Perhaps he was a little bit disappointed that the Loeries, held for the first time at the Cape Town Convention Centre, (which, albeit are not exactly the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, does lend a certain European atmosphere) was so damn polished and slick.

I wanted to tell him (and others for whom this might have been a first Loerie Awards) about the days of the Big Top in Margate, agencies vying with each other in boas and bling, inflatable beach toys and balloons batted about everywhere, the gees at fever pitch - instead of the polite hush that now envelops the auditorium. These days it's the media that is more of a circus, but that is another story!

As it was, a scrubbed-up Loeries ceremony celebrated the best creative output from the South African, greater African and Middle Eastern ad milieu on Saturday 20 and Sunday 21 September, circa 2013.

A new type of soapie

As a key sponsor of the Awards, Unilever, which also hosted an industry lunch over the course of the awards weekend, would have been pleased with the number of awards won for purveyors of FMCG goods.

I'm not a fan of pesticides myself. If the good Lord saw fit to put critters on this earth, far be it from me to stop them, nevertheless bug killers are always fertile ground for awards, and this year is no exception. With another scoop for TBWAHunt Lascaris for the Doom Wall of Shoes]].

That soap is a fertile creative ground is this year demonstrated by Y&R South Africa's Soap for Hope initiative, germ stamps from
Havas Worldwide - Middle East, Dubai and the
Carex billboard
from Ogilvy&Mather Africa's Kenya outfit, which is made out of garbage, [the billboard not the agency] to illustrate the many lurgies you can contract by handling dirty money. You can see more here.

The high quality of meaningful entries from Africa may indicate that the long promised sleeping giant of Pan-African creativity has finally awoken and that, despite any Euro-centricity of format, we're going to be seeing a lot more award-worthiness from the continent in the coming years.