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Mystery, intrigue and subterfuge as Cannes cheats push their luck

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In this week’s installment, Monsieur Pound wonders whether recycled ads in this year’s Cannes Lions are an indication of declining creativity, immoral agencies or unobservant organisers. And he also looks at the similarities between Good Health magazine’s viral video and a similar Volkswagen experiment conducted in Sweden.

Print is the hot topic coming out of the Cannes Lions advertising festival. This year saw entries in the venerable print category drop 41 percent. And this ad for Scrabble out of Mexico was all set to win the Grand Prix. The only problem was they had entered it in 2008 and it didn’t even place.

Re-entering is a no-no so this campaign for Billboard magazine ended up as replacement winner. It shows what makes up music, with Bono represented by pics of David Bowie and Mother Teresa. But the plot thickens: more ads were shown to be recycled and again an also-ran from another year ended up set to win this year. In fact, we saw three campaigns stripped of awards, including a Havianas and Proctor and Gamble campaigns. Busted.

What does this mean? Has creativity fallen so far that last year’s cast-offs are this year’s winners? Do ad agencies have no morals by breaking rules? Does nobody check this stuff?

Anyhow, on a better note here is a Cannes winner that wasn’t resubmitted from last year, a video called a different ending for a campaign trying to get people to stop using weapons. In this pick a path style adventure you can make good or bad decisions by clicking choices on the screen.

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Choose a different ending if you take good choices, like going home, things are okay. If you take bad choices, like picking up a knife, things get messy.

And how about this: Good Health magazine versus Volkswagen. Inspiration or plagiarism?

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