Cannes in context 🦁
After a watershed year, the hope is for more substantive progress and less angst from the PR community at Cannes.
16 years later, Cannes continues to occupy a curious place in the PR world’s psyche. To the extent that, sometimes, the conversations can start to feel therapeutic. This industry does have value! Even if the PR Lions remain dominated by those swaggering adland types.
Much of that angst may have lifted last year, when Golin, Ogilvy PR and Weber Shandwick each took home a well-deserved Grand Prix apiece, while Edelman became the first PR firm to win a Titanium Lion. Before Golin broke the drought, lest we forget, it had been 15 long years of waiting for a PR firm to take top honours in the category that bears its name — after the PR Lions was launched to muted fanfare in 2009.
Having got that monkey off its back, the hope might be for a more relaxed industry presence on the Croisette this year, bereft of the collective need to justify its existence amid the festival's glittering chaos. Having attended every edition since that rain-soaked 2009 debut, and built considerable programming that addressed these questions, I suspect that things may not be quite so simple — particularly with existential dread now writ large across the marketing and communications world in general.
There are still, no doubt, questions to be asked of an awards process that often rewards simpler, bold ideas, rather than the complexity amid which public relations typically thrives. But, with earned first creativity continuing to set the agenda, it seems clear that PR firms have figured out how to win the biggest Cannes awards. And that, at an event that features the world's largest marketing budgets, is no bad thing.
Or is it? No credible discussion of Cannes can ignore the polarisation it continues to trigger among industry opinions. As I noted a couple of years ago, people tell you why they are attending, and people tell you why they're not. The alluringly titled 'idea creation credit' will continue to vex many minds. And, there are those who have told me that Cannes is an unforgivably crude simplification of PR's higher calling.
