Cannes, the Godzilla of Festivals

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which kicks off today, has come a long way since the Fifties when envious cinema advertising executives decided they wanted something like the glamour of the Cannes film festival for themselves (thumbing their noses at the upstart medium of TV in the process).

Adland's annual get-together is now a veritable Godzilla – a gigantic, sprawling beast of an event that attracts a huge number of entries and delegates from all around the world, and is a major business in its own right.

This year’s Cannes will, no doubt, be the biggest yet, and I have some sympathy for those who worry if it has become a little too corpulent. How long, they wonder, before it collapses under its own weight?

Where I part company from the detractors, though, is the point at which they begin to pine for the “glory days” of advertising.

Ask them to describe those days, and they’ll wax heroic with tales of creative derring-do and epic lunches. But listen closely and, all too often, what you hear them describe is essentially an exclusive club: Euro-centric, male and mono-medium.

Today’s Cannes may be big and brash but it’s also emphatically open, diverse, international and multi-disciplinary. In other words, it’s a reflection of our modern industry and society.

Its success is an endorsement of our business – just look at who goes. Everyone from clients and the world’s press to the new media owners (masquerading as tech companies) who now colonise the beachfront.

So to those who hanker after the old days, let me tell you: clients don’t feel like that, the young people joining our business don’t feel like that, and the new competitors who would like to eat our lobster lunches certainly don’t feel like that.

As is well documented I have never made an ad in my life, but I have always been fascinated by and drawn to creative people and their work. It’s why I chose this business.

Cannes seethes and sizzles with competition – between individuals, between agencies, between networks and between parent companies – but ultimately comes together to honour the best creative work, wherever it springs from and however it gets there.

Raucous, outsized and at times ridiculous it may be, but Cannes Lions is a spectacular and vital celebration of our industry, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

A version of this article first appeared in Campaign magazine

Photo: Everett Collection/REX