Is Cannes Lions the New Versailles?

Two majorly extravagant cultural events came to an end last week. Cannes and Versailles - the raunchy miniseries that reached its murderous, buttock-heaving conclusion on BBC2. 

I couldn't help but reflect on the delicious parallels between the two events. 

Because the comparison with Versailles gives a pointer as to which side you take on the great 'Cannes - in or out?' debate. 

Are you on the side of the FCB culottes or Publicis sans-culottes. Are you sticking or twisting on the annual orgy of self-congratulation? 

First, I have to declare my hand. I'm with the Sun Kings. I love Cannes. 

I love the brazen, back-waxed bravura and bodacious brashness of it all.

I love the fact that auteurs and data specialists rub shoulders with Chief Creative Officers and network heads in the interest of cultural advancement. 

I love the performance and the seminars, the waft of celebrity, the theatricality and the edification. 

I love the unashamed exhibitionism of massively well-paid people taking a big domaine d'ott-fuelled bow in the sun. 

Who wouldn't? 

Just as Live TV coverage of the Oscars offers those mandatory close-ups of the failed nominees, so Cannes offers that essential frisson of FOMO for all industry creatives. The shudder of exclusion when you scan the shortlist and your work isn't on it. 

No doubt in its time, Versailles exercised the same magnetic fascination on the less feted artisans of Paris before its star waned. 

I'm no Mary Beard, but I do know that the dream of Versailles came to an end with the French Revolution. 

The people eventually had their say. 

For Louis XVI, Versailles was to be the new cradle of culture - a playground of power and a seat of divinely ordered authority. 

The Palace was to stand for millennia, an eternal kick in the teeth to the prosaic and plodding state - and the symbol of a golden age of art and literature, for which the arch patron was the sun-king himself. 

The Palace itself was to contain a Hall of Mirrors so that Le Roi Soleil could bask in his reflected magnificence and munificence. It was a bucket into which taxation taps poured the coffers of an obliging nation and was never full. 

The cultural and artistic mavens of the day gravitated to his court - Molieres was a regular, as were painter Charles Le Brun and composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. 

But the more the courtiers of Versailles dabbled in statecraft whilst sticking two fingers up at the great unwashed living just outside its manicured acres, the more they stretched the credulity and patience of the people they ruled - and the more out of touch they became. 

Until the elastic snapped. 

Far from being the genesis of a new era of the divine right of monarchy, Versailles turned into a mausoleum to the last gasps of the Ancien Regime. 

Moving from the Palace of Versailles to the Palais des Festivals in Cannes.... 

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity grew out of the Cannes Film festival because a group of cinema screen advertising contractor kingmakers believed that the sun kings of advertising films should enjoy similar preferment. 

The Festival has moved around a bit during that time, toggling between Venice, Monte Carlo and Cannes before settling on the Croisette as its natural home. 

Cannes heralded a golden age for advertising folk - an age in which successful creative people could bask in the sun and in their own unassailable talent. 

And it grew exponentially to the three-ring circus that it is today. 

Those who are there now bestride the world. Those who aren't there shun it but secretly hanker after it. 

Yet the more that Cannes Lions rewards the beauty of our industry - the tech-driven, stunningly crafted and daringly different - the more it loses touch with the very people the awarded work is supposed to serve. 

That's because what the great unwashed outside its palm-fringed promenade think or do has very little bearing on whether a piece of work is awarded or not. 

Like King Louis's Hall of Mirrors, Cannes isn't reflecting the prevailing mood of the world at large or even that of clients, just the starry priorities of creatives. 

In simple terms there is no correlation between awarded work and sales or business growth. Nor is there necessarily between awarded work and popular sentiment. Burger King's burning restaurants is brilliant and brave but it comes after Grenfell Tower has seared its way into a nation's consciousness and has had a similar effect on the people of New York. 

I have friends there who have seen in the high-rise aflame a revival of past nightmares. 

People are feeling more than ever that brands are failing them - that they just aren't addressing their true needs. 

And the same is true of tech - the darling of the Palais des Festivals. 

Banks, supermarkets, booking engines, comparison sites, fast food restaurants, doctors' surgeries, transport. You name it. Automation is dictating the tempo of people's interactions with brands, too many of which have become faceless as a result. 

Automation cannot fully accommodate key moments in people's emotional states, moments when they may require human contact or more control. 

So the decision by Publicis to step away from Cannes to focus on AI (for one year) is laudable if the point is to focus on how tech learns about and predicts the meaningful moments in people's lives, to facilitate human interaction, not replace it. 

Anything that brings people closer to brands is a good thing. And Publicis clearly feel that purpose is not currently being served by awarding Lions to work without any hard evidence of its impact on people. 

That's a watch out to those who will be back in the Cannes' pleasure grounds next year. 

As one historian wrote of Versailles: 'Little by little the old world crumbled and not once did the king imagine that some of the pieces might fall on him'.