Quantifiable results, beautiful writing and cultural relevance is key to winning a Cannes Lion award, according to three judges.
Despite that on average every Cannes session had some form of AI angle this year, the winning work was largely human-centered.
And this human-centred mindset is key to winning the world's most sought-after creativity award, three of Australia's most senior advertising leaders said on stage at the Advertising Council Australia's This Way Up festival..
Publicis Groupe CEO Michael Rebelo, who judged the creative effectiveness category, said judges have to get quite forensic.
"Where it got really tricky was trying to decipher between causality and correlation, because effectiveness is not just about the adjacency or the indirectness of ideas that contribute to a result," Rebelo said.
"You've really got to show how the idea drove that outcome. That causality is really critical because that's what changes a bronze to a gold."
For the judges, these awards are a time capsule, the winners will be benchmarked as the best work at this moment of time.
The stakes are high so judges look at every entry detail with a fine tooth comb.
Accuracy and truth in entry results is paramount said WPP ANZ president Rose Herceg, who judged the creative data category.
"We had one guy on our jury with an electrical engineering degree, so every time somebody mentioned AI he would actually deconstruct whether or not AI was used," Herceg said.
"So we would look at every detail, we would do our own research online to see if one thing is really not.
"This is accountability. You're going to get busted if you're not being very honest about the results and for me the great work in our category was all about growth."
Rose Herceg, Michael Rebelo and Tara Ford on stage at This Way Up.
The craft of writing an effective entry is also essential to a Cannes top gong.
"You'd be surprised how easy it was to discount some entries because even the best work had really lazy [writing]," Rebelo said.
"Get really forensic about the categories you're entering and make it easy for a juror.
"We're reading 2000-3000 pages over the course of four weeks, so join the dots, make it simple and remember, this is a selling exercise too.
"Impressions tends to be something juries [don't care about], results have to be about sales and quantifiable brand love."
Similarly, Herceg said bad writing kills her.
"Lose the buzzword, lose the jargon, lose the stuff that just does not matter and write simply and beautifully. Short sentences and simple English," Herceg said.
"Get somebody not in our industry to read it. It's incredible how much we like to trip ourselves up with fancy language.
"In the creative data category, those that have simple, beautiful writing that argued their case well, with irrefutable impact they immediately made the short list."
Cultural relevance was another aspect of winning work, Accenture Song APAC & LATAM chief creative officer Tara Ford said.
An example of this was from the French telecom brand Orange's work for the country's Women's National Football Team.
"Part of why I liked it was because I saw that piece not in my job or advertising channels, someone [outside of the advertising industry] sent it to me," Ford said.
"So I love the way that that piece worked because it was a piece of work the industry did that was really brought into culture."
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