BMF’s Chris Kay & Shane Bradnick: Cannes Day One from a suit and a creative point of view

BMF managing partner Chris Kay and ECD Shane Bradnick are in Cannes and report exclusively for CB.

It’s that time of year again – where untanned ad folk switch black t-shirts for white linen blouses, break out the shorts and get stuck into a week of drinking Rose´ and talking advertising.

Arriving in Cannes on a Monday is like arriving badly dressed at United Nations. It’s the day when all the long distance countries roll into town. Tired looking delegates queue for their passes and then push themselves onto the Gutter bar for one drink to knock them out before they try and get over the jet-lag.

Having come via a week in the UK I smugly feel totally fine whereas my erstwhile colleague Mr Bradnick is a little more disheveled.   Its because of this, and the fact it takes less time to write one blog versus two, that we thought we would write a combined account man/creative perspective on all things happening in the south of france. 

So here goes.

Having walked around the work a bit this morning, we thought we’d start the week with a bit of a perspective on that old school of mediums, TV, and some thoughts on the runners and riders for the shiny Film Lion Grand Prix.

As the ‘creative’, it’s nice to see some real love and craft given to story telling in some the possible contenders. Both Doritos ‘Dip Desperado’ and Sony’s ‘Michael, feel like multi character full-length features squeezed into a couple of minutes. And its amazing how in ESPN’s ‘Shake on It’ that a simple series of handshakes can tell us so much about the relationship between men when sport is involved.

Being a suit, unlike Mr Bradnick’s love of the longer artistic pieces, I am clearly more into the punchier ‘gag’ driven films and how the team got some of these past the client. So I am a big fan of the BGH ‘Dads in briefs’, the Carlsberg ‘bikers’ work, the ‘Taxi’, Sunshine Sakae, and respect the ‘Walk of shame’ as a great title for an ad.

And both of us, being soppy dads, quite like the ‘Dear Sophie’ ad for Google Chrome.

But we both agree if we had to bet our cocktails (excuse the dodgy accompanying picture) on potential winners it will probably be a fight out between the ‘back to the start’ Chipotle piece of genius and the perfect ‘Bear’ for Canal +.