No Grand Prix.
For the first time since 2011, the ADCN jury looked at a year of Dutch advertising and decided nothing deserved the top prize. In 21 subcategories, zero Lamps awarded. Zero gold in Advertising.
Disclosure up front: our Ziggo film, made with Holy Fools, picked up two nominations this year. So I'm not writing this from the outside, and I'm grateful for the recognition. The full finalists list is in the link, you can check out the work there too!
But the bigger picture is hard to ignore. The industry response has mostly been about whether the bar is too high or the work too weak. I think that question dodges the real one: The work is weak because the system that produces it has stripped out every mechanism that used to make it good.
No risk allowed. No negativity allowed. No friction, no tension, nothing that goes wrong.
Every brief comes back sanded down. Every edge gets rounded off in legal, in brand, in marketing review (testing). The interesting version loses to the safe version, every time. I've watched it happen on my own projects: a darker beat killed in revision, a real conflict softened into "a moment of pause," a sharp idea diluted until it tests well and lands nowhere.
What's left is the 2000s happy ad. The American pharmaceutical aesthetic. People walking through fields in soft light, a problem that was never really a problem, a resolution that means nothing. Side effects read by a calm voice. That's where every brand wants to live now..?
But storytelling needs contrast. Humour needs contrast. Emotion needs the negative space to make the positive land. You cannot have a punchline without setup, and you cannot have setup without something being a little bit wrong.
Strip the wrongness out and you get vibes. You get mood boards. You get "content." You don't get work that wins a Grand Prix, because there is no Grand Prix to win.
This is the same disease as risk aversion in creative work generally. Clients won't allow it. Agencies won't push for it? Directors learn not to pitch it. The whole pipeline is optimised to produce nothing memorable, and then we act surprised when nothing is memorable.
