Cannes Lions 60th Anniversary: A Roaring Success

Named after the winged Lion of Venice, an iconic sculpture in a city of art, it’s fitting that the Lions is now named the International  Festival of Creativity – not advertising –and champions all that inspires, from film craft to apps. Joe Lancaster examines the event’s growth from around 200 admen admiring an Italian toothpaste ad, to a global business behemoth that will, this year, welcome 12,000 delegates to its 60th birthday

They couldn’t have known what they’d started. It was September 1954 when 217 delegates applauded the first ever International Advertising Film Festival Grand Prix winner, a charming animated film produced by Italy’s Ferry Mayer for Cholorodont toothpaste, titled Il Circo. The event was set up by a group of cinema screen advertising contractors belonging to the Screen Advertising World Association (SAWA), who felt cinema advertising deserved the recognition that the Cannes Film Festival gave to features. Il Circo had beaten 186 other entries from 14 countries and was awarded the Lion trophy, inspired by the Lion of Piazza San Marco in Venice, where the event was held.

Following one year in Monte Carlo, the festival alternated between Venice and Cannes until it settled in the latter in 1984 and during those first thirty years the only category added was TV (not counting sub categories divided by length etc), which was merged with cinema in ’83 to make Film. Cannes Lions was very much a festival of film until shrewd French businessman, Roger Hatchuel, saw an opportunity and subsequently took over from SAWA in 1987. As a reaction to the industry crisis sparked by the Gulf War, he revolutionised the festival by creating a programme of learning and gradually adding more categories, beginning in ’92 with Press & Outdoor.

‘Get your ass into the Palais and learn something…’

Despite Hatchuel’s forward thinking, his ideas for development didn’t take off straight away and in the late 90s the awards were still the primary focus for most delegates. “There are still people [at Cannes Lions] who can remember the seminar rooms being so empty that Roger actually said to the staff, ‘you’ve got to get down there to make it look fuller’,” says current CEO Philip Thomas. “It’s slightly hard to believe when we have two and a half thousand people or more watching each seminar [in recent years].”

Thomas is employed by Top Right Group, formerly known as EMAP, which acknowledged Hatchuel’s stellar work by acquiring the festival in 2004 for a reported £52m. At this time the second revolution began and chairman Terry Savage, who has been attending for 27 years and began working for the festival as CEO in 2003, puts this down to two key factors: “The emergence of Cannes as a massive centre of learning… In 2003 there were just a few seminars. This ramped up to 35 in 2004,” and “the discovery of Cannes by the clients, which also happened in 2004.”

Since then the festival’s extra-awards activities have grown every year, as has the number of attendees from outside the usual agency/production sphere, with 25 per cent of delegates now from client, media, PR, design, or other alternative fields. This led to the rebranding of the festival in 2011 to Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, to encompass the event’s changing purpose. “As more people came to the festival, whether they were media, PR, or digital, they were saying to us [the word] advertising is limited because if you’re doing a PR campaign or an app, it’s not advertising,” says Thomas. “So we were thinking, ‘what we could call ourselves? Festival of branding, festival of marketing?’ and we thought no, actually what we are about is creativity, so we rebranded it.”

It hasn’t been plain sailing for Cannes in recent years though and 2009’s financial crisis tested the festival’s relevance like nothing before. Delegate numbers dropped by 40 per cent to 6,000, but Thomas believes that the tough year helped make Cannes stronger. “The people who did go were clearly under instructions from their company; ‘if you are going to Cannes, get your ass into that Palais and learn something because we want to learn something when you get back’,” remembers the CEO. Despite the low attendances, the number of seminar admissions remained roughly level from 2008 and the desire of delegates to learn from Cannes has continued to grow, with a record 58,000 seminar admissions achieved last year.

Young Lion kings in the making

Although the seminar programme at Cannes is unparalleled, learning at the festival isn’t limited to sitting in a room and listening to people talk. The opportunities on offer for people who want to break into the industry are incredible. This year seven academies will train several hundred hungry youngsters who will hope to gain wisdom from expert mentors. “These are 18-year-old kids and we can say to David Droga, John Hegarty and Jeff Goodby, ‘can you swing by for half an hour to talk to these kids?’. It’s just totally unique,” gushes Thomas.

Then there’s the coveted Young Lions (formerly Young Creatives) title to compete for, which itself is as hard as nails to even qualify for, probably due to the tendency for top agencies to hand out jobs to impressive candidates. Last year, 500 teams from Japan alone battled to represent their country in the competition. “The Young Lions competition is a huge boost of confidence that young talents need to grow into the new creative leaders of our industry,” says Icaro Doria, ECD at Wieden+Kennedy São Paulo, who won bronze in the Press competition in 2005 (and incidentally, a gold in the Press Lions the same year). “It was the first moment where I was exposed to Cannes, so the exchange of points of view and the plurality of the event made me want to get to know the world and [from then on] always work surrounded by diverse people from all parts of the globe.”

