Sore losers? Or do the Cannes critics have a point?

Beautiful craft, innovative interactive films, products with a proper brand purpose and work that changed perceptions. But as adland’s rosé-infused bloodstream gets back to normal and the bald heads begin to peel, there is much more to think about than how to win more next year.

 

Lots of people spent Cannes week talking about whether the right work was being rewarded. That usually meant querying how "real" charity work was and how involved agencies had really been in the winning ideas. Such chatter peaked on Friday night when Geometry Global and Memac Ogilvy MENA had to concede that, as they had not designed the "Lucky Iron Fish" product, they were not deserving of the Grand Prix in Product Design. Who’d have thought it?

 

Then there was the question of the validity of the big prizes. On the Monday, excited executives whispered to me conspiratorially that Omnicom might have a chance of unseating WPP after four years as the Holding Company of the Year. But it wasn’t to be. Yet the legitimacy of that title is undermined by the disparity between the size of the groups. Michael Roth dismissed the holding company competition as a "numbers game" when I asked him about it, but he was rightly proud of the performance of R/GA and FCB Inferno’s "this girl can".