Working on this campaign has been one of the most fun projects I’ve done in college. I don’t usually work in a group, but I like doing it, especially on a creative and multi-faceted project like this one. There were so many ideas that my partners had that just never would have occurred to me. I believe that every facet of our campaign turned out extremely well, especially the social and viral aspects, and that in a real-world ad campaign these strategies would work. I almost want to email our campaign to Nike – as in, I feel like we’ve accomplished something good enough for actual use by a client. Of course, this is my first advertising project, so maybe that’s how the first one feels for everyone. In any case I’m very proud of the work we’ve done here and I think it turned out to be a well-thought-out and well-executed campaign.
However, I was not at all thrilled about this project at first: creating an advertising campaign for a new Nike toning shoe, which is basically a reversal of Nike’s product philosophy. I agree with Nike’s former stance – that toning shoes are a cop-out and a joke. Personally, I would never in a million years buy a pair of Sketchers Shape-Ups or even a pair of Nike Bolds, our fictional line of toning shoes. Women don’t need to be encouraged to walk around their block in a pair of magic shoes if they’re trying to get in shape. I agree with Nike in that being healthy takes a whole lot of effort, and being athletic takes that much effort times ten. Toning shoes are for people who want to take shortcuts to fitness, which is to say, people who don’t really want to be fit. They’re for people who want to look thin rather than people who care about their health. So, unsurprisingly, I hated the idea of selling this product.
Our initial idea was to market the shoes as a first step towards better fitness, which is basically the idea we stuck with, although we did tweak it a little bit. As we were sitting in class on the day we received the assignment, my first thought was to make a TV spot that featured a woman getting in shape because she took the first step of buying the shoes. The idea was to show a frumpy and out-of-shape woman picking up a pair of toners and trying them on, and then following with a montage of her beginning to do lots of other health-conscious things – like cooking vegetables, drinking more water, taking the stairs, and eventually doing pilates, hiking, running, etc. By the end shot she would be fit and healthy and happy. Once we got to work in the group, though, this idea was somewhat moderated to include the idea of confidence and being happy with yourself regardless of looks. I’m all about that idea, but it was a bit of a struggle for me – though I didn’t speak up about it – because to me, confidence and health are two separate spheres. If I go for a run it’s not because I want to be prettier, but because I want my body to feel better. Fitness ought to be about doing what’s best for you rather than getting your self-worth from being thin. Essentially, this is the idea that we tried to incorporate into our brand positioning. Taking small steps, like wearing a toning shoe as you’re out and about doing your daily activities, can lead to greater awareness of your overall health and fitness. At least that’s the notion we’re trying to pitch. In reality, I don’t think a toning shoe helps anyone get fit, because it makes it seem like fitness is supposed to be easy.
The work we did is convincing, though. Our various consumer interaction strategies, like the website, app and launch event, are things that I think would draw customers. We wanted everything we did to have a very feel-good message, kind of like Dove’s “real beauty” campaign from a few years ago. We wanted this shoe to be a gateway rather than a shortcut. I think our campaign achieves at least the illusion that buying a Nike Bold shoe really is a first step towards getting healthy. It’s just the sort of things people, especially women, like to hear: you’re beautiful the way you are, Rome wasn’t built in a day, health can be fun, etc. Whether or not I stand behind the product, I certainly do stand behind our work, and I’m glad to have been a part of it.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Commercial Critique #5 – Balloons
MTV Brazil - Balloons
This commercial is just good plain fun. I’m a big fan of stop-motion animation, and while this isn’t quite the same technique, it’s similar. Can you imagine how much time it took to create and orchestrate the drawings on each of those balloons? I mean, there have to be hundreds of them. And each image flows perfectly into the next. This is my fascination with stop-motion; I just can’t wrap my head around making so many little pieces fit together so well.
The music here is fun too, but kind of annoying at the same time, which I’d say is a pretty good summary of MTV as a whole. The whole idea for this ad smacks of youthfulness – the song is a classic remade into something slightly aggravating, the balloons are an obvious nod to childhood, and even the drawings are unsophisticated and childlike. These juvenile elements are precisely what make the ad so simple and fun. It’s the sort of thing a kid would come up with – a flip book made on balloons you have to pop. The shot where they show the popping mechanism is a smart idea, too, because up until that point you’re not entirely sure what’s happening to the balloons, and everything just seems kind of messy.
The drawings do a good job of illustrating “The Music Never Stops,” as well. Each musician gives way or gives birth to some new musician, and the balloons just keep popping, and it seems like the story will progress until infinity. It’s pretty impressive to communicate the idea of infinity using just four different camera angles. Also, can you imagine how easy it would have been for this whole project to go wrong? If the machine screwed up at all there would have been so much work lost. I suppose that’s the price you pay when filming something as simple as this – it’s only simple if you don’t mess it up. This ad makes me smile and it gets its message across without any frills.
