Cannes: OTT nationalism and second-hand ads

This year’s Cannes Lions was characterised by a ridiculous obsession with nationalism, writes Dominic Mills – and what’s with the weird case of the second-hand winner from last year being hawked around the world to other clients?

For a couple of reasons (travelling abroad, no online access), I’m writing this column well ahead of deadline. That means I can’t give Cannes the attention I would like. But it doesn’t stop me making a few observations.

The first is the ridiculous obsession with nationalism. You can see this in the headlines of the various trade media. “Is Australia the new centre of world creativity?” (this off the back of a single, dominant, piece of work last year. Answer: no); “UK only wins two gongs in radio”; “China overtakes India in Lions table/India bags 27 gongs”; and so on.

Of course this is encouraged by the Cannes organisers, presumably because it helps drive more entries and sell more tickets, but a more-than-happy-to-oblige trade press pours fuel on the flames in search of a cheap headline, click bait or to pander to their readerships.

But it’s increasingly ridiculous. Advertising is a global business. You have Swedish and Brazilian creatives working from London; Thai and Filipino creatives in New York; Argentines in Sao Paolo.

Work for a French or German-owned multinational client may be created by the Hamburg arm of a French-owned agency network and is destined to appear in Africa. The approval process may take in individuals based in Paris, Stuttgart, Cape Town and somewhere in the ether.

If it wins, does this make it a German ad?

But is any of this taken into account when the faux nationalism – about as meaningful in competitive terms as Celebrity MasterChef – gets going on the Croisette? Absolutely not.

I’m all for league tables, and the agency, network and holding company tables add greatly to the spectator enjoyment of the festival. But the one I’d most like to see is one that measures clients by the number of prizes they win.

Cannes makes a stab at this in the form of its Creative Marketer of the Year award – this year given to McDonald’s – based on a sustained track record of creativity and Cannes Lions across categories and over time. You can read a fascinating interview with Cannes CEO Phillip Thomas on how this is decided here.

Next up we have category blurring. To a certain extent this is inevitable, given the way digitisation breaks down once-rigid demarcation lines. OgilvyOne’s ‘Magic of Flying‘ deservedly won gold in the poster category. But how, other than through the most literal interpretation of the word ‘direct’, does it also win the grand prix in the direct category?

Similarly, its close competitor in the direct category, a Dentsu ad for Honda based on a sound and light show that recreates Ayrton Senna’s record-breaking lap, is really a TV commercial (and it will probably win there too, and who knows how many other categories).

In a sense, everything is direct, which makes a nonsense of the category.

Juries can only judge what’s in front of them, but perhaps the Cannes organisers might take a tougher line on multi-category entries. And then again, perhaps, pigs might fly.

And last, we have the strange case of the second-hand, one-careful-owner, Cannes winner from last year being hawked around the world to other clients.

My thanks go to the website Globe and Mail for news that Canadian insurer Empire Life has ‘bought’ last year’s big winner at Cannes, ‘Dumb Ways to Die‘, and is now using it to sell, you guessed it, life insurance.

You may remember the original, a charming animated public safety film for Melbourne’s Metro Trains, complete with a catchy nu-folk style ditty. It spread wildly across the globe and has been seen approximately 80 million times.

I can just about understand why Metro Trains might want to sell its ad: it’s a local train company and is no doubt under pressure to make money where it can. But why would Empire want to buy it? And if you were Empire’s agency, how would you feel?

It’s a fair guess that some of those viewers will have been Canadian, so they’re likely to be confused or unimpressed.

Worse than that, it seems an especially tasteless gambit to suggest that dying without life insurance is the dumbest thing of all. So it’s not just stupid, it’s bad too.

At least 20 years ago, when I was editing Campaign, I came across a business trying to create a market for second-hand ads. Pre-digital, pre-YouTube – an era when Hollywood stars would happily film commercials for Suntory whisky in Japan (think Bill Murray in Lost in Translation) in the knowledge their adoring fans would never see it – it might just have worked.

But the agencies hated it so much they effectively killed it, and clients didn’t sign up for it because no marketing director with an ounce of self-pride would countenance the lack originality.

And in this day and age when any ad can be seen by anybody anywhere, and websites like this slavishly track copycat advertising, it doesn’t stack up.

Of course Cannes has absolutely no ability to stop this kind of thing. But no doubt eBay is seeing whether there’s a whole new market in second-hand TV commercials.

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