World: The changing face of the Cannes ad festival.

Is burgeoning senior staff and client attendance threatening to relegate the work to a sideshow, James Hamilton asks.

If there's any question over whether the Cannes Lions are still booming under the festival's new owner, Emap, ask the owners of the Croisette 72 - better known as the Gutter Bar - which had to call in a second drinks delivery at 3.00am on the Friday morning to cope with the braying throng and its apparently insatiable thirst. Cannes was record busy, with numbers up across the board - and not just in the bars.

Take the awards - for some, the raison d'etre for the whole week. Entries were up 18 per cent on the previous year (although the addition of two new categories - Radio Lions and Titanium - accounts for 6 per cent of that growth). Jurors on the Press and Outdoor category had to sift through almost 12,000 entries; film jurors got off lightly with just under 5,000.

Official attendance figures from the festival organisers are more vague: around 8,000 delegates, and its conservative estimate for those who turn up with no intention of making it to the Palais des Festivals is another 8,000. But most agree that there were way more visitors who were in Cannes and connected to the industry than that combined total would suggest, and a good number of them were clients.

This, along with the swelling numbers of senior network staff, is changing the face of a festival that used to count its general air of anarchy and decadence as a unique selling point. Yes, the amount of creative work on view is up; yes, the conference schedule is evolving into a more robust, practical programme. But the presence of so many senior staff and senior clients is lending a new tone to the festival and a focus on a different type of work: the serious, meeting kind.

'There's been a movement away from informal to far more formal meetings,' Richard Pinder, the Leo Burnett EMEA president, says. This year's festival was his first for six years, and he points to a noticeable difference in the type and frequency of meetings being held throughout the week.

Paul Silburn, a former TBWA\ London deputy creative director and now the North American creative director of Fallon Worldwide, agrees. He is one of many senior managers who believe that the festival has now become incidental to all the other industry activity that now accompanies it.