Saturday was the closing night of the Cannes Advertising Festival and huge crowds filled the streets and bars along the promenade. The Wieden + Kennedy team was there with our Honda UK clients, who won the title Advertiser of the Year. W+K worldwide had a pretty good night, picking up two gold lions for Nike ‘I Feel Pretty’…

another gold for Coke ‘video game’…

…and a silver for Coke ‘Happiness Factory’. This last result was a bit of a disappointment for our guys, as the spot had been widely tipped in advance as a film Grand Prix contender.

Here’s what Ad Age had to say on the matter:

Ultimately the jury narrowed the finalists down to
Dove and three other spots: Sony’s "Paint," from Fallon, London;
Epuron’s "Power of Wind," out of Nordpol & Hamburg; and and Nike’s
"Pretty," from Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Ore., which earned an
additional Gold for best use of music.

"It’s 2007, we’ve got the internet, cellphones, violent video games,
and they took this violent video game and transformed it into a
positive experience," Mr. Mroueh said. "The fact that they sold that to
Coca-Cola was monumental. For me ‘Happiness Factory’ is a great spot
and if there were a craft category, I would have awarded it a Grand
Prix for that. The animation is amazing, but at the end of the day,
that idea didn’t feel worthy of a Gold."

The Festival is a huge affair, with thousands of delegates from all over the world – camera crews, journalists, clients, Al Gore, headhunters, glamorous production company girls in skimpy outfits, and lots and lots of crumpled, sweaty, pissed-up creatives. Everything is over-crowded and over-priced, the waiting staff at bars and restaurants are quite spectacularly slow and rude (so rude on a couple of occasions that it was actually quite funny, but the rudeness may be the result of a week of having to deal with drunk creative directors demanding another bottle of the rose) and it’s all seemingly calculated to put you off the Cote d’Azur permanently.

If you come out of the ceremony clutching a Lion (award) you are besieged by paparazzi on the red carpet just like a proper celebrity at a film premiere.

Below – Dan Wieden flanked by Ken Keir and Ian Armstrong of Honda, after the awards event.

Honda had brought along a special guest to the ceremony – Asimo the robot – who came on stage to greet the audience. I shot some video of this which I’ll try to upload onto here tomorrow.  Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get any video of the fat bloke who ran onstage at one point and stripped off.

After the ceremony there was a big party on the  beach for delegates with an unnecessarily loud and annoying covers band and the drinking went on all night.

Tony Davidson, startled by giant explosion of fireworks:

As I left to catch the early flight home on Sunday morning, there were still a few stragglers making their way home along the Croisette after a night of revelry.

You can get the full results on the official website and watch the main winners. If you feel that way inclined. Check out the Epuron ‘Power of Wind’ spot, which is great