Country Assignment - United Kingdom

Throughout our time at the festival, we observed many things about the agencies that represented the United Kingdom.  adam&eveDDB, Saatchi & Saatchi, and McCann Erikson were three of the major players at the festival this year; McCann Erikson went on to win Agency of the Year at Saturday night’s awards ceremony.  It seemed as if British advertising professionals dominated the festival population.  We also noticed that there is a hotspot of advertising in London, similar to the way that New York and Chicago are considered the advertising hubs of the United States.  The last thing that we observed was that the UK won many awards for work done through advertising and marketing agencies rather than client-side marketing teams for brands, as is the case in the United States.

We expected the UK to resemble American advertising due to the “hotspot” nature of the advertising scene in London, and so we were not surprised when they ended up doing well at the awards shows.  They have been a leading example since the beginnings of the modern advertising industry.  We also expected them to produce similar work to that of the US because it seems that they hold similar values and follow similar trends.

After speaking to several executives from the UK we were surprised to find that most of the people we talked to held a strong sense of pride for their country.  We found their personalities to be blunt and outspoken, always coupled with a dry sense of humor.  Unfortunately, we also noticed that a lot of them were quite full of themselves, not only within their professional lives but in their personal lives as well.

The UK did very well in the awards portion of Cannes Lions.  In total, they ended up winning two Grand Prix awards and fourteen Gold Lion awards.  The Grand Prix awards won in the Digital Craft and Film categories.  The Gold Lions were won in multiple categories, including Film Craft, Entertainment, Integrated, Promo and Activation, Cyber, Media, Product Design, and Design.  Interestingly enough, the majority of these awards were awarded to the “We Are the Superhumans” campaign by the English agency 4Creative.  The UK also took home a little over 50 Bronze and Silver lions.