Mark Harrick’s 2011 Cannes Diary – How the Cannes Film Lions Grand Prix was decided
Mark Harricks, executive creative director at JWT Sydney, sat on this year’s Cannes Lions Film jury. Here Harricks sums up the big decision making day exclusively for Campaign Brief.
I’ve just awoken from my coma so I thought I should put some final thoughts down on judging the Film Category before I relapse.
It’s quite a clever system they have for judging this much work. Once we had a shortlist, we revoted on all the work anonymously using our handsets. 1 to 3 being finalist, 4 to 6 possible metal and 7 to 9 definite metal. The outcome was to established an average score for each piece that was then ranked with all other pieces in it’s category. For the next round the room layout was changed to a “United Nations” type seating arrangement, to encourage discussion before judging. Judging was also done by show of hands. From this point we started looking at the work from the bottom of the ranking to establish the finalists cutoff point. When we got to the four or five pieces either side of the cutoff point things moved around quite a lot depending on the discussions.
At the end of the day we were given 1 privilege vote each to bring back a piece of work for voting. With a finalist list defined we then voted from the top of the list to define Gold, Silver, Bronze. There was a clever rule here that once a piece had been voted metal, it couldn’t be voted down, It could be voted up though. The outcome of this was that judges were very careful when considering the work, especially when voting the Golds and Silvers.
There were some meaty discussions about brand building versus repeating the same idea. What constitutes moving an idea on or just repeating an old formula. Whether morally offensive work is justified when you need to raise awareness of an important issue (it was felt it wasn’t by the majority of judges). And of course the old execution versus idea debate.
Execution is such a huge part of what makes a great ad, the idea is obviously as important, but without an appropriate execution it won’t go far. The two Heineken spots illustrated this perfectly. They are both exactly the same idea. The one that won gold was beautifully executed, each scene or moment was well thought through, while the bronze version was not quite as crafted.
The two pearls of the metal judging, to my mind, were the “Braids – H2OH! Drink” spot and the “Otrivin Nasal Spray” campaign. They both received a healthy laugh from all of the judges whenever they were shown.
Interestingly, when deciding our Grand Prix we narrowed it down to four contenders. Nike – Write the Future, Puma – After Hours Athlete, Chrysler – Detroit and Dead Island.
You might be thinking why wasn’t VW Darth Vader in there? well quite simply, I think the jury felt selling a car by highlighting just one very small feature, wasn’t enough to push it to the very top. I know that sounds harsh, and that it’s a common way of advertising products, but maybe that’s the issue. It was a unanimous solid gold and loved by everyone on the jury, but we felt it wasn’t the Grand Prix.
When culling from four to two, Dead Island and Chrysler – Detroit dropped out. Both amazing films in their own right. Chrysler was loved, but there didn’t seem to be any debate around it being number one. There was a lot of debate around Dead Island. The argument for, was that it was a beautifully crafted, powerful bit of storytelling that made viewers really feel something when they watched it, perfectly pitched at gamers who love to be immersed in the experience. The argument against was that it was just a game trailer. They puled up the “Gears of War” spot from a few years back to compare. This was probably the clincher for some of the jury members and they voted against it.
Finally, it all came down to two. Nike – Write the Future and Puma – After Hours Athlete. Two amazing spots in the same category, what a competition! we had already had considerable debate about which was better so Tony decided to play both, one directly after the other and then vote anonymously on paper without any discussion. This is how the counting of the final votes went (the winner had to get 14 votes). View the decision here.
I think in the end when you look at the two spots side by side, the Nike spot just feels bigger. My personal preference, only by a whisker, was After Hours Athlete. I love that they created or named a space to play in that was just sitting there between Adidas and Nike. However, when you look back on this year in years to come and see that Nike spot, I don’t think there’ll be any arguments about Write the Future being the top spot for the year.