This commercial is just good plain fun. I’m a big fan of stop-motion animation, and while this isn’t quite the same technique, it’s similar. Can you imagine how much time it took to create and orchestrate the drawings on each of those balloons? I mean, there have to be hundreds of them. And each image flows perfectly into the next. This is my fascination with stop-motion; I just can’t wrap my head around making so many little pieces fit together so well.
The music here is fun too, but kind of annoying at the same time, which I’d say is a pretty good summary of MTV as a whole. The whole idea for this ad smacks of youthfulness – the song is a classic remade into something slightly aggravating, the balloons are an obvious nod to childhood, and even the drawings are unsophisticated and childlike. These juvenile elements are precisely what make the ad so simple and fun. It’s the sort of thing a kid would come up with – a flip book made on balloons you have to pop. The shot where they show the popping mechanism is a smart idea, too, because up until that point you’re not entirely sure what’s happening to the balloons, and everything just seems kind of messy.
The drawings do a good job of illustrating “The Music Never Stops,” as well. Each musician gives way or gives birth to some new musician, and the balloons just keep popping, and it seems like the story will progress until infinity. It’s pretty impressive to communicate the idea of infinity using just four different camera angles. Also, can you imagine how easy it would have been for this whole project to go wrong? If the machine screwed up at all there would have been so much work lost. I suppose that’s the price you pay when filming something as simple as this – it’s only simple if you don’t mess it up. This ad makes me smile and it gets its message across without any frills.
Commercial Critique #4 – The Entrance
Heineken - The Entrance
A couple weeks ago a few of my friends and I were sitting around at my house watching YouTube videos and talking about new music we’d found. Eventually my friend Michael grabs the computer and says, “Oh you’ve got to check out this band The Asteroids Galaxy Tour – I heard them on some dumb Heineken commercial but they’re really good!” I think this anecdote pretty much sums up the way this ad works. The music is what makes it so lasting, without a doubt, because it’s so catchy and distinctive. In fact, almost all of the comments on YouTube about this video consist of “Great song, what’s it called?” rather than “I love Heineken! What a cool guy!”
The main character is a cool guy though, so I want to shift the focus on to him for a little while. When I first saw this I was reminded of Dos Equis’ The Most Interesting Man in the World campaign (this one is the best), which is a brand I don’t care for very much. Their whole concept for this guy was, obviously, based on the Chuck Norris meme, which is another thing I’m not a huge fan of. Sometimes the one-liners coming out of these two viral trends (is that the right phrase?) are pretty solid, but many turn stale quickly. It’s as if the people Dos Equis is marketing to are supposed to see themselves in the Most Interesting Man. This is a weird strategy, though, because the humor of that campaign lies in the improbability of this man. Both him and Chuck Norris are just fictional characters about which countless jokes can be made. Yet somehow there are still hundreds of people who absolutely love the Most Interesting Man campaign and see it as a cool thing rather than a comic thing. Maybe I’m getting this all wrong, but I do think that the Dos Equis campaign is based around how ridiculous these commercials are, not necessarily how cool the man is.
The Heineken guy in this commercial is another story. He’s relatable, because everyone knows how it is to walk into a party and greet a million people before you grab your first beer. Yet relating to him makes you feel like you are the type of person who attends parties like the one he’s at, which is a good feeling for any consumer. He gives the impression of being liked by everyone – handing the eye-patch guy his eyeball back, feigning battles with two false enemies, playing with the band. The whole commercial just feels like a lot of swanky fun. It seems like a story Esquire would tell, except for the fact that this particular scenario does contain a few clichés. Plus, the song is great. No dialogue is necessary because the song and the characters tell their own story, and it’s a story anyone would want to be a part of.
A couple weeks ago a few of my friends and I were sitting around at my house watching YouTube videos and talking about new music we’d found. Eventually my friend Michael grabs the computer and says, “Oh you’ve got to check out this band The Asteroids Galaxy Tour – I heard them on some dumb Heineken commercial but they’re really good!” I think this anecdote pretty much sums up the way this ad works. The music is what makes it so lasting, without a doubt, because it’s so catchy and distinctive. In fact, almost all of the comments on YouTube about this video consist of “Great song, what’s it called?” rather than “I love Heineken! What a cool guy!”
