Having been on the jury at this year’s Cannes Lions, the advertising industry’s Oscars, few people are as well placed to judge great campaigns as Cathy Boxall, Dentsu’s global head of entertainment, and Ian McGrath, Dentsu’s chief operations officer of media in Ireland.
But, as they tell Dave Winterlich on the Inside Marketing podcast, there are also tips and recommendations that can help separate the winners from the rest of those that are shortlisted for the awards.
The first thing both highlight is the sheer volume of entries the judging panels have to work through.
Boxall, who was judging the entertainment Lions category, had to watch and read more than 200 submissions. McGrath, a shortlisting judge for the media Lions, spent over 40 hours reviewing 330 entries.
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High quality work, but in the wrong categories
Unfortunately, some stand out for the wrong reasons. In Boxall’s estimation, up to 30 per cent of the submissions she judged were entered into the wrong category.
No sooner were they in the competition but they were ruled out, an enormous waste of time, resources and opportunity.
“It would also have made my life easier if people had been a bit more rigid about where they put their entries,” says Boxall.
Worse still, the quality of all of the entries submitted – rightly or wrongly – was typically high.
“You could tell a lot of money has been spent on them, a lot of work went into them. In some cases they’d even used the talent from their content in the submissions. They’d obviously put a lot of effort into it,” she says.
Focus on creativity and brand effectiveness
Respect the judges, particularly the work they put in. What struck McGrath, a first time Cannes judge this year, was how comprehensive the judging is, starting with unconscious bias training.
“It’s about making sure you’re aware of all the cultural differences around the world that might impact your view in terms of how you view the success of one campaign over another, for example. It’s why both watching the videos and reading the entries is so important and the organisers instil that in you from the beginning of the process,” he says.
Part of what is required of judges at major international awards such as Cannes, or Clios, a rival alternative which Boxall has also adjudicated on, is an ability to balance innovative, creative ideas with results and impact, points out Winterlich.
Judges want to see evidence that the work had an impact, agrees McGrath. “It’s really important to see that it was a real campaign and not made for awards. Everything you see should be genuine. That said, I believe there still has to be the idea first. It should carry more weight,” he says.
“A lot of entries are over prescribed in terms of just trying to nail results, which kind of forgets that Cannes is an award show for creativity and brand effectiveness, things that are not really linear.”
Indeed, as Winterlich points out, campaign aims are too often “retrofitted” into award submissions.
Much better to spell out clearly the genuine impact it had.
Measure up
Branded entertainment is an area which often, unfairly in Boxall’s view, “gets a bad rap for not being measurable,” she says, “when it is actually entirely measurable, with lots of metrics you can put around any kind of entertainment campaign”.
That said, her experience in both the Lions and the Clios, “was that some of those results were quite fluffy. Often there wasn’t a very good link between objectives and results.”
This was particularly so in the Clios. “There it was mostly creative people I was judging with, and I tended to be the nagging voice in the room that kept coming back to the question of ‘Yes, but did it achieve what it set out to achieve?’ I’m a bit of a stickler for results,” she adds.
Just don’t inflate your aims. “Some of them were putting out very big objectives and then getting absolutely nowhere near to achieving them,” she points out.
Keep it real, folks, agrees McGrath; As a judge “you’re looking for what is genuine.”
This is especially true if competing for an Effie, an advertising effectiveness award, but in all cases, it’s no harm to let the judging panel know in your submission that your good results didn’t come from something tangential, such as a price increase or a discount, points out Winterlich.
Funny business
Don’t be too po-faced either. One of the clearest trends to emerge at Cannes this year was humour. “I was really pleased about that and it made the whole process so much more fun,” says Boxall.
“Humour is becoming massive not just in the brand entertainment categories but across the board. There was so much funny, silly stuff in entertainment that it was just brilliant, and may be because the world is pretty horrible right now. Indeed, this is the first year that they put ‘use of humour’ in as a basis on which to judge an entry,” she says.
One trend, albeit a continuing one, was the prevalence of sport as a platform, says McGrath.
Another trend of which he is less welcoming however was that of entries boasting about their frugality. For a media person, that counter-intuitive and less effective.
“Some entries were trying to make a big virtue of the fact that, ‘hey, we spent zero money on this. We really spent nothing’. To which I just felt that if it was a great idea, would you not want more people to know about it? You’re limiting the impact your campaign will have,” he says.
Keep it real
Don’t try to pull wool over the judges’ eyes either. One of the biggest, albeit smallest, bugbears during Boxall’s time as a Cannes judge this year was all the laurel wreath badges people dotted their submissions with, “to try and make it look like they won film festival awards,” she says.
“You get this PDF and it’s scattered with all these laurel wreaths and when you zoom in, because they’re really small, you find it is some tiny local thing they’ve done but were trying to make out like they’d won Tribeca. By the 20th one it was really irritating.”
For McGrath the biggest irritant was the presence of work made ostensibly for clients, but really for peers. “It’s like, I know you want to win an award at Cannes but do the work,” he exhorts. “Focus on the work and the awards should follow.”
To hear more from podcast and content series Inside Marketing, click here.
