Nine people I used to work with posted the same photograph yesterday. Blue water, white boats, a glass of rosé held at the angle that tells you the picture was taken by someone standing up.
Cannes is running all week, and my feed has become a slideshow of the Croisette.
I have sat on the entry side of this. I have written the case study video script at eleven at night, the one that makes a regional radio promotion sound like a moral achievement. So I know the arithmetic. Entry fees per category, delegate passes, flights, the dinner nobody expenses honestly. A mid-size shop can spend more on one festival than a client spends on a full quarter of paid media.
And no human being has ever bought a bag of chips because of a Lion.
Everybody on that beach knows it. They know it the way you know your own address. The entries go in anyway, more of them every year.
The awards circuit is not a marketing expense, it is a recruiting and retention budget wearing a marketing costume, and agencies would spend it far more intelligently if they said so out loud.
Look at who actually changes behavior because of a trophy. One, creative directors, whose entire career currency is work they can put on a screen in a room. Two, the twenty-six-year-old art director deciding whether to stay another year or take the in-house offer with better hours and a dental plan. Three, the recruiter who now has a reason to call her. That is the audience. Clients barely make the list. I have watched a lot of marketing leads choose a partner, and I have never once watched one choose by metal.
None of which makes the spend stupid. Talent is the only asset an agency actually owns, and the shows genuinely move it. What makes it stupid is the pretense. File the money under new business and you will be measured against new business, you will fail, and then somebody will cut the line item in a soft quarter without any idea what they just cut.
Name it correctly and you can manage it. You can ask which shows the people you want to hire actually care about, which is a real question with a different answer every two years. You can send the junior team instead of the partners. You can decide that two categories entered properly beats nine entered hopefully.
And no human being has ever bought a bag of chips because of a Lion.
Truffles spent this week asleep on a stack of last year's entry PDFs that I printed for reasons I can no longer reconstruct. Barnaby has not once asked how we did. It is a useful audience to keep around.