The main character is a cool guy though, so I want to shift the focus on to him for a little while. When I first saw this I was reminded of Dos Equis’ The Most Interesting Man in the World campaign (this one is the best), which is a brand I don’t care for very much. Their whole concept for this guy was, obviously, based on the Chuck Norris meme, which is another thing I’m not a huge fan of. Sometimes the one-liners coming out of these two viral trends (is that the right phrase?) are pretty solid, but many turn stale quickly. It’s as if the people Dos Equis is marketing to are supposed to see themselves in the Most Interesting Man. This is a weird strategy, though, because the humor of that campaign lies in the improbability of this man. Both him and Chuck Norris are just fictional characters about which countless jokes can be made. Yet somehow there are still hundreds of people who absolutely love the Most Interesting Man campaign and see it as a cool thing rather than a comic thing. Maybe I’m getting this all wrong, but I do think that the Dos Equis campaign is based around how ridiculous these commercials are, not necessarily how cool the man is.
The Heineken guy in this commercial is another story. He’s relatable, because everyone knows how it is to walk into a party and greet a million people before you grab your first beer. Yet relating to him makes you feel like you are the type of person who attends parties like the one he’s at, which is a good feeling for any consumer. He gives the impression of being liked by everyone – handing the eye-patch guy his eyeball back, feigning battles with two false enemies, playing with the band. The whole commercial just feels like a lot of swanky fun. It seems like a story Esquire would tell, except for the fact that this particular scenario does contain a few clichés. Plus, the song is great. No dialogue is necessary because the song and the characters tell their own story, and it’s a story anyone would want to be a part of.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Commercial Critique #3 – After Hours Athlete
Puma - After Hours Athlete
As much as I railed on ads that try and make you all weepy over some dumb product in my first commercial critique, this commercial really did make me all weepy over tennis shoes. I can’t tell if I like this commercial or not, but it certainly affected me. The first time I saw it on the big screen at the festival I had tears in my eyes. It makes you feel nostalgic. It’s so easy to just imagine you and your friends together, doing all the dumb things friends do in each other’s company, playing bad rounds of pool on a Saturday night in downtown Athens. I don’t usually go for that aesthetic but something about this ad makes it seem so meaningful to me.
Actually, as I’m sitting here writing this, it occurred to me that the something that makes this ad seem nostalgic is the music. Those strings laced into the deep-voiced poetry make you feel so sad, while you’re watching images of happiness flash across the screen. It’s that dichotomy between feeling sad and seeing happy that makes you nostalgic, because it’s just like the process of memory. You remember things that you can no longer experience with the sorrow of losing that experience. I have no idea what this commercial has to do with any Puma product and I can’t say I’m any more inclined to buy their stuff after having watched it. But I do get goosebumps every time I see it.
Relating to the characters in this commercial makes you feel as if you’re a character in a film. The story they’re telling is just the average story of any group of friends who go out and have a good time, yet something about the way the script is crafted makes the whole scenario seem epic. The writing for this ad won awards at Cannes as well, along with the sound. The viewers’ ability to fuse their own life story into the story that’s being told makes it seem like a story worth hearing. And this ability comes from the fact that there’s such a multitude of scenes and characters being introduced here. Every few seconds we’re glimpsing another image, perhaps one we can relate to more than the previous ones. These images glide in and out of each other – we see minor triumphs and fails in these various groups of people, and we come to know them in a very short amount of time.
This commercial is good because it’s more like a movie trailer than a traditional ad. You enjoy watching it, you’re moved emotionally, you identify with the characters. But the bottom line is that these characters are just trying to make you want to buy Puma sneakers. This isn’t a trailer; the story ends at the end of the commercial. Luckily it’s a story we all identify with, so we can feel as if we’ll continue the story after we buy our own Pumas to wear. This is the part that gets me though; if that was the strategy they were going for, it didn’t work, at least not on me. I don’t relate Pumas to making awesome memories with my friends or staying up all night wandering the city. From a creative standpoint, this film is great; from a sales standpoint, not so much. In any case, that’s definitely a pretty weepy score.
As much as I railed on ads that try and make you all weepy over some dumb product in my first commercial critique, this commercial really did make me all weepy over tennis shoes. I can’t tell if I like this commercial or not, but it certainly affected me. The first time I saw it on the big screen at the festival I had tears in my eyes. It makes you feel nostalgic. It’s so easy to just imagine you and your friends together, doing all the dumb things friends do in each other’s company, playing bad rounds of pool on a Saturday night in downtown Athens. I don’t usually go for that aesthetic but something about this ad makes it seem so meaningful to me.
