The year the Loeries came home to roost.

The 2024 version of Africa's biggest advertising awards show was always going to be a watershed moment, and this past weekend the reckoning arrived in full force for South African agencies.

In a year delivering one of our poorest showings on the international awards scene, the judges left blood on the walls, and after extracting the winners from whatever available resource (more on this later), there's a few things we as an industry can discuss and ponder.

The birds are migrating North.

The agencies from the Middle East are now the perennial big winners at a show where SA used to dominate. We can debate the effect this has on the Loeries until next year's show, but what is undeniably undebatable is that the work coming from this region is conceptually stronger, beautifully executed, and presented in case studies with the budget of a small Hollywood passion project. They are now setting our own bar for us.

The indies are coming for it all.

Back on our shores, the independent agencies are showing everyone else how it's done. Joe Public rightly won agency of the year with work that has them standing head and shoulders above any other shop in the country at the moment. But across the board, a multitude of smaller creative houses are eating their way to the top with much-deserved recognition going to Halo, The Odd Number, Promise, Boomtown, Retroviral, and many more.

Flailing in film

As is the case every year, the chicken brands delivered film pieces that swept the board but outside of that the pickings were slim. Our biggest red flag should be that a country where the 30-second commercial takes up probably 90% of our country's TV media spend, not a single South African commercial got awarded in the category for TV and Cinema up to 90 seconds. This wrong gets righted with a better performance in the other categories, but one can't help but wonder how much the testing and subsequent tweaking through research affects the age-old 30 second spot.

The tumbleweeds blew hard on social media.

How in 2024, is there no way to see the winners as they are announced? The Loeries account on X was last updated in 2023, and there were no signs of any life during the entire Creative Week to see what's happening, feel some of the vibe, or most importantly track any form of winners list. Instead, we were left scrambling around for updates from BizCommunity, iDidTht, and other industry-covering accounts to see what's what.

Harsh judges or average work?

It was probably a bit of both, and it resulted in a perfect storm that we can only hope serves as a desperate wake-up call for a country that's always been somewhere around the top 10 of creative regions in the world. With all the furore around our Cannes performance, a statement had to be made, and whether intentionally or not, the judges for the most part delivered. There were 1260 finalists (a process that needs some relooking in the future) which delivered 250 Loerie awards, giving a conversion rate of just over 19%, with only 1.75% of finalists getting the elusive Gold.

Where to now, dear Oracle?

My dear reader, I simply don't have the answer. And I don't think a lot of us do. Our industry is tired and uninspired. We are facing greater challenges across the board than ever before within our agencies and with our clients, and we have one of the most talented batch of creative workforces in the world that's growing increasingly frustrated with the job they do. What I can say is that there seems to be an ever-so-gentle wind of change blowing when it comes to the kind of work we produce, and as has always been the case, the Loeries reminds us of both how great we can be and how much better we can still get.