Monday 29 October 2007

Where are all the Lemons?


Australia's annual celebration of newspaper advertising, The Caxtons, was held in beautiful Byron Bay over the weekend.

Winning a Caxton has never been easy and this year was no exception.

Awards were given in only 11 out of a possible 20 categories.

Categories where no award was given included automotive and charity.

Yes charity.

I remember when charity was one of the most popular categories.

Strangest figure to emerge over the weekend, was that 51 ads were nominated as finalists.

At first I thought that was a reasonable number considering the high standards expected by the jury.

Then I thought about it for a little while. And that's when the figures became a bit of a concern.

Every city in Australia has its own daily newspaper. Some cities have two or three. We also have two national papers.

Given that these papers are published pretty much every day of the year, that adds up to a lot of ads.

Better make that a hell of a lot of ads.

And since only 51 of them were considered worthy of the affections of the Caxtons' judges. that means we only produce one great print ad a week.

One single solitary print ad in the whole of Australia.

Oh dear...