocean Worldwide is Australia’s representative on the Direct Lions jury. King, along with most of the Australian and NZ jurors, is reporting exclusively for CB.

Day 0. As a Kiwi representing Australia in Direct, I’m interested in the fortunes of both countries. So here’s what I’ve seen from NZ and Australia so far.

None of the Australasian judges got too silly at the welcome drinks last night. One started using the word ‘moist’ a lot as the night wore on. She’s promised ‘this will be the theme of her blog on CB this week. We’ll see.

Day 1. We pre-judged before Cannes and cut the work down from 3070 pieces to around 2,000 to be judged this week. Some pieces I thought weren’t too good still made it through to judging today. Others looked as impressive as I remembered.

IMG_1086.jpgThis morning the work was really good, with a few pieces from Australasia standing up very well. This afternoon was a totally different story. This category wasn’t pre-judged and it showed. Some work and some case videos were really poor. For a while we were wondering whether anything would make it to even shortlist, but a couple of pieces finally stuck their hands up. Including, I think, some stuff from our region.

It’s way too early to tell what will be shortlisted, but my impression is that the Australian and New Zealand work is generally in the top tier of work we’ve seen so far. Today was a lot of fun. Here’s hoping for the same tmrw.

(Picture 1: King and his old M&C Saatchi buddy Olivier Girard on the direct panel; Picture 2: Team snap)