Where are all the Lemons?
Australia's annual celebration of newspaper advertising, The Caxtons, was held in beautiful Byron Bay over the weekend.
Winning a Caxton has never been easy and this year was no exception.
Awards were given in only 11 out of a possible 20 categories.
Categories where no award was given included automotive and charity.
Yes charity.
I remember when charity was one of the most popular categories.
Strangest figure to emerge over the weekend, was that 51 ads were nominated as finalists.
At first I thought that was a reasonable number considering the high standards expected by the jury.
Then I thought about it for a little while. And that's when the figures became a bit of a concern.
Every city in Australia has its own daily newspaper. Some cities have two or three. We also have two national papers.
Given that these papers are published pretty much every day of the year, that adds up to a lot of ads.
Better make that a hell of a lot of ads.
And since only 51 of them were considered worthy of the affections of the Caxtons' judges. that means we only produce one great print ad a week.
One single solitary print ad in the whole of Australia.
Oh dear...
posted by Stan Lee at 11:23 pm
4 Comments:
With stats like that you'd have to say that newspapers are kinda like junk mail that you pay for!
A good newspaper ad used to be the benchmark for strong single-minded ideas. As a junior I strived to be clever enough to make good press ads. These days people strive to do good TV.
The reason why 20 years ago a junior could do a good press ad was there was scope for quirky small space executions. These days the media dollar has been redistributed with electronic media, DM and more recently, out of home, point of sale and promotions inluded more heavily in the mix.
I think the results at the Caxtons show that there aren't many single-minded campaigns that extend into press. To Rupert's point you find that the big stake holders in press advertising are now the retailers. Could this eventually lead to the death of the Caxtons?
Can I put it out there and say that the blame is not with the talent, it's with our country's fearful, static, and far from visionary or brave clients?
Good point Age. However we can't blame everything on our clients surely?
I think part of the problem with print media is it is a medium that generally, but not always, requires words. And, given that everyone has a keyboard on their desk, everyone thinks they can write.
So copy doesn't get questioned by the client, it gets changed or rewritten by people who tend to say, "I'm no Copywriter, but..."
Yes clients are partially to blame, but agencies need to better manage them and their expectations.
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