Actually, as I’m sitting here writing this, it occurred to me that the something that makes this ad seem nostalgic is the music. Those strings laced into the deep-voiced poetry make you feel so sad, while you’re watching images of happiness flash across the screen. It’s that dichotomy between feeling sad and seeing happy that makes you nostalgic, because it’s just like the process of memory. You remember things that you can no longer experience with the sorrow of losing that experience. I have no idea what this commercial has to do with any Puma product and I can’t say I’m any more inclined to buy their stuff after having watched it. But I do get goosebumps every time I see it.
Relating to the characters in this commercial makes you feel as if you’re a character in a film. The story they’re telling is just the average story of any group of friends who go out and have a good time, yet something about the way the script is crafted makes the whole scenario seem epic. The writing for this ad won awards at Cannes as well, along with the sound. The viewers’ ability to fuse their own life story into the story that’s being told makes it seem like a story worth hearing. And this ability comes from the fact that there’s such a multitude of scenes and characters being introduced here. Every few seconds we’re glimpsing another image, perhaps one we can relate to more than the previous ones. These images glide in and out of each other – we see minor triumphs and fails in these various groups of people, and we come to know them in a very short amount of time.
This commercial is good because it’s more like a movie trailer than a traditional ad. You enjoy watching it, you’re moved emotionally, you identify with the characters. But the bottom line is that these characters are just trying to make you want to buy Puma sneakers. This isn’t a trailer; the story ends at the end of the commercial. Luckily it’s a story we all identify with, so we can feel as if we’ll continue the story after we buy our own Pumas to wear. This is the part that gets me though; if that was the strategy they were going for, it didn’t work, at least not on me. I don’t relate Pumas to making awesome memories with my friends or staying up all night wandering the city. From a creative standpoint, this film is great; from a sales standpoint, not so much. In any case, that’s definitely a pretty weepy score.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Commercial Critique #2 - The Force
Volkswagen - The Force
I loved this ad when it first came out. At the festival they talked about it being a great example of viral advertising, and that’s exactly how it reached me. A friend of mine emailed it to me before I ever saw it on TV and I got a big kick out of it at the time. I love Star Wars so critiquing this ad was kind of a no-brainer for me. What I really like about this ad is how it blends several humanistic elements so well. It’s an argument for believing in magic. Well, let me moderate that statement – it’s an argument for why you should buy a new Passat, but it manages to make you feel so hopeful. This kid’s dejection and exasperation is familiar to anyone who’s ever been a kid. It reminded me of this trick my parents used to play on me when I was little: when they’d see the crosswalk light change from Don’t Walk to Walk, they’d tell me to ask the red light to turn green, and as soon as I asked, the light would turn. For years I genuinely thought I was the master of the traffic lights. This commercial is great because you can just imagine how excited the kid is to think he’s mastered the Force.
Another thing I love about this ad is the way the parents behave. When I first watched it I remember thinking, “Wow, what good parents.” You’re touched by the knowing eyebrow-raise the dad gives as he hits the start button. These are clearly two people dedicated to letting their kids have dreams, and you admire them for it. Volkswagen is really good at making their drivers seem like cool people. Another example of this is the Jetta campaign from a few years ago where all the ads were about the way people stereotype Jetta drivers. I drive a Jetta now and those ads always make me feel proud to drive my car – like I’m part of the cool club. That’s exactly how Volkswagen wants me to feel. They’re a lot like Apple, in that even though I know they’re just pulling advertising tricks on me, the tricks work. I love my Volkswagen even though stuff breaks in it all the time and I’m a loyal Apple customer, in part because their ads have always stuck with me so well.
This commercial does a good job highlighting the car itself in subtle ways, too. That shot where you’re looking outside at the kid from the inside of the car shows off the dashboard wonderfully, but it seems natural because it transitions into that shot in the same way all the different scenes have been transitioning into each other. We don’t even notice that this particular change of viewpoint is showing us the car’s interior. Also, the commercial does a really great job mimicking Star Wars itself. The scene where the kid is walking down the hallway with his Vader cloak whipping around his heels is dead-on. Overall this is just great advertising: it’s funny, intelligent and cute. And it doesn’t hurt to play on such a huge cultural phenomenon like Star Wars – that’s exactly what makes a viral video go viral.
I loved this ad when it first came out. At the festival they talked about it being a great example of viral advertising, and that’s exactly how it reached me. A friend of mine emailed it to me before I ever saw it on TV and I got a big kick out of it at the time. I love Star Wars so critiquing this ad was kind of a no-brainer for me. What I really like about this ad is how it blends several humanistic elements so well. It’s an argument for believing in magic. Well, let me moderate that statement – it’s an argument for why you should buy a new Passat, but it manages to make you feel so hopeful. This kid’s dejection and exasperation is familiar to anyone who’s ever been a kid. It reminded me of this trick my parents used to play on me when I was little: when they’d see the crosswalk light change from Don’t Walk to Walk, they’d tell me to ask the red light to turn green, and as soon as I asked, the light would turn. For years I genuinely thought I was the master of the traffic lights. This commercial is great because you can just imagine how excited the kid is to think he’s mastered the Force.
