Sinead Roarty’s Cannes Diary: Wrap

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Sinead Roarty’s Cannes Diary: Wrap

(The 2022 Industry Craft jury. Without a doubt, the best jury ever. Pictured L-R front: Melanie Pennec, Nils Leonard (President), Sinead Roarty, Juliana Cobb, Farah Gamal; back: Clara Gutierrez Jorge (Lions judging exec), Saulo Rodrigues, Neo Mashigo, Jeffry Gamble, Paul Banham, Masayoshi Kodaira)

Sinead Roarty, creative consultant at The Godmother represented Australia on the Cannes Industry Craft Lions jury. Here Roarty reflects on her time in the jury room, exclusively for CB.

 

The French Riviera Dispatch

Let’s be honest: online judging sucks. Good work slips through the cracks, and when it comes to craft, nothing beats sniffing the work up close. So it’s been a joy to be back together IRL – even if that meant experiencing another kind of lockdown in the jury room.

The Industry Craft awards were announced on Tuesday night, so let’s unpack some of the winning work.

Typography that can be seen from outer space.

A font that’s beautiful because it’s ugly.

An idea that literally lives and dies by its execution.

Work that is both of its time and will have a lasting impact.

These are just some of the reasons we awarded the Grand Prix to Sheba’s Hope Reef. As our president, Nils Leonard, rightly pointed out, choosing the word ‘hope’, deceptively simple as it may seem, was a genius call. It’s easy to imagine other brands insisting on stamping their logo on the ocean floor. Hope for the future of the planet is something we can all relate to.

Sinead Roarty’s Cannes Diary: Wrap

While some folk spent the pandemic mastering their sourdough, others spent their time crafting masterpieces. All told, we awarded twenty-five lions across various craft categories. Here are some of the themes we saw:

The return to real. While the metaverse and NFTs may be hogging the virtual spotlight, other brands are getting real. Grit and sweat and actual living people are being captured through candid photography, black and white images, minimal retouching and street casting. Check out Burger King’s Nonartificial Mexico, Seen From A Mini and Rolling Stone’s Rockin’ Mamas.

Big brands continue to be passionate about purpose. Not as a one-off gesture but by baking it into their brand DNA. Coors’ Chillboards and Sheba’s Hope Reef are good examples of brands walking the talk.

Creative collabs are the go. After two years of social distancing and crafting over zoom, it was refreshing to see work that champions the handmade, traditional craftspeople, and multiple creators. Kenya’s Ministry of Health’s Lesso Lessons, Spotify Sound Tour and Penquin’s Portuguese (Re)consitution are magnificent examples of dancing the old-fashioned way.

After a long period of too-earnest chest-beating, it was great to see work that was funny AF. Not gags, but clever, crafted humour. The festival organisers could hear us guffawing from the other side of the Palais when we viewed Wendy’s National Roast Day and Progressive Insurance’s Dr Rick Will See You Now.

Killer craft. Not just good design, but good design well-crafted. The quick fix has been replaced by work with an attention to detail that pays off big time. It shows a level of decision-making where the client understands that craft will be the difference between a good idea and a great one. Minecraft rebrand, Rio Carnival branding, and Tokyo Ad Museum’s Beautiful Mutations are next-level good.

Finally, one piece that gets a special shout-out and covers many of this year’s themes is Vital Farms’ Hens Behind the Lens – a campaign shot by free-range chooks. It’s a cracker of an idea, is down-to-earth, a collab (maybe that’s a tiny stretch), has purpose and is witty. We would have loved for one of the hens to come up on stage, but it didn’t make gold. Maybe next year.

Sinead Roarty’s Cannes Diary: Wrap