Editorial: Best of British talent took on the world ... and won.(Editorial)

A relentless gloom has pervaded British advertising for so long that it often stops those involved from not being able to see the silver linings for the clouds. This being the case, it's easy to adopt a Jeremiah-like attitude towards the latest Gunn Report, which reveals the UK ad industry won more creative awards than any other country in 2006.

And the good news doesn't stop there. The UK's world-beating performance was even better than that of the US, which has been pushed off the top spot for the first time since the Gunn Report first appeared in 1999.

So why is there no dancing in the streets of Soho and Covent Garden? Perhaps because the findings do not seem to square with the anecdotal evidence. This year, awards-night audiences have not exactly been bowled over by the quality of the creative work on show. A cynic might even suggest that the report demonstrates it wasn't British creatives getting better, more that those elsewhere just got worse.

But to hell with that. While client procurement specialists continue threatening agency investment in the creative product and ad budgets remain depressed, the best of British creative ...