Should the SA digital space worry about its poor Cannes Lions showing?

This year, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity was not a happy hunting ground for South Africa’s digital agencies. In fact, the only local digital agency to win something was Gloo@Ogilvy, which won a bronze in the Digital Media category. To put that into perspective, 80 awards were given out in that category alone. Another 126 were handed out in the Cyber Lion category with a further 42 campaigns awarded in the mobile category. Within that context, one digital agency win can seem pretty depressing, but should we be worried?

The instinctive answer to that is “yes, definitely”, but it’s actually a little more complicated than that, especially when you bear in mind what Cannes Lions is actually all about.

It’s in the name

Cannes Lions isn’t just a series of awards ceremonies, it’s also a week long festival of creativity, with lectures, seminars, workshops, and wild parties. That said, the awards are what really grab the headlines. But what exactly are the awards rewarding?

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Well, the answer to that lies in the festival’s full name. The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is about just that: creativity. The awards don’t reward simple, but effective applications of technologies, or tried and trusted methods that deliver solid results.

That means it’s meant for wild, out there ideas, that push the limits of creative advertising. In that respect, the South African digital space should be very worried.

“The rest of the world is leaving South Africa behind, and exponentially so,” The Creative Counsel co-founder Ran Neu-Ner told Memeburn in an interview. “We’re falling further and further behind and that’s a cause for concern”.

In digital especially, he believes, “South Africa is incredibly slow on the uptake”. That doesn’t bode well for the country’s chances in the Cyber Lion category, where — courtesy of the Jupiter Drawing Room — there’s a case of Bollinger champagne waiting for the first South African agency to bring one home.

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To be fair though, it’s not entirely the agencies’ fault. It’s also got a fair bit to do with South Africa’s attitude towards technology in general. Take apps for example. “Very few people in South Africa use apps to add value to their lives,” Neu-Ner told us, “whereas in mature markets like the UK, people use apps for everything”.

To be fair, Gloo@Ogilvy’s campaign intersected creativity and deliverable innovation quite neatly. It was awarded its Lion for the First National Bank (FNB) ATM “Switch” campaign. It involved adding an extra layer of code to the bank’s ATMs which allowed non-FNB users to switch over at the touch of a few buttons.

“This work showcases the power of digital to help brands engage customers whilst adding huge monetary value to their business. Not only was this a first of its kind communication, but it also helped directly add millions of rands in value to the bank,” Pete Case, Chief Creative Officer of O&M South Africa and Chairman of Gloo Digital Design said in a press release.

Brand managers partly to blame

In the same release, Case also applauded FNB for being brave enough to take on the campaign. And if Neu-Ner is to be believed that actually makes it a little unusual among South African brands. “South African brand managers don’t have an award-winning culture,” he told us.

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Despite that, The Creative Counsel co-founder reckons that South African creatives could do more. “If you’re going to win awards, the work has to create the brief and not the other way round,” he said.

The country’s digital creatives can at least take solace from the fact that their colleagues in other disciplines seem to struggle just as much at Cannes Lions. South African agencies as a whole brought home just 40 Lions in a year when more than a thousand were awarded. “That’s sad for a country that positions itself as creative,” Neu-Ner told us.

Creative implications aside though, should South Africa’s digital agencies actually be chasing Lions?

Lions aren’t business solutions

Despite Neu-Ner’s worries about what South Africa’s poor Cannes Lions showing says about the country’s creative output, he’s actually pretty skeptical about the awards. When clients ask them if a campaign will win at Cannes, for instance, he usually asks them if that’s what they really want.

Remember, Cannes is about creativity, not what a campaign delivers for the agency’s client. As long as a campaign’s run somewhere — even if it’s on a remote corner of the web, or on a single beach, or at 2AM on a regional radio station — it’s eligible for entry. “It’s a fundamental issue I have with awards,” Neu_ner told us.

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He’s not alone in that scepitcism either. In the run up to the awards Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation for Havas Media US, penned a piece for The Guardian asking the question: What if Cannes Lions celebrates the worst, not the best of advertising?

As Goodwin points out, the ads people remember aren’t the ones that win at Cannes. He argues that there’s an increasing disconnect between advertisers and the general public as well as the needs of their clients.

“At a time when businesses face existential challenges, we seem determined to provide silly, self-serving solutions,” he writes.

According to Goodwin, “we’re in the middle of a total distortion in reality. There is no overlap between the brands and campaigns I read about in the press and those that the public (or myself) actually experience”.

To be fair, the awards have tried to address this to a degree, most notably with the introduction of the Creative Effectiveness category. Campaigns in that category have to have run for more than two years and have “a measurable and proven impact on a client’s business – creativity that affects consumer behaviour, brand equity, sales, and where identifiable, profit”.

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Sometimes the winners in this category show up campaigns that cleaned up in other categories. A notable example of this is Dumb Ways to Die.

As Y&R Global CEO David Sable told Memeburn in an interview earlier this year, a campaign that was originally about preventing train accidents had become a mobile game aimed at kids.

The truth is that while awards might look great in your office foyer, they’re no guarantee of business success. On that front, you’re much better off delivering results for a long list of happy clients. It’s not as exciting, sure, but gold, silver, and bronze statues don’t pay salaries.

Whether South African digital agencies are actually doing that is another debate entirely, but they can prove that they are then we can probably forgive the paucity of Lions.