The Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, one of the premiere global awards events for advertisers is feeling the recession. According to an article in AdAge today, this year’s event saw a 20% decline in entries and almost a 40% decline in attendance.
It seems that as brands have been cutting back on their budgets, agencies are reining in their own spending. Less money means less entries in awards events and, of course, less attendance. I wonder if this decline will only last through the recession or if we’ll be seeing a general shift away from celebrating agency creative work in festivals like Cannes.
While I certainly think that good work should be awarded and celebrated by the creative community, it seems that the lesson of the recession is to focus more on ROI and measured campaigns that produce results, than on good-looking work. Still creativity and risk taking are very important to innovation and I would hate to see this suffer because agencies were playing it on the safe side.
http://adage.com/article?article_id=137300
