It’s an interesting exercise to sit down in a darkened room in anticipation of three days of television watching. Three days? You heard right. That’s the investment of time and cerebral energy invested by each one of the judges at the ’94 Bessies. A daunting task in itself to watch three days of television, 12 hours a day – but three days of commercials? Who would believe it? Anyway that’s what nine of us did, and the rest will soon be history.

Initial reaction to the more than 400 entries in the singles category was, after the fog cleared from our eyes, one of disappointment. Sure, we’d all anticipated a wealth of great spots. All those clients the ad guys wish they had and all the spots I didn’t shoot were just waiting to be discovered. Well, it didn’t happen quite that way.

Of course we’d seen a lot of the spots before on air. And we’d seen a lot of them at awards shows, the Art Directors Show in particular. And therein lies the problem. Unaware we were judging the same body of work as judges for the Marketing Awards and the Art Directors Show I was personally shocked at the tremendous overlap these different shows have.

It makes sense that in a year of struggle and intense competition for work these awards would mean a lot to everyone. Most people seem to enter them all, or at least two out of three, or six or however many there are. Winning means a lot in strictly business terms to everyone involved in a production. Everyone loves a winner and clients, all our clients, love to win.

Awards shows are good for business and a good business in themselves. If that was otherwise I doubt there would be so many of them. It’s just disheartening to have invested so much in putting together a great show and to know that very little in the show has not been seen and duly awarded before.

Initial reaction, as I said, was at best lukewarm. Comments from judges like ‘Boy, this industry’s really in trouble’ were typical of the discouragement felt by everyone at not being knocked out by the majority of entries.

There are, of course, many reasons to feel our industry is not entering The Golden Age. Most of them are becoming a familiar litany to rationalize and explain away our very real fears. The economy, of course. Market fragmentation and Death Star. People who prefer reading to watching television. People who prefer channel surfing to watching television and people who just don’t remember your ad. And so on… ad infinitum.

Low budget is low budget. It means a client can’t afford the bells and whistle, it doesn’t mean he’s going to be happy with mediocre, ineffective advertising. And that’s a lot of what we saw.

We tried to award effective advertising first. Budget was the least of our considerations. As a filmmaker I was surprised how quickly I lost that overriding concern for visual quality and became desperate in my quest for simply a strong, fresh idea.

So much of what we judged fell into the category of missed opportunity through safe, formula advertising. Which brings up the subject of the one catch-all culprit in the bid to justify weak advertising – research. ‘It worked in research.’ It’s boring, we know, but it’s simple and my grandmother remembers it. Well, what can we say? That’s supposed to be the point of the exercise, right?

Anyway, from what we had to judge the short list looked very good, and by Sunday night we all felt a little more like we still would have a job same time next year.

There were simply some outstanding pieces of advertising. All well-deserving of top awards in any year, any economy and, yes Virginia, any country.

And, inevitably, yes, the judges won awards. We didn’t rig the voting and we didn’t award ourselves. It just happens some of the best talent in the business was on the judging panel and not by coincidence they created some great spots. Thanks to Dan and some great writing even I was awarded. And I don’t even feel too guilty.

stephen yeates is a Toronto-based commercial filmmaker who works with Circle Productions. Charting an uncommon career path, Yeates, who has been a director for 10 years, two years ago expanded his sphere of responsibility, becoming a director/cinematographer. Yeates’ commercial filmography includes the Canada Trust Counting Kid, Peller Estates, and The Miracle Continues campaign for Dupont featuring carefree children romping about in an idyllic weed-free world.