Codegate Plays Key Role in Cannes Lions Festival for 8th Year in a Row
07/09/2010
Codegate's enterprise mobility software has once again helped to ensure the success of the 57th Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, held earlier this summer in France. Codegate's solutions continue to speed up the judging of the awards and enable the organisers to easily and quickly register and monitor more than 6,000 attending delegates.
"One of the key reasons I originally selected Codegate as our preferred enterprise mobility solutions provider was because of its open and honest approach,' explained Carolyn Lowery, Festival Director at Cannes Lions. "From the outset Codegate proved to be flexible, adaptable and very pro-active. We have continued to work closely together ensuring that Codegate is constantly able to tailor its voting solution and its delegate registration and tracking software to meet the unique demands of our advertising festivals in Europe and Asia.'
Established 57 years ago, the Cannes International Advertising Festival is the largest event of its kind with more than 22,500 advertising campaign entries from all over the world. Winners receive the highly coveted Lion trophy which honour the most creative film, print, outdoor, interactive, radio, design, sales promotion & activation and integrated advertising, as well as the best media, direct marketing, PR and Titanium ideas. The Festival runs for seven days and includes the judging of entries as well as a programme of seminars and workshops.
"Codegate initially developed an electronic voting system, just for the film category, to replace a paper based system which had required judges to register their votes by writing them onto an entry form. The votes were then manually entered into the Festival's bespoke back office system which was a time consuming and error prone process.' added Lowery.
Codegate's electronic voting system integrates with the Festival's back office system enabling the judges to cast their votes via hand held computers. The voting data is then automatically uploaded to the back office systems at the end of each day, eliminating the need for the Festival to employ a large number of temporary staff to manually process the votes, often late at night.
"Following the initial trials around the voting for the film entries, we quickly saw how effective Codegate's solution was in delivering a speedy and accurate judging process, at the same time as reducing our administration costs,' said Lowery. "The decision was then taken to roll out the Codegate system for use by our 180 plus judges across other entry categories.'
The Codegate team is always on site during events and through the observation of the Festival's processes is able to recommend new developments.
"It became clear to us that the judges had to review huge amounts of support material for each advertising campaign entry. This material arrived in a huge range of different formats which meant the Festival organisers had to use a wide array of different devices to present the material,' added Terran Churcher, CEO, Codegate. "Reviewing the material for the judges was a costly, time-consuming and cumbersome process. We recommended a move to a completely digital solution and developed Media Launcher, a bespoke software application.'
Media Launcher enables all of the supporting material to be loaded onto any PC instantly making it a complete library of items to be reviewed by the judges. Because the Media Launcher software understands the schedule to which the jury is working it presents this information in an intelligent, timely and orderly manner, making the whole review process a lot quicker and easier.
Media Launcher also provides the Festival organisers with visibility of which judges have voted on which category, enabling a gentle nudge to be given to those judges who have yet to cast their votes.
"We have also worked closely with Codegate on tailoring its delegate registration and tracking software to allow us to manage our 6,000 plus delegates more effectively. The Codegate solution enables us to verify delegate details at registration and their picture is taken via a webcam,' continued Lowery. "Delegates are then issued with a colour coded badge which includes a personal barcode and their photo. The colour denotes which days of the event they can attend and the barcode relates to their individual registration details.'
Codegate has further developed the delegate registration and tracking solution to allow the Festival organisers to gather additional delegate data by scanning the barcode on their badge as they enter seminars and workshops. The data collected now forms an important part of the post Festival analysis, showing which delegates attended which seminars and which workshops were the most popular.
One of the most recent developments Codegate has delivered for Cannes Lions is the availability of interactive delegate kiosks. Equipped with a PC or Mac, running Codegate's interactive kiosk software and located throughout the Festival's venue, the kiosks allow delegates to review all kinds of festival material such as: judges details, campaign entries from specific countries, short lists of individual awards, and which awards have been announced. This material is constantly updated throughout the festival ensuring that delegates always receive up to date information.
"Codegate is also working on a number of other developments for us, not just for Cannes Lions, but also for our European awards competition, Eurobest, our Middle East and North Africa awards, the Dubai Lynx and our Spikes Asia event,' concluded Lowery. "Codegate's solutions help to make our events run even smoother and ensure that we maintain our position as organisers of the most prestigious advertising events in the world. We have come to regard Codegate as a key and much valued member of our Festival teams.'