It has a few eccentricities, but the Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards remains the preeminent European awards scheme recognising film and video for brands, charities and governments. The 2017 entry field was strong at almost 1,000 dolphins were awarded.

Looking at both the winners and non-winners, it’s clear the focus is on production values. Film after film reveals stunning imagery, emotive music and squadrons of drones supporting every conceivable aerial angle. Effectiveness is skimmed over, so this isn’t the place to look for compelling engagement data. It’s all about what’s on the screen.

The outstanding film was without doubt ‘The Heart of Trade,’ billed as a Danish/UK production by M2Film with Green Cave People for Maersk. It won no fewer than eight awards including the coveted ‘Grand Prix for Best Film,’ and M2Film grabbed the Black Dolphin for ‘Production Company of the Year.’

M2Film is headquartered in Copenhagen while ‘The Heart of Trade’ director Malcolm Green is based in London. To work out who was top dog of UK producers, we analysed who won what from four different perspectives: golds won, number of winning projects, total awards won and total score by weighting. We then calculated who performed most consistently across all four measures.

Eighteen UK producers picked up trophies in Cannes, including in-house teams at Shell Creative Visual and HSBC Now with MerchantCantos. Casual Films, HSBC, Media Zoo, Plastic Pictures and Woodhouse Video Production all won two awards, but the top spot was a closely-fought battle between Pink Banana (4), the Edge Picture Company (4) and Pretzel and Peggy (5).

We don’t automatically pick the night’s winner by who won the most awards because some are harder to win than others. Pink Banana’s trophies included a coveted Black Dolphin for ‘Best Music’ for Joe Flory’s score on ‘RBeats,’ one of the craft categories where only one award is made. The Edge won three golds including two for ‘Sextortion,’ already a multiple award winner elsewhere; outstanding performances from both agencies.

The Moving Image top dog of UK producers in Cannes is Pretzel and Peggy. They not only won three golds but the company’s trophies were spread across four projects for four different commissioners – internetmatters.org (‘Internet Matters’), Royal Sun Alliance Insurance (‘Learning Zones’), Natwest/RBS (‘We Can Do This’) and M&C Saatchi (‘Anti-Smoking Film’). The work shows consistently excellent storytelling across a range of themes, brining business topics vividly to life.

And those eccentricities I mentioned? It’s no disrespect to M2Film that perhaps the longest applause of the night went to Deutsche Welle’s ‘Trump’s Ties.’ Bad dress sense is one thing the creative industries can unite around.

For the full list of winners, many with links to videos, click here.

Steve Garvey is CEO at Moving Image