At approximately 9:47 on June 29, Scott Fessler, Katsin/Loeb’s creative assistant, ambled up to me and murmured, "I think we just won a Cannes Gold [for the Cybercash campaign]."
"Obscenity, obscenity," I calmly responded. "You gotta be blanking me, and have you told Frank and Annie (art director and producer, respectively)?"
"No," he replied. "I thought you’d want to."
"Okay," I said, barging into Frank’s office. "Put down the freaking phone."
Panic ensues. We check with source A, who says no. We check with source B, who says maybe. We check with JGF, the production company, who says yes. Frank says nothing—he lies on the floor, twitching.
We are still unsure.
Scott gets the lady from Cannes back on the phone. I pick it up and snappily say, "Bonjour," in a pathetic attempt to establish my continental bona fides. A cool British accent replies: "Do you people have difficulty believing me?" "No," I reply. "It just has to do with the business—you get used to heartbreak."
Approximately 36 insane hours later—featuring an encounter with the airline’s lost baggage service followed by a 30-minute desperation shopping spree—Frank and I were on stage hoisting a Lion toward the cheap seats.
At least they didn’t whistle at the work.
A brief digression here: there are folks who believe that awards are the sine qua non of the business. Others believe awards are pure ego poison. I recall the client who threatened to fire me if we ever even entered a competition with his work.
Screw him.
My own sense is that awards don’t change a life or a career; they don’t necessarily always single out the best work; they certainly aren’t often fair. But they do provide, above all, a legitimate inspiration. An award proves that an ingenious solution is worthy of recognition. They set standards to which we can and should aspire. And that not only benefits us individually, it works to the client’s great advantage in motivating us to search unrelentingly for that rara avis—a brilliant idea.
This is a good thing.
But back to our story.
Standing on the Cannes stage is a singular disappointment. You are invited up; you make whatever fool of yourself you care to; you shake hands with the Jury Chairman; 30 seconds later you return to a front and center seat doubtlessly previously occupied by a far more famous butt than your own.
Only later does it sink in.
San Francisco insularity notwithstanding, you realize that there’s a whole global community who actually cares about the work. You know this because a whole lot of strangers come up to congratulate you.
Your art director, unwilling to let the magic go, wakes you up at 8:00 fully two days later to announce a) he was back in the hotel and b) he’d spent the last 14 hours celebrating with the writer of the Grand Prix-winning campaign.
More people you never met congratulate you on the campaign.
You get caught in an air traffic controller strike and grab the last two seats out of Milan—the kind that keeps your knees in your chin for 12 hours. Getting there is a story in itself (I learned that my agency driving nickname is "The Neck Snapper".)
You carry the Lion into the agency where people muse, "Damn, that sucker is heavy."
All to the good.
But here’s the rub. To win the Lion, something that you always thought possible when you started an agency, is the sweetest moment of all. And if it took 12 years, so what?
That sweetness lasts until you start to wonder: Can we do it again?
We’ll see.
