Media Decoder: Cannes You Dig It?

Every June, the pooh-bahs of advertising gather in Cannes, France, for the international advertising festival. Nice work if you can get it, as they say. Or perhaps that ought to be reworded as “Cannes work,” since Nice is close but no cigar, festival-wise.

In any event, the zillions of agency folks who are unwilling, unable or un-wealthy enough to attend the Cannes event used to stew silently while their more fortunate colleagues or competitors winged eastward to France. Now, thanks to the Internet, their bitter and jaded japes can be shared with the rest of us.

For instance, an agency in New York named Woods Witt Dealy & Sons has been putting on an annual Wrath of Cannes counter-festival for the last three years, and is returning with a fourth one to be held on June 23.

To keep the puns coming, the theme of this year’s fake festival is “Cannes-tent,” playing off the proliferation of use of the word “content” on Madison Avenue to refer to, well, ads.

And to underscore the difference between the haves and have-nots, participants in the Wrath of Cannes are limited to junior level agency employees with two years or fewer of experience — or no experience at all, for that matter, just to make things more interesting.

Rather than submit to an extensive, and expensive, process by which to enter their work into the mock festival, participants need only bring the ads in question with them to the event, to be held at 7 p.m. at Kabin, 92 Second Avenue between Fifth and Sixth Streets.

More information will be able to be gleaned from a Web site, wrathofcannes.com, that is scheduled to go live on Monday afternoon.

The winner of the parody festival receives a parody trophy, depicting a man performing an act that cannot be described here but in general terms has become synonymous with someone of epic cluelessness...Media Decoder