Do What You Cannes To Tighten The Belt

Excess baggage is the blight of air travel. You know the problems: it costs you an arm and a leg, you have to go and stand in another queue, your partner shouts at you for buying too many books and if you are as heavy as I used to be, you worry each time you go to the airport that you will be charged extra just for being yourself.

Robbo once had to pay the EB fee to get himself aboard a flight back from East Timor – he was a big boy on a small plane from the land of little people.

Excess baggage is also a problem for big companies. Some have made it redundant by cutting out the travel itself.

We are all trying to loose excess baggage - even Government claims to be doing that. The Opposition did their bit earlier this week.

In my case I have lost 42 kilos of excess baggage in the last 6 months but more about that in another column when I know Wilcox, the cartoonist, is on holidays.

But travel hasn’t entirely come to halt. Ten Australian advertising executives are jetting off to Cannes this weekend to judge the Cannes Lions Awards. These are the industry’s world awards to show how good you are at winning awards.

The dilemma we all have, including Louise who knows the name of every town in provincial France, is “how do you pronounce it”? Is it CARN, as in “carn the blues”, which is what people say who still wear corduroy jackets and listen to Philip Adams on Radio National.

The other camp pronounces it CANS, but we all know that they don’t what they are talking about.

The media section judge from Australia is Henry Tajer of Universal McCann (not McCarn) who I think sees himself as a bit of a young lion anyway. Tajer’s company won an award last year for the campaign for Meat (carne in neighbouring Spain of course) and Livestock. Henry must have thought that this would have been a monty to bring home the bacon but not necessarily so. Winning international awards doesn’t always guarantee success in the real world - Tajer’s company dropped 21% in billings last year – no bull.

With that in mind the agencies of the world seem to have got the message that staying home is a good thing. Campaign submissions this year are down 20% from the last year to 22,000 and the drop of delegates getting the excess baggage story on the way home is a crushing 40%. Traditional media categories took the biggest hits. Press entries are down 32%, film entries dropped by 25% and outdoor entries minus 23%. Promotion and Design entries increased as advertisers put more weight into this type of work.

The ten Australian judges might look a bit conspicuous given the size of our industry beside the giant US Ad sector that is15 times bigger than us with just 27 judges. Seems that the champions of free enterprise are taking over government to surprising new lengths.

Charlie has been predicting for a while that we are at the beginning of an upturn in the advertising business in Australia.

So being away from the office chewing the fat on the French Riviera might not be such a good look to the client’s back home. Louise thinks that my worrying about Australian judges at the Cannes LIONS might be a bit of paranoia and sour grapes. I have been invited a few times over the years but never thought I would look good bathers along side the industry big wigs – but if I keep shedding the excess, who knows!