Festival of the sense of hearing

Cannes Radio Radiospots is still a young
category. It is already attracting a lot of attention - mainly because of the
potential for future TV commercials.
When the Brazilian juror Mario enters the
streets of Curitiba turns up his car radio, a smile flits across his face.
his lips. He knows that nobody can ignore his radio spots. In
Brazil, coverage is almost 100 percent. "There is always
A radio somewhere. Radio is the television of the poor," he says
say.

When a few thousand kilometers further south the Argentinian juror
Ernesto switches on his radio, he smiles too. Nothing gives him such
a lot of fun, like inventing a radio spot. A national
radio campaign in Argentina is much more cost-effective and
more efficient than a TV or poster campaign. That is why
its customers very often opt for advertising via the airwaves or cable.
As a result, it is not only traditional service providers that are
radio advertising, but also for Swiss standards
radio-exotic sectors such as pharmaceutical companies or banks.

When jury president Guillaume turns on the radio in Belgium, the
his heart. Radio is his thing and always has been. "I
liked radio even as a little junior lyricist. The big stars of the
agency were on shoots under palm trees. She doesn't have radio
interested. They just let me get on with it. The customers let
me in peace, too, because there was no storyboard that could be changed.
could. The scripts did not have to go to an international board either.
They were written in Flemish, which nobody understood anyway. And when
it went to recording, wasn't there a cool director with
horse's tail that could turn my spot into something I couldn't
had written. There were only underpaid sound engineers with whom
you could drink a beer and have fun. But then when I saw the
award for the radio spot, everyone listened up. The next step
was mostly that the radio concept was turned into a television concept, as with
the Bud Light Spots 'Real Men of Geniu'."

It's Sunday evening. 8 pm. After listening to all 1064 radio spots
at least once and have discussed ourselves hoarse, is
the shortlist. In general, it can be said that the world order
is restored: At the forefront are the colleagues from the
Anglo-Saxon region and South America. The Norwegians are doing well
and the Belgians. Although my only job in the first 72 hours was to
I have countless movies in my mind's eye
seen. Mario is right: radio is television. The level of
submitted spots is astonishingly high. I was most amused by
I was impressed by a Brazilian radio commercial for an oven system with two
separate heat chambers. You hear a duck with the voice of Donald
Duck with a pig making love, after the climax announces
a spokesman dryly: "If nature didn't want them together, why should
you?" Laughing tearfully, I look to my left into the pale, frustrated
Mario's face. He is listening to Charity Section.

Alexander Jaggy is Executive Creative Director
and member of the management board of JvM/Limmat. He is a member of the jury at the
this year's International Advertising Festival.