Every Advertising Season Has A Story

Michael Hedges June 20, 2013 Follow on Twitter

Trend watchers scour each and every tell-tail for probabilities, possibilities, hints and hunches. None are more attune than the advertising people. Their creativity with sounds and images has stirred generations, shaped language and shaken foundations. We love them. They scare us.

Gathering for the 60th year to celebrate virtue and enormous cash-flow, the advertising people have come to Cannes as if to Delphi. The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity got underway last Sunday with more ad people, more ad people watchers and more awards. They’ve decorated the hotels, the beaches and anything that moves. Hide the children, Doris. It’s the advertising people.

The first Grand Prix of the season was awarded for a relatively new category – creative effectiveness. The idea behind the three-year old category is a bridge to the wisdom of ad genius David Ogilvy: “If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.”  To win it’s necessary for an ad campaign to have placed in an award category last year and provide jurors with a written report on how well it worked.

The Grand Prix winner was the “Legendary Journey” campaign for Heineken beer created by the Amsterdam office of terminally creative agency Wieden & Kennedy. The campaign – still running – stretched across 170 markets and sold a lot of beer, said the documentation. “Some entries could have been written better to score higher,” said Draftfcb Greater China CEO Pully Chau to AdAge (June 18).

The big winner – so far – is the excruciatingly creative “Dumb ways to die” campaign for the Melbourne, Australia, Metro Trains, the transit system. McCann Melbourne picked up two Grand Prix for this animated genius – public relations and direct marketing. The campaign promotes safety around trains. It’s a YouTube hit, not necessarily an award criteria, and it’s short-listed to win the all-important film category award at the end of the week. There's a video game.

In the outdoor category – always a personal favorite - Ogilvy & Mather France picked up the Grand Prix for IBM’s People for Smarter Cities campaign. The three posters were transformed into a bike ramp, rain shelter and bench. Ogilvy UK won outdoor Gold Lions for travel portal Expedia’s Luggage Tags poster campaign.

Timed to excite the more statistically inclined ad people and other market watchers, ZenithOptimedia (ZO) presented its latest forecast. Ad spending growth, says ZO, this year is slowing and they’ve cut the forecast to 3.5% from 3.9%, last quarter’s estimate. The problem is negative growth in Europe. In the Euro-zone, ad spending will be 5.2% lower than 2012. In the so-called Euro periphery (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) the decline will be 10.3%.

“The economic recovery that economists hoped to see in the euro-zone in the second half of 2013 appears to have been postponed until the beginning of 2014,” said the ZO presser. Ad spending will rise, they say, 5.2% globally in 2014 and 0.8% in the euro-zone and even more in 2015 as mobile advertising tightens its grip. Developing markets – Asia/Pacific, Latin America and Africa – will contribute nearly two-thirds of ad spending growth by 2015.

While not all the Cannes Lions awards have been announced, trend watchers already see an ominous thread. The Melbourne Metro Transit campaign, clever as it is, mentions death, uncommon to aspiration oriented ad creatives. The Grand Prix in the promotion category was awarded to Sport Club do Recife football club for a public service campaign encouraging organ donation. Dutch funeral insurance company Del’a won a Gold Lion for a heart-wrenching participatory video campaign called “Why wait until it’s too late.”

The final season of Mad Men, the award-winning TV series reliving 1960’s ad business, will go into production this October. This time next year it will be history. Will Don jump out of that window?

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