60 years of the Cannes Lions

Associated media

Amy Sargeant takes a look at some of the most memorable advertising campaigns of the past six decades

Game Changers: The Evolution of Advertising, edited by Peter Russell and Senta Slingerland

Game Changers is something of an amalgam, commemorating 60 years of the Cannes Lions, delivering a selection of prize-winning film, print and digital campaigns, interspersed with brief ‘Eye Witness’ accounts from PR executives, copywriters, photographers, designers and other practitioners. Taschen, of course, makes something of a speciality of coffee table publications and its catalogue includes various compilations of typical ads, decade by decade, in addition to broader historical surveys. Philip Thomas, chief executive, Cannes Lions, imagines that there will be ‘furious debate’ about Game Changers’ selection.

British readers will remember the dominance of the 2012 Olympics by particular privileged partner brands (and the timely acquisition by Coca-Cola of the Innocent smoothies brand); Game Changers recalls the significance of the launch of Ridley Scott’s ‘1984’ advert for Apple: ‘Whoever won the Super Bowl’s advertising breaks was now every bit as important as who won the game’.

The significance of technological developments and exchanges between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media is acknowledged in both commentary and campaigns. Veteran ad man (and ‘game changer’) Sir John Hegarty claims that ‘at its core’, advertising is still storytelling: ‘The question for today’s communicator is, where do I place my stories and how do I do so, so that as many people as possible see it and pass it on? Again, technology has liberated the process as never before’. Another ‘Eye Witness’ account observes that ‘the Web doesn’t have a Super Bowl you can buy your way into’.Game Changers applauds witty ambient ads for Google voice recognition and ‘The Three Little Pigs’ for The Guardian, broadcast on television and acknowledging the appearance of the newspaper (a frequent reporter of ads as news) online. Fallon UK’s ‘Gorilla’, for Cadbury (featuring a set evoking the distinctive purple, gold and silver wrapping and a chunky, chocolate-coloured character) rapidly spread online, ‘picking up millions of viewers globally and prompting numerous parodies. Critically, Cadbury encouraged this digital life, even going so far as to take one of the user-generated mash-ups as the basis for a follow-up commercial a year later’.

Game Changers is a predictably thick and shouty book with quantities of blank, brightly coloured shiny space against which are laid sound bites set in bold, upper case, sans-serif lettering. Pictorially, it mostly celebrates the final execution of campaigns and there is relatively little of the practical background analysis of tools, strategy and presentation provided, say,  by Pete Barry’s Advertising Concept Book, reviewed separately in this issue of Cassone.

Game Changers: The Evolution of Advertising  edited by Peter Russell and Senta Slingerland is published by Taschen 2013. 308 pp.ISBN 978 3 8365 4524 2