Another thing I love about this ad is the way the parents behave. When I first watched it I remember thinking, “Wow, what good parents.” You’re touched by the knowing eyebrow-raise the dad gives as he hits the start button. These are clearly two people dedicated to letting their kids have dreams, and you admire them for it. Volkswagen is really good at making their drivers seem like cool people. Another example of this is the Jetta campaign from a few years ago where all the ads were about the way people stereotype Jetta drivers. I drive a Jetta now and those ads always make me feel proud to drive my car – like I’m part of the cool club. That’s exactly how Volkswagen wants me to feel. They’re a lot like Apple, in that even though I know they’re just pulling advertising tricks on me, the tricks work. I love my Volkswagen even though stuff breaks in it all the time and I’m a loyal Apple customer, in part because their ads have always stuck with me so well.
This commercial does a good job highlighting the car itself in subtle ways, too. That shot where you’re looking outside at the kid from the inside of the car shows off the dashboard wonderfully, but it seems natural because it transitions into that shot in the same way all the different scenes have been transitioning into each other. We don’t even notice that this particular change of viewpoint is showing us the car’s interior. Also, the commercial does a really great job mimicking Star Wars itself. The scene where the kid is walking down the hallway with his Vader cloak whipping around his heels is dead-on. Overall this is just great advertising: it’s funny, intelligent and cute. And it doesn’t hurt to play on such a huge cultural phenomenon like Star Wars – that’s exactly what makes a viral video go viral.
Commercial Critique #1 - Slow Motion
Carlton Draught - Slow Mo
This commercial is brilliant in so many ways, chief among them being the fact that it totally pokes fun at the way so many commercials try to tug on your heartstrings. If you weren’t paying attention and just kind of heard this playing in the background, you’d think it was some stupid perfume commercial. It sounds like it’s trying to make you cry. But the ad itself is hilarious. The whole idea of things looking better in slow motion and words sounding better if they’re in opera form are classic advertising tricks. I’m always so embarrassed by the number of ads that make me get all teary-eyed, because they’re always ads for stupid things like cars or jeans. Of course, those ASPCA ads are pretty effective too, but I feel a lot worse crying over a Hallmark commercial than I do crying over abused animals.
The hilarity of this commercial is chiefly in its timing, though. Example: when they guy’s finger gets hit with the pool ball and his shout coincides perfectly with the swell in the song. It fits perfectly and is awesome. Also, the whole premise of men looking better in slow motion is a pretty good one. Imagine if this commercial were in full speed. It’d be exactly the chaos, messiness and vulgarity of your typical sports bar – it wouldn’t be funny at all, it’d just be gross. The slow motion highlights the beer itself really well, too. Notice all the shots of the beer sloshing around in its glass, or bubbles rising up from the bottom of the pint glass. It makes the beer look genuinely elegant, but the commercial’s premise respects the consumer’s intelligence. They know that we know beer really isn’t elegant and they’re laughing along with us. I really like ads that don’t patronize the consumer, and I think this is a great example of one. Trying to sell to me by appealing to my baser instincts (read: basically all women’s products) or making me feel like I would be a happier person if I just had this product in my life usually just annoys me. We’ve all been so inundated with ads throughout our lifetimes, my generation especially, that it’s not hard to spot an advertiser trying to make us feel something false. This ad acknowledges that its product is not going to make you happier – it’s just beer and when you drink it you’re just going to be doing all the gross stuff people do at bars. But it does a great job mimicking those ads that talk down to you and make you get emotional over some silly brand. It reminded me of that great lamp ad Ikea did a few years ago, which is another favorite of mine.
More than anything, though, I wanted to critique this ad because I laughed so hard at it. None of these shots hold back at all, and some of them are completely disgusting. I don’t know the last time I saw such a realistic ad, and they only get away with it by making it in with such an unrealistic tone. Paying attention to the lyrics of the song makes it about a thousand times funnier, too, like at the end when he is seriously just singing “blah blah blah slow motion.” The whole ad is so ridiculous and so effective. I would drink a Carlton just as a thank you to their company for making such a clever commercial. Definitely one of the best ads I’ve seen here.
