Last winter I found myself in Canada for the first time in my life. In the middle of moving a family, finding a house, trying to remember the names and faces of 80 new coworkers and tons of new acquaintances, finding the best steak in town and learning to speak Canadian, Anna Tricinci comes up to me and tells me about the First Cut Awards. (See report p.S-7)

‘It’s an award that we’ve done for years, the prize is a trip to Cannes…we’ve had some great directors, great judges…we have a great party afterwards…but I don’t know if we should do them this year, maybe skip a year…the industry yadda, yadda, the economy yadda, yadda, yadda…but I REALLY want to do it, it’s REALLY great for the agency, it’s REALLY great for the industry…and it’s REALLY great fun.’

Think about it, it would have made sense to cancel them. I mean, we are in the middle of a recession, advertisers are cutting spending all over the world, agencies are shrinking, merging or disappearing, some of the biggest names in commercial production in the world went bankrupt and productions that streamed to Canada seemed to have come to a stop or migrated to warmer temperatures around February.

Add to that the fact that the number of submissions to the First Cut Awards has been shrinking by about 30% a year since 1999 and almost all the new reels you get are from established foreign directors trying to expand their possibilities, a hiatus made a lot of sense.

When you take an even harder realistic look at it, it seems almost impossible that the First Cut Awards survived so long. How many countries in the world can pump out 15 to 20 new directors every year that have work to submit? The Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase at the Cannes Advertising Festival struggles to find more than 20 noteworthy entrants out of the hundreds they review each year. Why would Canada consistently deliver that many?

And the truth is it doesn’t.

Not if you constrain yourself to the known world of advertising – a world that Saatchi & Saatchi as a network has been moving out of for the past four years; a world that clients like BMW and the most independent and creative agencies like KesselsKramer, 180 and Mother have already moved beyond; a world that seems outdated and some marketing guru tries to kill every five years.

Not unless you move into the world of ideas.

Because in the end that’s what directing is all about. Whether it’s a commercial, a video installation or a feature, it’s about conveying an idea, a thought, a point of view, a surprising insight or emotional message to a viewer. It’s about doing it in 30 seconds or the length of a song. Saying it with words or suggesting it with pictures. Expressing something you have deep inside or portraying someone’s sales pitch. Doing it with $500,000 or $0, your money or their money. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that there’s an idea at the beginning of the process and there should be an idea at the end.

That’s why I love the idea that in my new home, Canada, in the middle of a recession, an industry slowdown when we’re all feeling the pinch, 27 passionate young talents have cut for the first time.

Mariano Favetto is creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi, Toronto.