Who was top dolphin at Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards?

It has a few eccentricities, but the Cannes Corporate awards remains the pre-eminent European awards scheme recognising film and video for brands, charities and governments. The 2017 entry field was strong at almost 1,000 so if you won a dolphin, you beat a lot of competition. And you can tell people you won a film award in Cannes.

Spend a few hours viewing both winners and non-winners and it’s clear the focus is on production values. Film after film reveals stunning imagery, emotive music and squadrons of drones supporting every conceivable aerial angle. Effectiveness is skimmed over. This is not the place to look for compelling engagement data, it’s all about what’s on the screen.

So who came top of the rankings, and why?

Cannes Corporate overall winners

The outstanding film of 2017 was without doubt ‘The Heart of Trade’, billed as a Danish/UK production by M2Film with Green Cave People for Maersk. It won no fewer than eight awards including the coveted Grand Prix for Best Film. M2Film grabbed the Blue Dolphin for Production Company of the Year. There's a case study of ‘The Heart of Trade’ here.

M2Film's headquarters are in Copenhagen while ‘The Heart of Trade’ director Malcolm Green is based in London. To work out who was top UK producer, we analysed who won what from four different perspectives: gold dolphins, number of winning projects, total awards and total score by weighting.

UK winners

18 UK producers picked up trophies in Cannes, including in-house teams at Shell Creative Visual and HSBC Now with MerchantCantos. Casual Films, HSBC, Media Zoo, Plastic Pictures and Woodhouse Video Production all won two awards. Top spot was a closely-fought battle between Pink Banana (4), The Edge Picture Company (4) and Pretzel and Peggy (5).

We don’t automatically pick the night’s winner by who won the most awards because some are harder to win than others. Pink Banana’s trophies included a coveted Black Dolphin for Best Music for Joe Flory’s score on ‘RBeats’ (see below), one of the craft categories where only one award is made. The Edge won three golds including two for ‘Sextortion’, already a multiple award winner elsewhere. Outstanding performances from both agencies.

So the Moving Image top UK producer in the Cannes Corporate awards 2017 is Pretzel and Peggy. They not only won three golds, but their trophies spread across four projects for four different commissioners – internetmatters.org (‘Internet Matters’), Royal Sun Alliance Insurance (‘Learning Zones’), Natwest/RBS (‘We Can Do This’, see below) and M&C Saatchi (‘Anti-Smoking Film’). Their work shows consistently excellent storytelling across a range of themes, bringing business topics vividly to life.