Micah Walker’s 2011 Cannes Diary – Day Two from the Cannes Outdoor jury room
Micah Walker, executive creative director at Publicis Mojo Sydney, is representing Australia on the Outdoor jury. Harricks has just finished day two of judging and writes exclusively for Campaign Brief. Other Aussie and Kiwi jurors will be contributing exclusively to the CB Blog over the next week, so make sure you check in daily, hourly, every minute…
Two days in, and I’ve scanned about 1500 pieces of outdoor, which is about 1/3
of the entries. It’s a lot to get through, and yet only a small number appear to be worth their
cost of entry. It’s becoming a much more complicated category.
One thing for sure is that there are a lot of folks around the world working on briefs I’ve never had the fortune of seeing throughout my career. Anti-gas tablets, WWF, superglue, long life pens and Post it notes dominated the entries (but I doubt the shortlists).
Certainly folks are sick of the case studies but compared to other juries we really didn’t have that many.
Ed Morris, who I’d never had the pleasure of meeting until this Cannes, lamented the fact that music (often famous tracks) were allowed on them, and everyone else agreed that they really were becoming too false of an articulation for the work. Ads for the ads. Everyone of the opinion that the time and expense of making them was just getting out of hand. Accepted evils, I guess.
What else….dinner with Jose Miguel Sokoloff from Bogota and Mr Morris last night reminded me how brilliant it is when you meet genuinely talented folks that are also genuinely good people.
If you ever get the chance to talk to either, do it. Lovely fellows, both very smart. Ant Keogh joined us for lunch earlier in the day and the same goes for him. Good bunch.
So, another day in the dark room…this one to form our shortlist. I feel sorry for the telly jury (and Dylan from DDB) who look a touch older every time I see them, but I’m excited to see the other 2/3 of the work in our group.
We’ve heard as many as 14,000 people arrive in the next few days, so the quiet streets won’t be, for much longer…
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