What If Award Winning Ads from Cannes Became Open Source for Anyone to Use?

This week is the Cannes Creative Festival and so there are plenty of the usual healthy jokes about Cannes being a yacht-party fueled satire of itself. Criticism aside, awards have always been meaningful to celebrate great work and motivate creative people … but the problem is that in past years most Cannes award-winning campaigns quickly seem to disappear. As McCann Worldgroup Chief Strategy Officer Jitender Dabas explains:

“Celebrated ideas frequently get shelved. Creators chase the next big award-winning concept, while others hesitate to touch existing campaigns for fear of appearing unoriginal. This is a colossal waste. Powerful ideas, lauded on the grandest stage, shouldn’t fade away. It’s a missed opportunity for humanity.”

The solution Dabas proposes is to suggest that perhaps some of these world changing ideas should go open source—made available to non-profits, small businesses and anyone else who might benefit from trying to recreate their own versions. It’s a fascinatingly non-obvious idea precisely because it seems to counter exactly the narrative we hear when it comes to celebrating creativity.

What happens to IP rights or creativity itself if we think about open sourcing great ideas? Yet the dirty truth about advertising is that great ideas rarely belong to the creator. They are owned by whatever client paid for them. And those clients tend to be fickle, rarely sustaining their investment or support even for impactful award-winning ideas beyond a typical campaign season.

So, ideas get retired, shelved, forgotten and lost. In this world, the idea of making these ideas open source so they might have sustained life makes a lot of sense. Having Cannes be the catalyst to make this happen is perfectly logical. If there was ever a big idea worth funding a yacht party to share with the industry insiders at Cannes right now, this might be it.