This commercial is brilliant in so many ways, chief among them being the fact that it totally pokes fun at the way so many commercials try to tug on your heartstrings. If you weren’t paying attention and just kind of heard this playing in the background, you’d think it was some stupid perfume commercial. It sounds like it’s trying to make you cry. But the ad itself is hilarious. The whole idea of things looking better in slow motion and words sounding better if they’re in opera form are classic advertising tricks. I’m always so embarrassed by the number of ads that make me get all teary-eyed, because they’re always ads for stupid things like cars or jeans. Of course, those ASPCA ads are pretty effective too, but I feel a lot worse crying over a Hallmark commercial than I do crying over abused animals.
The hilarity of this commercial is chiefly in its timing, though. Example: when they guy’s finger gets hit with the pool ball and his shout coincides perfectly with the swell in the song. It fits perfectly and is awesome. Also, the whole premise of men looking better in slow motion is a pretty good one. Imagine if this commercial were in full speed. It’d be exactly the chaos, messiness and vulgarity of your typical sports bar – it wouldn’t be funny at all, it’d just be gross. The slow motion highlights the beer itself really well, too. Notice all the shots of the beer sloshing around in its glass, or bubbles rising up from the bottom of the pint glass. It makes the beer look genuinely elegant, but the commercial’s premise respects the consumer’s intelligence. They know that we know beer really isn’t elegant and they’re laughing along with us. I really like ads that don’t patronize the consumer, and I think this is a great example of one. Trying to sell to me by appealing to my baser instincts (read: basically all women’s products) or making me feel like I would be a happier person if I just had this product in my life usually just annoys me. We’ve all been so inundated with ads throughout our lifetimes, my generation especially, that it’s not hard to spot an advertiser trying to make us feel something false. This ad acknowledges that its product is not going to make you happier – it’s just beer and when you drink it you’re just going to be doing all the gross stuff people do at bars. But it does a great job mimicking those ads that talk down to you and make you get emotional over some silly brand. It reminded me of that great lamp ad Ikea did a few years ago, which is another favorite of mine.
More than anything, though, I wanted to critique this ad because I laughed so hard at it. None of these shots hold back at all, and some of them are completely disgusting. I don’t know the last time I saw such a realistic ad, and they only get away with it by making it in with such an unrealistic tone. Paying attention to the lyrics of the song makes it about a thousand times funnier, too, like at the end when he is seriously just singing “blah blah blah slow motion.” The whole ad is so ridiculous and so effective. I would drink a Carlton just as a thank you to their company for making such a clever commercial. Definitely one of the best ads I’ve seen here.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
This Is The End, Beautiful Friend
Well, the festival is now officially over. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t relieved. As much fun as it’s been and as much as I’ve learned, this week wore me out. I didn’t attend any seminars today, as planned. From what I’ve heard I didn’t miss much. The awards show tonight was spectacular, though. The four big categories being awarded tonight were film craft, film, integrated and titanium, along with awards for agency of the year, holding company of the year, etc. I’m inclined to say that Cannes Lions gives out too many awards in general, because every category has a bunch of sub-categories, and it seems like each win gets kind of buried in a sea of other wins. But tonight was cool because we got to watch all the best TV ads (they call TV ads “film”), and also we saw some campaigns with really innovative ideas, which is what integrated and titanium awards are handed out for.
I don’t want to talk too much about the particular ads, because I’ll be doing five separate commercial critiques on my favorites, but suffice it to say that they were really cool. Most of them I recognized, but some of the foreign ones were new to me and really funny. Wieden + Kennedy won big on a lot of campaigns, and they also won independent agency of the year. All week long I’ve been more and more impressed by them. For those of you who don’t know, they’re the guys who did the Old Spice campaign. They’re also based out of Portland, and I love Portland, so bonus points for that. I think they’ve become my top choice for dream agency to work for. I like their client roster as well, and especially the work they’ve done for Nike.
The awards show was a lot of fun and it was quite a spectacle, in typical Cannes Lions style. We all decided to get really dressed up for it so that was cute. Mallory took individual shots of all of us on the red carpet… glamorous. That’s just about all I have to say about our last day at the festival. It’s been a really long week but I can’t stress enough how much I learned. Look for more posts this coming week with some of my other assignments and also stories about the rest of my adventures in France!
I don’t want to talk too much about the particular ads, because I’ll be doing five separate commercial critiques on my favorites, but suffice it to say that they were really cool. Most of them I recognized, but some of the foreign ones were new to me and really funny. Wieden + Kennedy won big on a lot of campaigns, and they also won independent agency of the year. All week long I’ve been more and more impressed by them. For those of you who don’t know, they’re the guys who did the Old Spice campaign. They’re also based out of Portland, and I love Portland, so bonus points for that. I think they’ve become my top choice for dream agency to work for. I like their client roster as well, and especially the work they’ve done for Nike.
