Cannes 2012: Happy yet hopeful

As the 59th International Festival of Creativity ended, the Indian advertising industry, although proud after winning 14 metals, remained hopeful for a better performance next year.

With the curtains drawing for the 59th International Festival of Creativity, as the Indian advertising industry looks back at its own performance, there lingers a bit of disappointment in the air. After the smashing performance of last year, 2012 was a year of learning for the ad industry in terms of enhancing the scope of work, apart from entering work in new categories such as Cyber, for more opportunity to celebrate in the future.

Piyush Pandey, executive chairman and creative director, Ogilvy South Asia feels that agencies should stop treating it as a race to win metals, and rather focus on good work. For him, work should not be created with a mentality to win only metals but to add value to the product.

"It is difficult to say as this is not an Olympic race where one trains and prepares oneself. One must always try and do good work and if one wins then he should celebrate that win. It is not something that creative heads can plan in the night, saying, that 'tomorrow I will work on something that will bring me metals'. One should first create great piece of work for the local market and then should enter the work at Cannes," he said.

Pratap Bose, COO, DDB Mudra Group opined that India should work to catch up with work for new media. Bose remarked, "People were ahead of us in terms of the strength of work they had so I hope we are able to do better next time. The whole idea is to speak to a new world, the area of digital, cyber and mobile, so while India is classically strong in print, it is not going to help. Agencies need to do far more than that. We need to work on this weak area."

Meanwhile, Ashish Khazanchi, vice-chairperson and national creative director, Publicis Ambience feels that while in traditional media such as television the work has improved, there is a lot of scope for further improvement. According to him, this year's performance in terms of the scale of creativity was better. "We had campaigns like Google's Tanjore Painting - which is a case study in its own way and a lot of people can learn many things from that. Over all, the creatives for all campaigns are good, but nothing extraordinary," he added.

For Josy Paul, chairman and national creative director, BBDO India, India came with a lot of expectations but in reality, only a few shortlists converted into metals, which was very disappointing for the industry.

"India came here with greater expectations really, given the kind of diverse new ideas seen at the Goa Adfest this year. So, people did have big expectations across categories. For example, BBDO got eight shortlists and while two of our campaigns really did well for our clients in India, did not do well here. At the same time, it is good as this year, India has won three gold Lions as compared to last year's one gold Lion, apart from the Effectiveness Lion," he explained.

According to Paul, the gaps can either be because the industry has forgotten how to package the work or the fact that the jury is getting bigger every year, and now has people from diverse nationalities and cultures.

"Therefore, not all our work is easily understood, especially when the jury has just 30 seconds to make up their mind. Ideas have to be bigger, they have to have human connections and capture greater emotions," he said.