Media Forum: Is Cannes of any real value?(media agencies)

Do the awards serve any purpose for media agencies, Alasdair Reid asks.

How embarrassing. The media agency of the year at Cannes this year wasn't a media agency at all. Forsman & Bodenfors Gothenburg, the winner of the Media Grand Prix for an integrated on- and offline campaign for AMF Pension, is a creative agency.

Its widget-oriented initiative allowed 25-year-olds to submit photos of themselves to a site and an application morphed the image to show them what they'd look like as pensionable 75-year-olds.

But it gets worse. All three top Cannes media slots went to creative agencies - Leo Burnett Chicago and Dentsu in Tokyo being the other two contenders. It was, you could argue, hard for the media judges to ignore creative agencies this year - half of the record 2,000 media entries came from non-media agencies.

In other words, creative agencies are not only making a bigger impression with the judges, they're trying harder. (And this is perhaps not the place to mention the utter failure of UK media agencies this year either.)

All of this will add grist to the mill of those who argue that the industry is entering a new phase of structural evolution - and that the digital advertising landscape, where there are fewer demarcation lines, is eroding the unique selling proposition of media agencies.

Which, in turn, may help give weight to the creative agency viewpoint (being rehearsed increasingly regularly and with growing vehemence) that, while media networks can be absolutely trusted to handle the money side of things and see the negotiations through, if you want the sorts of big ideas that can shift your business into overdrive, you go to a creative agency.