Winning effectiveness awards are what matter most – and Australia’s in contention at Cannes
As the Australian contingent heads for Europe for next year’s Cannes festival, Australia is in with a shot at the prized Grand Prix for Effectiveness, argues last year’s winner Steve Coll.
The argument in favour of creative awards is being made more vigorously than ever. Surprisingly, it’s not creative agencies making the case. It’s our clients.
Some of the world’s best marketers are embracing creative awards like never before. And nowhere is this more apparent than at Cannes, recently rebranded as the Festival of Creativity.
For several years, Cannes has been consistently demonstrating the correlation between work that works and work that wins. Matt Beispiel, Senior Director of Global Brand Development for McDonald’s, points to a measurable difference. “We’ve seen an ROI 54% higher with creative that wins at Cannes Lions than creative that doesn’t.”
If award-winning creativity is innately effective, why the separate ‘creative effectiveness’ category?
Sounds like bullshit to me.. ‘hey lets make an award winning ad, call if effective and head to Cannes for some high five action’
I think celebrating campaign effectiveness on a global scale is a worthwhile exercise for the industry, in many ways. There are many local effectiveness awards, and Steve, as I think you’re alluding to – they’re not all created equal (you’d have to say the IPAs in the UK are the preeminent effectiveness awards, with the local Effies looking pretty lightweight in comparison). So a big, global effectiveness award gets a big tick from me.
But where Cannes have got it wrong is the way in which they only invite previous year’s winners and short-listers to enter. Yes, it means as judges you don’t have to read as many entries – but it doesn’t help the industry make the case that great creativity works better than average creativity – because only great creativity is allowed to enter in the first place.
If Cannes (and our industry for that matter) truly believes that great creativity works, it should have the confidence to allow anyone to enter its effectiveness awards – good work or bad. Assuming the papers with a great idea at the heart of it work better than those with average ideas (which I passionately do), you’re making a far greater statement to the wider marketing industry about the true power of great creativity against everything else.
If it’s all about “effectiveness” why aren’t results weighted 100%?
wasn’t the Grey one entered last year?
isn’t that ad from 2010?
Hi Pulp,
You can only win the effectiveness Lion if you win the previous year, so that one category is effectively on 12 months delay.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Finally good to see decent advertisements!
The English and Euro’s do it so much better than us.
I am a true blue Aussie; though our TVC’s are boring, uninspiring, often plagiarise and in many cases actually insult you by making such dumbed down advertising.
I just don’t know why us Aussies are just so bloody awful at making TVC’s