Cannes International Advertising Festival 2011

Advertising is all about desire. About longing. About pleasure. Essentially, advertising is about our fantasies.

Wow, sounds a lot like cinema, doesn’t it? Movies put us in a fantasy world for a couple of hours; advertising tells us how to buy our fantasies in about 30 seconds.

It’s no accident, then, that the best ads are also miniature movies – funny and entertaining, emotional and dramatic, powerful and persuasive – and that they are designed to grab us by our hopes and dreams and shake us until our wallets come out.

Fitting, then, that the world’s best tv and cinema ads are chosen each year in Cannes, France. In May, it’s home to the most famous film festival on the planet. Then in June, it plays host to the Cannes International Advertising Film Festival. (Here’s a fun fact: this year, the festival has re-branded itself as the Cannes International Festival Of Creativity; we’re going to keep calling it an advertising festival.) Over 4000 film and video commercials from dozens of nations are
submitted to the judges. This year, ad agencies from the Norway, Canada, Italy, Turkey, Indonesia, South Africa, Singapore, Sweden, The Netherlands, New Zealand and many more went head to creative head with the perennial winners from the U.S., U.K., Argentina and Japan. In the end, only a select group came away with Bronze, Silver and Gold “Lions” for their excellence.

These winners, the absolute best of the year’s immense worldwide production of advertising, are collected together and presented in one rapid-fire, eye-popping, mind-boggling feature of fun called the Cannes International Advertising Festival.

The creative people who wrote and filmed these winners know that the audience is jaded about ads. They know that they must make ever more clever, crafty, funny, sexy and arresting ads in order to get and keep your attention. Their ads are winners because they’ve succeeded in rising above the mind-numbing stuff we usually have to sit through. So this 87-minute collection is particularly entertaining because, unlike your usual commercial break on tv, ALL the ads are cool and cute and smart and silly enough to fascinate us for seconds on end.

If your desire is for better ads, if you fantasize about being uproariously entertained, if you get pleasure from a feast of bite-sized films, then the Cannes International Ad Festival is the movie you’ve been dreaming of. We long to see you there!

– Bruce White