Caxtons chair Justin Drape: Cannes failure is a wake-up call on newspaper creativity
Justin Drape, chairman of this year’s Caxton Awards for Australian newspaper advertising has said that Australia’s failure in the Print Lions at Cannes was because creatives were “busy hanging out with the cool kids in digital and integrated”.
Drape, co-founder and joint ECD of Three Drunk Monkeys, said: “In Cannes I joined 17 other jurors to judge the best press from all over the world, and unfortunately no Australian work was deemed worthy of an award. This is a wake-up call to raise our creative standards in this category.
“I feel – as an industry – we’ve been so busy hanging out with the cool kids in digital and integrated that we’ve neglected the potential of press advertising.
“Of all the media available to us now, press advertising is still one of the most powerful we have to make an intelligent and emotive connection with an audience.”
Menawhile, the Caxtons, which has previously been an exclusively newspaper-based awards, has introduced a new category – “Best Multi-Media Campaign”. However, at least one of the channels used will still have to have been owned by a newspaper company.
The rest of this year’s Caxtons judging panel consists of:
- Rowan Dean – Euro RSCG
- Dejan Rasic – Colman Rasic
- Pete Bake – The Glue Society
- Andy Dilallo – Leo Burnett
- Christian Finucane – 12:20
- Vince Lagana – Saatchi & Saatchi
- Jim Ingram – GPYR Melbourne
the winning canne ads, minus doritos, were crap this year as well. compared to last year’s brilliant collection.
Really?? We’re too busy “hanging out with the cool kids in digital and integrated” and that’s why Oz did badly in press?
So, what’s the excuse for the other yrs we’ve done badly in press??
This story is starting to sound monotonous – yr after yr when our creatives come back from Cannes either empty handed or with few Lions in this category… in recent times all we hear is that the industry needs to do something about it… so my question is, what is it finally going to do???