“I can’t remember how I celebrated. I can remember the awards do, that’s about it,” Mike Sutherland told shots.net, knee deep in the Riviera sea on Wednesday.
Sutherland is the copywriter of the 2002 Lions Grand Prix winning press and outdoor campaign, for Club 18 - 30. The win for Sutherland, his Saatchi & Saatchi art director partner Anthony Nelson and photographer Trevor Ray Hart caps off the team’s coup of winning a Silver Pencil at this year’s British Design and Art Direction for the campaign.
“It’s great to win a gold,” said Nelson, “but the grand prix… it was fantastic.”
It is the team’s first time in Cannes after four years at Saatchi & Saatchi. “We didn’t realise the size of the festival,” Nelson continued. “There were just literally hundreds of people outside the Palais.”
Nelson reckoned they bagged the grand prix thanks to the ad’s universal appeal, and argued that the campaign’s strength was in breaking from Club 18 - 30’s text-heavy advertising heritage. “It’s just a purely visual idea. A lot of wordy ads don’t seem to do well at Cannes. This is a gag that everybody can get,” he said.
The team paid tribute to photographer Trevor Ray Hart, who was profiled in shots 71. Nelson said: “It was one of those jobs that could easily have been fucked up from the idea to the execution, so he did a sterling job really.”
“He polished the turd,” quipped Sutherland.
Nikolas Studzinski, head of art at Saatchi & Saatchi London, sat on the jury for the Press and Poster Awards which were handed out by Jeff Goodby at a ceremony at the Palais on Tuesday night. “It was a very fair jury,” he told shots.net from a sun lounger on the beach. “I was worried it might be a bit political, but it wasn’t.”
The network’s London agency won awards with not only 18 - 30, but also the climactic Coco De Mer print work photographed by Frank Budgen which won Gold and the agency’s campaign for Multiple Sclerosis which also won Gold.
However, debate raged over the risque, visual double-entendres of the 18 - 30 campaign.
“I’m obviously biased,” said Studzinski, “I thought our work was strong enough to escape any real debate, but I was surprised. MS was universally liked. But Coco De Mer and especially 18 - 30 proved to be more contentious.
“I can understand it,” he continued. “Club 18 - 30 had the question of political correctness. One of the jurors thought it was puerile and smutty. Which of course it is, but in a relevant way. It’s not gratuitously smutty. It’s simply the truth about the product.”
Studzinski placed the credit squarely at executive creative director David Droga’s door.
“David Droga has really turned the agency around,” said Studzinski. “He’s probably the best creative director I’ve worked under. He’s really straight. He likes things to be really simple, which is probably why our work has done so well this year. But he’s brought an Australian attitude to it. Everything is really simple. It’s a lot to do with Dave. In fact, it’s all to do with Dave.”
