Someone recently attacked much award-winning interactive creative for being not all that hot.
They probably have a point. Not having the same familarity with (or obsession with) the 50-year corpus of conventional advertising as their offline counterparts, digital juries are at risk of acclaiming as original some ideas which have already seen lengthy service for ABM in the 1970s.
But whereas interactive work is sometimes less than purely original, it is rarely formulaic. And that's not something you could say of many of the pieces shorlisted for the press and outdoor sections in Cannes.
Walking through this section was a bit like that hall of mirrors scene at the beginning of The Man with the Golden Gun: everywhere you looked it was the same ad. Ranks of oblique visual puns stretching to infinity.
It was also mentally draining, since many of the ads required an unreasonable degree of Bletchley Park level visual code-breaking on the part of the viewer - all the more unreasonable when the damn thing was to supposed to be a fleeting poster.
As a copywriter, this obsession with the visual pun seems to me a form of textual discrimination. If I, as a writer, were to assume a similar degree of verbal literacy in my audience (peppering body copy with Shakespearean quotations or allusions to the late works of Catullus) I would be laughed out of the room. Yet a bunch of people whose experience of humanity seems confined to their contemporaries at art-school is allowed to presume a ludicrous degree of visual literacy and deconstruction on the part of the everyday public.
This bias seems all the more strange when you consider that The Sun allows itself unbeliveably elarorate wordplay, while keeping its pictures largely direct and large chested.
My other observation is that, when boiled down to the original proposition, much of the work in these categories simply stated the obvious in an oblique way. "Sports cars are fast". "Off road vehicles can drive across bumpy ground." and so forth. How often do agencies really get briefs like that?
Having said all this, I would just like to add a couple of caveats here. First of all, the work that won metal was for the most part original and mould-breaking. And the Anglo Saxon work (Harvey Nichols and Marmite are both original executions of distinctive strategies) was often spectacularly good.
I know it's an international festival and so forth, but really: the occasional word wouldn't go amiss.
