Opinion: Perspective - Taking advertising's temperature on the Croisette.

After six months consuming advertising rather than writing about it, a few days in the south of France with the cream of the ad industry sounded like a gentle reintroduction into the business.

How wrong ... of course, Cannes is adland at its most potent, excitable and exciting. And while it remains an irrelevance to the vast majority of people working in advertising (yes, sun-tanned ones, it's true), few senior executives were missing.

I'm sure everyone who went and everyone who didn't are by now thoroughly fed up with the whole affair and it will be ... oh, at least a few more weeks before the diktats circulate about snaring a prize next year. But as a …