Asheen Naidu’s Cannes Diary #2

Asheen Naidu, executive creative director at BWM Dentsu is on the Cannes Industry Craft Lions. Naidu, along with many other jurors writes exclusively for Campaign Brief.

After going through 1650 entries we’ve finally reached a shortlist. It features some familiar pieces that have won at other shows in the run up to Cannes, but also some new beautifully-crafted ones.

Each juror had a chance to bring back one piece that didn’t make it through, as part of the “jury proposal”. We were surprised at how some wonderful pieces slipped through the cracks either because a juror didn’t completely understand the context or cultural nuance, or was simply too overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work to wade through. As such I think this is a great feature of the Cannes judging process. We had a lot of discussion around the balance of idea and execution, since this is the craft category, but in the end I feel confident that the shortlist we’ve created is a great representation of brilliant craft enhancing a great idea.

Being from a copy background, I was really disappointed with the standard of copywriting. There wasn’t really anything that jumped out at me, except for one or two pieces. It seems like some agencies intentionally entered long copy ads with the hope of exhausting judges into submission, but just weren’t able to hold the attention all the way through. The judges were drawn more to personality and charm in writing as opposed to sheer length of copy. Unfortunately it seems like the art of copywriting is fading.

Today we decide on metal, with more stimulating conversation from a really great bunch of people.