The idea that Informa, PLC, the for-profit company that owns the Cannes Festival of Advertising (as well as Warc, and Contagious magazine) is shocked about fraudulent ads winning at this year's Cannes is ludicrous. The notion that they will do anything about it is even more ludicrous.
As anyone can plainly see, Informa, PLC, is making too much money from their festivals to do anything that might endanger their cash-flow.
Four minutes of online research shows that claims of fraud have been swirling around the festival for decades.
What's more, and this might be just a coincidence, one of Informa's top five institutional investors is BlackRock. BlackRock is one of WPP's top six institutional investors. BlackRock is also Omnicom's largest institutional investor, owning about 5-percent of Omnicom. BlackRock also owns about 12.5-percent of IPG and nearly 7-percent of Publicis.
So the people who own the awards shows and the people vying for the awards are owned in large measure by the same investors.
All this is a bit like owning a kids' soccer team and a trophy company. Everybody is walking home with something shiny.
There was a time when "interlocking directorates," that is when one board member was on the boards of two different companies that did business with each other, was frowned upon by regulators.
But the "free world" (which by some semantic legerdemain includes the united states) no longer has regulators. And the ad industry no longer has a trade press that might examine things like this--even if only to preclude the appearance of malfeasance. (Investigative journalism ain't my bailiwick. I have about four full-times jobs and this ain't one of them.)
To my old eyes, Cannes, many other award festivals and the ad industry itself are all good examples of what philosophers might call a "subject-object split." That is, there's a difference between the subject, what is being said, and the object being experienced.
ie: "We care about the deficit. Here's a bill that adds $3.3 trillion to the debt."
I am a fairly assiduous consumer of advertising. I think it's been about 25 years since I've viewed a Cannes winner in the wild.
Most real ad spend (see below) is spent on ISPs selling you crappy service for $200/month. A telco selling you crappy service for $200/month. An auto-maker leasing you a crappy car for $500/month. A pharma company telling you to ask your doctor about a drug if you're not allergic to that drug. Or a soda company selling you diabetes wrapped in forever chemicals.
Broadly speaking, those five examples probably make up about 92-percent of the commercials you see, 92-percent of the world's ad spend.
They win no awards.
No agency takes credit for them.
So, again I'm guessing, the 27,000 entries at Cannes all come from less than 8-percent of all ad expenditure. In terms of statistical relevance, they're hardly a rounding error.
I'm shocked, shocked to find anybody cares.
--BTW,
In my career, I've worked for IBM, Mercedes-Benz, Boeing,
H-P, and a couple other Fortune 100 clients. Many times as the "top" writer on these brands. Over 40 years, I've probably produced fewer than two dozen spreads.
In the wake of the Cannes-fraud "revelations," I do not for a minute believe that Domino's in Mykonos, Greece, whose website looks like this:
has produced four spreads that look like these:
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