Winning eight Lions at the Cannes awards this year, the South African advertising industry has shown it has the talent for temptation. Alex Dodd reports
I exit the cinema feeling a bit like a latter day Phineas Fogg. I’ve seen the world and it’s taken me a whole lot less than 80 days. In more like 80 minutes I’ve had brief stopovers in Japan, Brazil, Sweden, Argentina, England … not to mention langouring at length in the land of milk and honey, that advertisers’ home on the range – America.
It’s the premiere of the Cannes Lions ’98, and our local manufacturers of desire have shown up in full force, less for the escargots than for a view of the ingenious adverts that have garnered kudos at the world’s premier ad industry event. This year South Africa has scooped an impressive total of eight Lions (five in print and three in film). One of the smaller, streamlined Johannesburg agencies, Net#work, is clearly going to have to invest in a couple of bottles of Brasso and Silvo to keep all their little Lions buffed.
In the anticipatory flurry of smiles and skinder, I chat to Mike Ellman- Brown of Berry Bush, who bore the honour of being the South African judge in the print category in a previous year. (This year we were represented on the film panel by Net#work’s impressively youthful creative director Mike Schalit.) The worldwide significance of the annual event cannot be underestimated, Ellman-Brown enthuses. Being in Cannes for that week is like being at the university of advertising. It’s enormously educative, immensely inspiring and, on the judging process, he profoundly comments: “It doesn’t matter if you’re English, Japanese or German … A good ad is a good ad and a shit ad is a shit ad.”
I can’t say I saw a single example of the latter variety on the big screen on Monday night. Rather, I was bowled over by the ingenuity and universality of just about every single ad showcased. The masters of the craft know exactly how to take an archetype and milk it for its powerful commonality.
The most impactful ads are clearly the ones that take the simplest, most recognisable icons as their conceptual tool. (A doddering granny with bad co- ords playing Play Station; a bunch of tourists trying to distract an English bobby who has eyes only for the gobsmacking price of the new Polo splashed across the side of a passing double-decker bus; a nerd who gets his revenge on a bunch of teasing babes with a disposable camera …)
The more stock the departure point, it seems, the stronger the final outcome. The creatives start with something we, the members of the global human mass, know and love, or love to hate, or feel squelchy and soppy about, or embarrassed to acknowledge in public. Then with, some highly affecting twist or turnabout, they mainline the product straight to your hyperthalamus which instantly yelps out: “Ooohhh, I want that car! Maybe if I bought that deodorant, I’d get more regular, raunchy sex. Drinking Miller Lite would make me part of that cool and witty clan of human beings that elude the dull, mediocrity of this world. Guys that eat that brand of noodles also have hassles with their naggy girlfriends – I’m not alone in the world.” Sick, but so damn clever. The Cannes Lions serve to confirm that Mammon has in its service some of the most gifted brains on the planet.
And if you think we’re the only ones who recognise the naughtiness of what they’re actually doing to us – tempting us into that deadliest of 20th-century sins, avarice – you’re wrong. One of the most fascinating aspects of this year’s selection was the post-modernity of the ads. The advertisers’ cheeky knack for commenting on their own process.
Young and Rubicam, Toronto’s AGF Mutual Funds ad, for example, sends up the retirement ad genre. The scene opens with an urbane, white-haired man in the standard Polo shirt at the ninth hole. He smugly announces that, with the aid of the fund, he’s been able to realise his dream. And that dream? To retire to some fab Miami beach retirement village complete with golf course and frail care? Nope. His dream was to star in a retirement fund ad. The gopher’s an aspiring actor. The whole thing’s set up. The golf course is greener than green … Get it? The retirement fund ad smugly sending up the cheesiness of its own advertising form.
One of the other campaigns that’s Pritt on my mind is the Nike ad which poignantly comments on the kind of flak and prejudice skateboarders endure. The advertisers create hypothetical documentary scenarios in which other sportspeople are treated with the same disdain skateboarders normally face. A bunch of middle-aged tennis players end up desperately scaling the tennis fence in an attempt to escape the ire of the security forces trying to enforce the “no tennis” dictum. Two joggers bemoan their fate as passersby snigger and accuse them of being selfish and inconsiderate. Imagine if we treated all athletes the way we treat skateboarders, the ad posits. A clever way to win over the sympathies of skateboarders, a large chunk of Nike’s target market.
Frankly there are too many instances of brilliance to begin to mention, but what has to be said is that our local whizz kids are starting pull serious cred. According to the suave and stylish Jean Marie Dru, this year’s Cannes jury president, who attended Monday night’s ritzy event to present the awards, South Africa is entering the global limelight in a big way. The festival started out being dominated by American and British ads, he said. Then Spain had its day, followed by Brazil, which has been top of the pops for the past few years.
This year, he said, most of the journalists present in Cannes were keen on finding out how sunny South Africa had fared. “The countries who have been strong and successful,” he reminded the unnervingly white audience of industry representatives, “added their own culture to the US/Anglo-Saxon background. The melting pot approach is refreshing. And with it, you could be the next Brazil.”