Day 2

On day two, the clouds have passed and Cannes has unveiled a beautiful blue sky. As some of my colleagues know, I am immune to jetlag. Unfortunately, I have discovered I am not immune to the infamous Gutter Bar. The festival hadn’t technically started, but the advertising crowd was out in force last night.

Most interesting is the Gutter Bar (its real name Croisette 72) has been ad-bombed. Global brand Yahoo! has recognised this establishment as the central hub for our industry and bought out the entire front façade in an obvious attempt to rebrand the place as the Yahoo! bar.

I don’t think the name will take.

Today, the long-awaited shortlist of Cannes Lions finalists has been published.

Our plot of land has once again competed well, and possibly dominated, along with our friends across the ditch, New Zealand. In fact, if I was to take the viewpoint the Sydney Morning Herald took recently in their front page report of the Kiwis in their first World Cup match, I would simply say Australiasia scored 106.

At my count, Australia has racked up 69 finalists and New Zealand 37 – very impressive effort.

In Oz, the standout agencies at this point appear to be Leo Burnett Sydney (10), Clemenger Melbourne (9), GPYR Melbourne (7), Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney (7), DDB Sydney (5), and BMF (5). Leo Burnett’s finalists are for their work on Canon’s Photo5, PhotoChain, Earth Hour, and Bundaberg Rum. Chum and Guide Dogs account for most of Clemenger’s finalists. GPYR have earned their spot for their work on the Australian Navy and their renowned It’s No Picnic campaign, while Saatchi & Saatchi have scored the highest finalist haul for a single campaign with Toyota’s Nothing Soft Gets In being given 5 finalists across the categories.

For the Kiwis, Colenso BBDO has listed 12 with the rest shared across a swag of agencies.

With luck, many of these will be converted to metal tonight, and many more the following night at the awards ceremonies in the Palais de Festival.

Featured on the cover of today’s Lions 2010 Daily News is Wunderman London’s Executive Creative Director, David Harris, whose lecture today to a packed auditorium was on the source of inspiration. He said, “ideas are neither common nor sensible”. Does that mean today’s list shows Australia and New Zealand have no common sense? Apparently that’s a good thing for generating inspirational ideas, and we’ve certainly shown that to the world thus far.

Given that I’ve been invited to give a presentation to my international colleagues on Wednesday at the Wunderman Creative Directors’ Summit on the topic of “Why Do Aussies Always Win?” I’m hoping to make some quick adjustments to my talk to include some stellar 2010 Cannes Lions results for Australia and New Zealand.

Good luck everyone.

Live in Cannes,
Matt Batten
Creative Director
Wunderman, Sydney