Kinsale Sharks Festival puts the hook into attendees

Major changes in this year’s Kinsale Sharks Festival will test whether the awards beano, a fixture on the Irish advertising calendar for the past 54 years,can reinvent itself after loud grumblings from the industry questioning its appeal and relevance.

The weekend-long event is open to international entries and attracts a healthy international attendance – and entry list. It traditionally takes place in September, before agencies rev up for the busy pre-Christmas period. The judging panels for its bewildering number of awards (in the shape of a shark’s snout) are drawn from global agencies, with an Irish judge on each panel.

This year, Susan Hoffman, global executive creative director of Wieden+Kennedy, takes over from John Hegarty as the Kinsale Sharks honorary president, as well as overall jury chairwoman.

Kinsale Sharks has traditionally featured two days of expense- account-fuelled partying, culminating in the awards ceremony on Saturday night in Actons Hotel.

This year, for the first time, it has been split in two – a weekend festival in Kinsale on September 22nd-24th, followed on October 27th with the actual awards ceremony in the Round Room in Dublin’s Mansion House.

Festival chairman Peter Brady explains the time lag, saying that in recent years the trend has been for agencies to send their younger creatives to Kinsale. More senior people are reluctant or unable to take the time to go on the weekend, which starts on a Thursday.

The awards shortlist will be announced this year at a party on the Saturday evening. This gives the shortlisted agencies a chance to invite their clients to the more formal dinner in Dublin a month later.

Clients have never been welcome at the festival, a factor that has long been part of its appeal for the industry. However, Brady says that other festivals, including Cannes, usually invite them to awards events.

It also means that the October event, with MC Tara Flynn, will largely have the international element stripped out, since those delegates will have long gone home, leaving it as a mostly Irish awards ceremony. This is quite different from the original idea of the festival, which has always been proud of its international dimension.

Another major change to boost the idea of the weekend as a stand-alone advertising festival is that the “educational” component has been entirely revamped. These were typically workshop sessions or talks on some aspect of the creative process. Brady admits they were not’t very popular with delegates.

Instead, this weekend’s Friday and Saturday sessions will be delivered by Creative Social, a London-based creative events and networking company that taps into its address book of more than 300 top creatives for its events (40 in London to date) and others in cities from Singapore to Amsterdam.

While the session schedule for September hasn’t been ironed out yet, it looks to be a far more lively and stimulating offering than what has gone before. And, crucially if this splitting of the event is to work, it will make the weekend in September feel like a standalone festival.