The awards show was a lot of fun and it was quite a spectacle, in typical Cannes Lions style. We all decided to get really dressed up for it so that was cute. Mallory took individual shots of all of us on the red carpet… glamorous. That’s just about all I have to say about our last day at the festival. It’s been a really long week but I can’t stress enough how much I learned. Look for more posts this coming week with some of my other assignments and also stories about the rest of my adventures in France!
Friday, June 24, 2011
The Godmother of Punk
Today was another pretty low-key day. First up we had a meeting with Chris Hall, CEO of BBDO Atlanta. He was very nice and down-to-earth, and he managed to cover a lot even though we didn’t have much time to talk to him. Basically he had three take-away lessons for us, the first of which being that creative communication means more effectiveness. Studies show that creative campaigns are eleven times more effective than traditional or unimaginative campaigns, and most of the winners here at Cannes have results to back up their creative work. His second point was that we are living in a golden age of creativity in which the possibilities for both production and consumption are limitless. Lastly, Mr. Hall talked about the importance of collaboration, and how great work is a team sport. It was a good, if brief, talk.
After the meeting I ate a quick lunch and then headed to the best seminar I’ve seen all week. Patti Smith came as part of Grey’s Music Legends series, and she blew everybody else I’ve seen here out of the water. I’ve been really excited about this all week and it lived up to my expectations. Pretty much the whole time she was talking, and especially when she sang at the end, I had goosebumps. All week I’ve been stimulated by the stuff I’ve seen, but I can’t say that anything moved me. Patti Smith moved me. It was a shot in the arm to remember how much more important music and literature are to me than advertising – and not just to me, but how much more important those things are in an overall sense. Listening to her was like reading Rilke or Buber, and that’s saying a lot from me.
It was amazing to hear her stories about living in the Hotel Chelsea in the sixties, and all the experiences she had with people like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Listening to her talk about that time made me somehow heartsick for Bob Dylan, and I’m not sure how to really articulate that emotion any better. She talked about how Jim Morrison was really the first person to combine poetry and rock n’ roll, rather than Dylan or Leonard Cohen. There were people fusing music and poetry before Morrison, like jazz musicians, or Kerouac improvising to the piano, or even William Blake’s song-like poetry. But Morrison was a performer and a poet in a way that no one else before him had been because he was able to commune with his audience so well. She talked a lot, too, about why music and poetry work so well together. While poetry is the most beautiful of all art forms (which is a sentiment I agree with), it can also be one of the least accessible. Music makes the poetry available to people, it mixes the primal with the sublime. Patti said that her music was known for the clashing of the two and I love that notion.
I also really liked something she mentioned at the beginning of the seminar, about how when she attends concerts, she feels no division between herself and the stage. She feels admiration for the performer, but also love and unity. This is one of my favorite feelings in the world and I was so glad to hear her voice it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to see bands whose music I live with every day and felt the same way, felt as if the band and I and the rest of the audience were just together. As if our emotions became one for just that small space of time. It’s kind of like when you hear a song and you think that surely the person who wrote it was inside your head.
Towards the end of the seminar she told us about a conversation she’d had with Allen Ginsberg about bloodlines. Everyone has two: the genealogical and the intellectual. Ginsberg felt that Whitman and Blake were his brothers, and he loved those men and lived with them in a very real way. When Ginsberg died, a portrait of William Blake was hanging on the wall above his head. Patti talked about visiting the graves of the poets she’s loved most just to say thank you to them. I think anyone who loves literature, or any art really, can appreciate this feeling. Writers like Emily Dickinson or Charlotte Bronte are just as much a part of my blood as my own mother and father are. I’ve learned so much from them and many others that I do feel a certain tenderness to and familiarity with them, and I feel thankful for the things I’ve learned.
She closed with the last letter she ever wrote to her longtime friend Robert Mapplethorpe. The letter was an excerpt from her memoir Just Kids, which recounts their time together in the late sixties in New York City. It was quietly beautiful in its sorrow, and now I can’t wait to read Just Kids when I get home, because Patti writes about that kind of sorrow so well. After she read the letter she sang for us, and everyone had goosebumps, and we gave her a standing ovation at the end. Truly the most amazing thing I’ve seen here. I felt that I was in the presence of a legend during her seminar much more so than with Robert Redford. He seemed more like just a very interesting person whom you’d love to have a drink with, while Patti Smith seemed like someone you’d want to spend years of your life learning from. It was nothing short of incredible. After that we did a little goofing off in Cannes and then headed home – I honestly don’t think any other seminar could have topped Patti, so I decided not to attend any more. Besides, I’m getting awfully sick of seminars. Towards the end of the week I began to notice that everyone’s messages kind of merged, and I’m having trouble telling one seminar apart from another. Tomorrow is the last day and I believe I’ll only be attending the awards show at night. I can’t believe how fast this week flew by!
