As the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity kicks off again for another year, this year looks slightly different.
Amid changing times and budgets for mainstay agency attendees and the arrival of a new kind of delegate, the festival is changing its own shape.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, festival chairman Philip Thomas highlights how Cannes Lions is getting both smaller and bigger at the same time.
Shorter festival
“Going from eight days to five days, we did that to try to make it more concentrated, so that people didn’t have to be away for so long. More or less, we managed that.”
Fewer Lions
“We’ve got rid of a lot of lions, rid of a lot of sub-categories, and that has meant that our entry numbers have gone down a lot, which is what the industry was asking us to do.”
Consultancies pitch up
“It’s a little bit of a misnomer to say that the consultancies are taken over. They’re taking over some very visible physical spaces, and that’s obviously their strategy. But, what I think is more interesting this year is the slightly changing mix of entrance into the Lions.”
Entries are up
“We’ve got entrants from clients increasing by 84%, that was on a 65% increase last year, we’ve got entries from consultancies up 30%, entries from media owners up 56%, and these are from low bases. The agencies still absolutely dominate the entries, but it’s just a subtle shift that we might see accelerate in the future.”
This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.
