A friend from my agency years texted me from the Croisette on Sunday night. A photograph of a rosé, the water behind it, and one line underneath. Nobody here is talking about the work.
They are talking about Publicis. The holding company is sitting out every award show for a year, Cannes included, plus the trade shows and the sponsorships, and moving the money into Marcel, the AI platform Arthur Sadoun announced with Microsoft and named after the man who founded the place.
The reaction has been theatrical. Betrayal of craft, abandonment of the industry, a bad signal to talent. I think it is the most honest thing a holding company has said about awards in ten years.
Awards are a recruiting program and a margin story wearing the costume of a creative standard, and Publicis just published the invoice.
I have watched this from inside. I once sat through six weeks of production on a case study film, original score, a voiceover artist flown in, for a campaign that ran twice in a single market and was quietly killed in November. The film was better than the work. Everyone knew the film was better than the work. That is not a scandal, it is the format doing exactly what the format is for.
Add the entry fees, the shipping, the delegate passes, the rooms in Cannes at Cannes prices in the third week of June, and you have a number any CFO could have read aloud at any point in the last decade. Sadoun read it aloud. That is the entire scandal.
The film was better than the work. Everyone knew the film was better than the work.
None of which means awards are worthless. Juniors pick agencies off the reel, and a Lion still moves careers in a business with almost no other portable proof of quality. Strategy in particular has never had a scoreboard anyone respects. But those are talent economics, not client economics, and clients have been paying for talent economics without an itemized line for years.
Here is the part that should worry the Croisette. Publicis has set up a test it cannot control. If the work coming out of those agencies over the next twelve months is no worse, and no client notices the absent trophies, then the awards were never the standard. They were the receipt. And a receipt you can skip for a year without consequence is a receipt somebody else is going to skip next.
Tuesday I was at the usual place in Southeast, sticky floor, host who calls everyone baby, and I did an ambitious thing with a Fleetwood Mac song that I will not be defending here. No jury. No case study film. Forty people clapped because they felt like clapping, which is the only feedback loop in my life that has never once been gamed.