I never do dinners and have a couple of lunches a year,” he said.After presenting Mr Brodin’s award, Barbara Cassani, the chief executive of low-cost airline Go, offered moral support to the analyst community, under fire this year for its failure to publish more “sell” recommendations. “The markets are so volatile right now that it’s a bit hard to blame analysts.”Caroline Randall, a utilities analyst at JP Morgan Chase was voted leading “rising star”. She put her success down to making controversial calls on stocks such as a buy recommendation on National Grid and a “sell” on Scottish Power. “There aren’t many TMT analysts that have shone this year,” she said.

“My recommendations have gone the right way and we’ve broken away from the noise by analysing the parts of companies that others gloss over.”She postponed celebrations yesterday until well after the market had closed, as she would be sipping champagne at a National Grid investor meeting in the evening anyway.UBS’s energy and utilities teams took the top two slots in the sector category, helping the bank win leading brokerage firm for equity research. John Chester, UBS’s head of European research, said fund managers had chosen to reward those banks regarded as having truly independent research, but cautioned: “It’s hard to stay number one.”Christian Cowley and Phillip Oakley, the ABN Amro analysts behind the negative research note that ejected Railtrack from the FTSE 100, failed to obtain recognition. By contrast, Merrill Lynch’s property team, whose research was recently slated by British Land boss John Ritblat, won in their category. It was otherwise a bad year for Merrill Lynch, falling from first to third place in the leading brokerage category, and slipping further in the fund management award, this year won by Fidelity Investments.The ceremony, at the Guildhall in the City of London, had none of the razzmatazz presentations about the New Economy put on by the hosts, Thomson Financial, last year. Instead, Michael Grade warmed up the crowd by engaging them in a Who Wants to be a Millionaire style audience vote on where the FTSE would be in a years’ time.

It turned out to be a £1m question: the audience, including many of the City’s finest brains, voted in almost equal measure for the four 500-point trading ranges between 5,000 and 7,000.”I wouldn’t bother going back to your offices I’d just hang around here,” quipped Mr Grade. The crowd loved it.In the same game, only 8 per cent of the audience said the LSE would remain independent. Almost 35 per cent saw it falling to a takeover, while partnering with a European rival, while 58 per cent reckoned it would partner with a European rival.Michael Spencer, the chief executive of Garban InterCapital, used his stint in presenting an award to comment on the result. “The future for the LSE is to look for projects in Europe, and I wholly support Clara Furse [its chief executive],” he said.. This is adland’s Oscars, complete with sun, sea and sand and all the shenanigans of a creative elite coming together to compete for prestigious awards. But next week’s International Advertising Festival in Cannes (16-21 June) will be more than a junket for Sarah Sturgess, 22, and Lena Ohlsson, 27.

The pair will represent the UK in the seventh Cannes Young Lions Creative Competition ­ not bad going less than a year out of college, and for an all-female creative team, too.In the shoebox office in Saatchi & Saatchi’s creative department where they have been squatting since December, Sturgess and Ohlsson can’t quite believe their luck. Not only have they won the chance to represent the UK in Cannes, courtesy of D&AD (the British design and art direction association); they have just been offered staff jobs at Saatchis, having spent the past six months working there for free.
It took an innovative idea for a new campaign for Wranglers jeans and an impressive “book” ­ the portfolio of dummy ads any creative wannabe needs to get a foot in an ad agency door ­ to secure their tickets to the south of France. “D&AD runs a young creative competition each year,” Sturgess explains. “This year the brief was: do something for Wranglers with a Wild West theme, and bear in mind the brand’s claim to be the ‘authentic’ jeans.”Ohlsson and Sturgess came up with a cinema ad featuring a young man whose badly injured hand is not the result of a ranch injury but an accident at the local supermarket where he works. “The idea was that ‘authentic’ is about what real people wear,” Ohlsson says.