American Agencies Won Only One TV Gold at Cannes and That Was A Controversial One

United States agencies won about 23 percent of the Grand Prix and Gold Lion awards at the 2009 Cannes Advertising Festival. However, they fared surprisingly poor in Film categories designed for television commercials, winning only one of those eleven awards.

That one Gold was won by the JWT (J. Walter Thompson) agency in New York for a pair of controversial spots made for MTV. The two commercials ridiculed senior citizens in an effort to get young people to vote in the 2008 Federal election.

One spot shows an elderly couple having trouble understanding airport security officials. The other portrays an elderly man unable to find the right button to answer his phone. Both spots end with text saying "Old people outvote young people 2 to 1. Choose or Lose."

Ridiculing old people, and hinting that most of them have dementia, does not make either commercial the finest 30 seconds in the American political process. The spots would probably have been shamed off the air as racism or sexism if they had portrayed other segments of the population in that manner. Where is AARP when we need it?

The awarding of a Gold Lion to the commercials does not speak very highly of the Cannes judging criteria.

Neither does an Internet video produced by The Viral Factory in London for Diesel Product Service, a British clothing firm. Even the agency said, in submitting the entry, that the video was "incredibly crass" and we might ad "tasteless." But then it boasted that the video had "achieved over 14 million views" on the Internet.

Cannes cheapens its many great Lion winners by putting the MTV and Diesel Product entries in the same Gold room with them and by encouraging similar submissions in the future.