Like many past Young Lions winners, this year Doria will return to Cannes to help train the next generation of creatives and is due to speak in a seminar titled ‘Foreigner: No Boundaries For Creativity’. Others who have achieved great things in the industry since their Young Lions successes include Aris Theophilakis, CEO/chief creative at Futatsu, who won gold in the first ever Young Creatives competition in 1995; Luiz Sanches, CD at AlmapBBDO, who won bronze that year and has since won over 70 Lions plus a Press Grand Prix; as well as Ashish Pathak, Dejan Rasic and Guga Ketzer, who became ECD at Brazilian agency Loducca at the age of 29 and is now partner and VP of creation. “It changed my life. It blew my mind,” he told shots recently. “I came back fired up. In South Brazil you always said, ‘I want to do the work that the guys in São Paulo are doing,’ but when I went to Cannes I said, ‘I want to do the work that those guys from [around] the world are doing’.” 

As well as emerging talent, Cannes is also expected by ad folk to recognise emerging industry trends and adapt accordingly. But how does the festival decide when the time is right to introduce a new category? Thomas explains how the Mobile category, which launched last year, came about: “For at least four years people were saying we should have a mobile category but one year I did an analysis and only 62 entries would have been eligible. That told me we weren’t ready, but it gets to a stage where the industry is saying, ‘listen, we’re doing so much work on mobile, it’s the future, it’s not even the future, it’s the present and you are not reflecting what we are doing’. So we have to try and get the timing right; we don’t want to be too early because then there’s 60 entries and that’s pathetic, but we certainly don’t want to be too late.”

Thomas admits that adding more categories makes the festival harder to manage: “It makes it more and more unwieldy, we need to constantly look at ways that we can adapt and change it and make sure it isn’t getting too unwieldy.” However he is quick to remind people why certain categories are still relevant. “Some hardcore people say, ‘Why have you got print? Print is dead’. One of our challenges is we’re completely global so we have entries from 90 countries and if you’re in a digital agency in New York, you might think print is dead. But actually if you’re in India, or Brazil or China, print is a massive part of what you do, a huge part of the business. We can’t look at it from a cutting edge point of view, we need to look at it from a holistic, global point of view.”

Scam ads and entry fees: a Cannes of worms?

This year the festival will introduce the Innovation Lions, which aim to honour the technology that allows people to be creative, from apps to hardware and everything in between. “If you could criticise Cannes in the last few years for anything it might be that technology hasn’t been at the heart of the festival,” admits Thomas. “Entrepreneurs, start-ups, tech companies etc. maybe haven’t been as visible as they should be when you consider how important technology is to the business.”

Of course more categories means more money and this year entry prices ranged from €435 for Press and Outdoor, to €1,275 for Titanium and Integrated. WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last, person to question the cost of entries when he spoke about the festival in 2009. He admitted a year later though that WPP was “very, very focused on Cannes” and wanted to be “the leader in terms of awards at Cannes.” His company won the first Holding Company of the Year prize in 2011.

“Particularly with the addition of categories, some people think, ‘oh that’s just another way to make more money’, but the honest truth is, if we hadn’t introduced Mobile or Branded Entertainment we would look increasingly irrelevant,” says Thomas in the festival’s defence. “Being as humble as I can be, the reason [the festival] is really good is because we’re a business. You can put on an event like this as a non-profit organisation or as an association or something like that and it wouldn’t be as good because actually businesses tend to do things very, very well, because they kind of have to.”

However, Steve Davies, chief executive of the APA, believes the cost of attending the festival is prohibitive for production companies. “Both entries and the delegate pass are expensive. Also if production companies’ main focus is meeting agencies they work with, or would like to work with, they will not be able to attend enough sessions to get value for money out of the pass.” He believes that in general the festival is too agency focused: “Production companies generally feel marginalised. They have to fight for recognition and feel there is more focus on agencies and clients. Bringing in Film Craft was, I think, designed to involve production companies more but it has become mainly an agency thing too, in terms of entries.”

Davies would like to see the festival embrace the fringe elements of Cannes, such as the CFP-E events, in order to incorporate the production scene more. “I think the existence of the fringe, like the Edinburgh Fringe, can add to the official Cannes Lions by bringing even more people to Cannes, creating a buzz and making sure production companies are there.”

Another topic that always raises eyebrows on the Croisette is scam ads and almost every year brings controversy surrounding ineligible work being entered or, worse, winning awards that then have to be rescinded by the festival. Does Cannes have a responsibility to police entries or is it down to the entrants to be honest? “Without a doubt we have a responsibility and we do our best if we think it is occurring to stop it,” says Savage. “But with 34,000 entries [last year] I think people focus too much on the small amount of bogus work and [not] the massive amount of genuine work. That is why it is ultimately the responsibility of the entrant companies to eliminate it, because it draws attention away from so much brilliant and legitimate work.”

In June this year it is expected that a record 12,000 people will attend Cannes Lions and that entries will top last year’s peak of 34,301. There’s clearly no sign of things slowing down. But in a time when the success of advertising can often be measured by likes, re-tweets and shares, is the festival still important? “Cannes is incredibly important. It’s the time of year when you look at how other people are dealing with the same challenges you are and it’s incredibly inspiring to look at great creative answers to some of the same questions you’re faced with every day,” says Wieden+Kennedy’s Doria.

A diversification of the Croisette’s eco system

Going forward, Thomas believes that more diverse people and companies will be attracted to the festival, with Hollywood studios, TV networks and web companies, such as Spotify, widening the “eco system”. However, he believes that, “the heart of it will always stay the same, which is creativity and how that can add value to your business,” and he’s sure that advertising’s creative thinkers will lead the way: “We’re about reflecting the industry, not leading it.”