Advertising Spoken Here

Five weeks after its glamorous film festival, the French Riviera town of Cannes once again becomes the scene of a major international competition. Top filmmakers from around the world — from Argentina to Yugoslavia — offer their work. World-class directors like Ridley Scott and Spike Lee capture the moment. Performers from Madonna to Mickey Rourke play to collective fantasies. But this time there is one crucial difference: most of the movies flash by in 15 to 90 seconds.

This is the other Cannes festival — the 38th International Advertising Film Festival. Here some 4,500 art directors, copywriters and filmmakers gathered to assess nearly 4,000 of the world’s top television commercials. Schmaltzy or sexy, slick or surreal, suspenseful or satirical, the hottest spots were awarded 80 gold, silver or bronze “Lions” by a 23-member international jury.

The U.S. always submits the most entries: 781 this year, followed by Britain with 387, Spain with 336 and Japan with 318. But it no longer wins the most awards. The recent explosion of commercial TV in Europe, Asia and Latin America has fostered a burst of freewheeling talent. This year’s grand prize went to a stylish French commercial (also aired in the U.S.) in which a lion and a tawny woman climb up opposite sides of a mountain, and at the peak the woman outroars the lion for a bottle of Perrier. Another winner was a spectacular English spot for Reebok sneakers in which a Mohawk steelworker sprints and leaps atop an Atlanta skyscraper. The ad is so scary that it was banned from British TV. Overall, Britain won the most Lions — 20 compared with the U.S.’s 14. Australia and Spain tied for third place with nine awards each.

One U.S. entry met a shocking rebuff. It is a lump-in-the-throat spot about Mike Sewell, a youth born with Down’s syndrome, who found a job and happiness at McDonald’s. The crowd in the giant auditorium at Cannes greeted it with raucous boos and whistles. “This is the most vicious, cynical, jaded audience in the world,” said Marcio Moreira, creative director of McCann-Erickson Worldwide. “They don’t like to have their emotions manipulated.”

The reaction was a reminder that advertising, no less than any other art, bares the psyche of a nation. “Schmaltz is an American idiom,” said Moreira. “We’re a people who cherish wearing our feelings on our sleeve.” Along with wavy fields of grain and golden, hazy images of plump grandparents, another American penchant is for the hard sell: buy because it tastes good, or because it works better.

By contrast, the British are embarrassed by the direct approach, preferring humor. “British ads are funnier because the British themselves are funnier,” says Dutch adman Bart Kuiper. One cheeky British spot, titled The Hopping Pecker, shows a cartoon image of a male organ knocking at a red heart-shaped door and being refused entry until it coifs a condom.

Humor is rarer in France, which goes for abstract, elegant and often surrealistic images (such as the Perrier-on-the-mount spot) with no direct message. In one French ad, a handsome man picks up a svelte woman on the road and drives her home through a thunderstorm as they exchange long glances. It turns out to be a spot for Renault — but it says little about the car. In contrast, German ads are mostly blunt: Buy Soviet-made Ladas, one East German distributor exhorts, because they cost no more than secondhand West German cars. Italy’s gold winner is a frankly self-mocking spot with shots of fully , dressed men adjusting their underwear in public. “We’ve cured Italian men of a bad habit,” intones the announcer, leading into a pitch for Johnny Lambs boxer shorts.

As for Japanese ads, it seems only the Japanese understand them. One baffling spot features a man eating a parking ticket in front of a meter maid; I LOVE OSAKA, says the kicker. “The cultural gap is so great,” commented Allen Rosenshine, chairman of BBDO Worldwide and president of the Cannes jury, “that it is almost impossible for the West to appreciate Japanese commercials.” But the Japanese clearly have cachet. One prizewinning Italian spot for oven paper has a Japanese delivering the sales pitch in his own language, without subtitles. For most viewers, his body language must suffice.

With the world’s economy in a downturn, many industrial clients opted for safe, conventional pitches, leaving some of the most daring filmmaking for public-service spots. Torture, smoking, rain-forest destruction, homelessness and global warming are among the issues that prompted 209 such entries. A heart-stopping British ad against incest shows a little girl lining her stuffed animals against her bedroom door to prevent her father from entering. Most controversial was an Australian insurance company’s antispeeding campaign, showing violent car crashes with screaming victims and dying, bloody children. It won a gold Lion — and a chorus of angry whistles from the audience. “Terrorist advertising,” charged French television producer Jerome Bonaldi. But BBDO’s Rosenshine defended the spots’ “irrevocable impact,” saying, “You’re never going to forget them.”

The prevailing serious mood was mirrored in the growing use of ecology as a selling tool. In an irreverent German spot for Mercedes-Benz, a man admires his gleaming sedan with its catalytic converter, then climbs onto a bicycle instead and rides away. “We can never really do enough for the environment,” says the narrator. An offbeat British ad shows a Navajo trucker trying to send smoke signals from his exhaust pipe to friends across a canyon. It doesn’t work because he has switched to Shell diesel fuel.

Even that old advertising standby, naked female flesh, was rare in this year’s festival. True, one Norwegian ad shows a jolly couple making love. But then they pause, and the woman winds up her partner with a huge key. Declares the voice-over: “Det Nye is the magazine for girls who make their own decisions.” In another feminist campaign, the latest Maidenform underwear spots from the U.S. invite viewers to contrast today’s free-form lingerie with the historic oppression of women within bone- and wire-framed corsets and bustles.

In Europe audiences flock to movie theaters early to watch the commercials and break into applause for the best ones. Americans are more casual, even disdainful about ads, but when they gather at their back fences or around office water coolers, they discuss them as avidly as they do the shows that surround them. The five-day Cannes festival celebrates the wit and imagination that prompt that interest. As New Zealander John Doig of the McCaffrey and McCall agency put it, “We come here to remind ourselves that ads don’t just sell. They also make the little hairs stand up on the back of the neck.”