Poor old Phil Thomas. The chief executive of Cannes Lions already looks knackered. To be fair, he’s been here now for over a week, and has just spent all morning overseeing the first batch of a dozen press conferences. The press conferences mark an opportunity for the jurors to explain their reasons for awarding what they did, a relatively thankless task when you have a load of journalists querying as to why their country failed to win anything. Even before this interrogation started, the jurors all looked shattered too, but I suppose you would be if you’d just spent 5 days holed up in a dark room staring at hundreds of different bits of work.

With the few shortlists already made public, we’re already beginning to see a real trend. Yesterday you may have noticed that I started a blog post with a rather poor joke linking the festival to the World Cup. But in the end, it may not be far from the truth – Brazil, with a staggering 82 nominations in Outdoor and 68 shortlisted pieces of work in press, are simply destroying everyone else. 

Of the other countries, Germany and France are featuring heavily, as are India and Australia. As for the UK, well we still just about appear to be holding our own (well, apart from in radio anyway). UK agencies have a good number shortlisted in media, and have made a marked improvement in outdoor too.

But then again, that’s just the shortlist stage. Now those nominations need to be converted into Lions. Simple…