Cannes Lions is going on at the moment. The stuff I like the most are exclusively the Cyber Lions, awarded to the interactive/digital stuff, I haven’t even checked print for the usual overload of visual puns and image play, the print I like, functional and clean advertising seldom wins in France. What I miss is with the interactive stuff is that the in so many cases the brand is second hand, technology and idea is primary. This is something that ATL agencies suffered from many, many years ago with generic strategies without soul, voice or identification. One of the Grand Prix winner, Fiat eco:Drive, could’ve been done for basically any car brand with any environmental credentials. The other GP winner, The Best Job in the World, has an amazing and well executed idea, but no one remembers the damn island or who was responsible for it. Why So Serious is good but the voice and image was crafted by the movie’s director and writers, not 42 entertainment, they just utilised neatly.
I was interviewing Dave Bedwood of Lean Mean Fighting Machine for my dissertation, an incredibly inspirational conversation that I wish could’ve gone on for more than the hour he gave me, and he mentioned just this, that digital agencies has too little experience in writing ads, thousands of ads, to find that thing in a brand that makes worth communicating. CP+B is an agency that does great interactive/digital work that always has an appropriate tonality and a voice that people can recognise. Their Whopper Sacrifice campaign clearly comes out of the brand strategy not from the technological possibilities Facebook brings.