CANNES, France—The 59th edition of the Cannes Lions festival is now under way. (Check out Adweek's full coverage at adweek.com/cannes all week long.) But when the festival debuted in 1954, it wasn't called the Cannes Lions. It wasn't held in Cannes. And while the big prize was a Lion trophy, it was inspired by a monument in a different city entirely—the lion of Piazza San Marcos in Venice, where that first festival took place.
The motivating emotion for having a festival at all, of course, was envy. The International Film Festival had been staged in Cannes since the late 1940s, and members of the Screen Advertising World Association (SAWA), a group of cinema screen advertising contractors, felt that advertising films deserved their own show.
