While the curtain officially goes up on the 2016 International Festival of Creativity with the Health Lions on Friday, judges have already started reviewing the work—and they have a lot of work to review.
Festival organizers announced Wednesday morning there were 43,101 submissions this year, up 7% from the 40,133 entries in 2015. Just five years ago the entry total was 28,828.
Much of the increase this year is due to the introduction of two competitions—Digital Craft with 1,150 and Entertainment Lions for Music with 637. But, without those new categories, entries were still up roughly 3% and there was growth in 18 of the 24 different Lions competitions.
The Festival has introduced a number of new competitions in recent years. Often interpreted as simply a way to increase revenue—early bird entry fees in most categories was €499 this year—the Festival has said it was evolving beyond advertising to reflect shifting attitudes about creativity in marketing and branding. And the entry tallies suggest there is interest.
The Product Design Lions for example, which only launched in 2014, saw a 92% increase in submissions: 538 from 280 a year ago.
In the release announcing the “record-breaking award entry numbers,” the Festival also highlighted the interest in what it called its specialist streams: Lions Entertainment (new for 2016), Lions Innovation and Lions Health.
The Entertainment Lions include what was previously called the Branded Content & Entertainment Lions (up 32% from last year) as well as the Entertainment Lions for Music.
The Pharma Lions (583 entries) and the Health & Wellness Lions (2,024 entries), together constituting the Health Lions, were up 35% and 42% respectively. The Creative Data Lions (715 entries) and Innovation Lions (381) also showed strong growth of 16% and 69%.
“We’re seeing evidence that the role of startups in the branded communications ecosystem is key, with new businesses and their products not only buoying entries to these two Lions, but driving deep into others as well,” said Lions Festivals chairman, Terry Savage.
Conversely, some of the other more traditional Lions competitions are down this year: Radio dropped to 1,410 from 1,720; Print & Publishing dropped from 4,470 to 3,775; Film dropped from 3,070 to 2,801 and perhaps most surprisingly, Cyber dropped from 3,738 to 2,886 (though it’s likely the new Digital Craft Lions would have had an impact here).
Once again this year, Outdoor is the most popular competition—by a large margin—with 5,365 entries up from 5,037 a year ago.
With the Health Lions running Friday and Saturday, the main Festival gets underway Sunday with the first awards gala Monday night.
And agencies complain that they aren’t making any money. Always find dollars for submissions & travel to Cannes plus the millions of hours (across the industry) that it takes to create the pseudo work that makes up about 25% of the submissions and the case studies with made up stats and english-accented voice-overs.
Wednesday, June 15 @ 4:00 pm |