CLOSE-UP: LIVE ISSUE - LIONS DIRECT. This year the Lions Direct jury will place its focus on creative, Glen Mutel writes.

Who'd want to be a Frenchman in New York these days? Well, Wunderman's chief executive and chairman, Daniel Morel, would. In fact, he's been one for the past 26 years. However, in two weeks' time he will return to his homeland to preside over the Lions Direct jury at Cannes.

Morel's summer job is likely to keep him extremely busy. This year there have been 393,050 entrants to the Lions Direct awards - a rise of 5.6 per cent on 2002. These are impressive figures, particularly considering the fact that overall number of submissions to the festival are down by 5 per cent.

Last year's Lions Direct was the first. Now that the award scheme has been established, Morel is adamant that it's ripe for a few important alterations.

'This year we have shifted the emphasis of the judging towards creative,' he explains. 'We have rebalanced the criteria so that 40 per cent of the grade is devoted to the creative quality of the work. I pushed for 50, but I got 40.

'A further 20 per cent of the final mark is for the execution of that creative piece. So, altogether, 60 per cent of the judging is related to the creative product.

'Although we'll be looking at work by big clients, we're not told how much money each one has spent on a particular programme, so we'll be judging these pieces on the standard of the idea and on the execution.'

Morel started his career as an account man at Ogilvy & Mather. He has also worked for Saatchi & Saatchi, as the EMEA director on Procter & Gamble and IBM.