After the meeting I ate a quick lunch and then headed to the best seminar I’ve seen all week. Patti Smith came as part of Grey’s Music Legends series, and she blew everybody else I’ve seen here out of the water. I’ve been really excited about this all week and it lived up to my expectations. Pretty much the whole time she was talking, and especially when she sang at the end, I had goosebumps. All week I’ve been stimulated by the stuff I’ve seen, but I can’t say that anything moved me. Patti Smith moved me. It was a shot in the arm to remember how much more important music and literature are to me than advertising – and not just to me, but how much more important those things are in an overall sense. Listening to her was like reading Rilke or Buber, and that’s saying a lot from me.
It was amazing to hear her stories about living in the Hotel Chelsea in the sixties, and all the experiences she had with people like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Listening to her talk about that time made me somehow heartsick for Bob Dylan, and I’m not sure how to really articulate that emotion any better. She talked about how Jim Morrison was really the first person to combine poetry and rock n’ roll, rather than Dylan or Leonard Cohen. There were people fusing music and poetry before Morrison, like jazz musicians, or Kerouac improvising to the piano, or even William Blake’s song-like poetry. But Morrison was a performer and a poet in a way that no one else before him had been because he was able to commune with his audience so well. She talked a lot, too, about why music and poetry work so well together. While poetry is the most beautiful of all art forms (which is a sentiment I agree with), it can also be one of the least accessible. Music makes the poetry available to people, it mixes the primal with the sublime. Patti said that her music was known for the clashing of the two and I love that notion.
I also really liked something she mentioned at the beginning of the seminar, about how when she attends concerts, she feels no division between herself and the stage. She feels admiration for the performer, but also love and unity. This is one of my favorite feelings in the world and I was so glad to hear her voice it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to see bands whose music I live with every day and felt the same way, felt as if the band and I and the rest of the audience were just together. As if our emotions became one for just that small space of time. It’s kind of like when you hear a song and you think that surely the person who wrote it was inside your head.
Towards the end of the seminar she told us about a conversation she’d had with Allen Ginsberg about bloodlines. Everyone has two: the genealogical and the intellectual. Ginsberg felt that Whitman and Blake were his brothers, and he loved those men and lived with them in a very real way. When Ginsberg died, a portrait of William Blake was hanging on the wall above his head. Patti talked about visiting the graves of the poets she’s loved most just to say thank you to them. I think anyone who loves literature, or any art really, can appreciate this feeling. Writers like Emily Dickinson or Charlotte Bronte are just as much a part of my blood as my own mother and father are. I’ve learned so much from them and many others that I do feel a certain tenderness to and familiarity with them, and I feel thankful for the things I’ve learned.
She closed with the last letter she ever wrote to her longtime friend Robert Mapplethorpe. The letter was an excerpt from her memoir Just Kids, which recounts their time together in the late sixties in New York City. It was quietly beautiful in its sorrow, and now I can’t wait to read Just Kids when I get home, because Patti writes about that kind of sorrow so well. After she read the letter she sang for us, and everyone had goosebumps, and we gave her a standing ovation at the end. Truly the most amazing thing I’ve seen here. I felt that I was in the presence of a legend during her seminar much more so than with Robert Redford. He seemed more like just a very interesting person whom you’d love to have a drink with, while Patti Smith seemed like someone you’d want to spend years of your life learning from. It was nothing short of incredible. After that we did a little goofing off in Cannes and then headed home – I honestly don’t think any other seminar could have topped Patti, so I decided not to attend any more. Besides, I’m getting awfully sick of seminars. Towards the end of the week I began to notice that everyone’s messages kind of merged, and I’m having trouble telling one seminar apart from another. Tomorrow is the last day and I believe I’ll only be attending the awards show at night. I can’t believe how fast this week flew by!
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Revolutionary
Seems like my plan of going to bed early and not getting sick didn’t really work. I woke up this morning feeling worse, but I think it’s just a cold, which is what always happens to me when I don’t get enough sleep and/or get stressed out (read: finals). I went to the pharmacy a little while ago and got some crazy French cold medicine though so I hope that’ll help. Needless to say, I slept in again this morning and missed a couple seminars I’d wanted to attend. Will.i.am had a seminar today but I actually had no intention of going to that anyways… plainly put, the Black Eyed Peas are god-awful. I didn’t go to the Nick Jonas seminar for the same reason. I really just don’t want to dignify such fluff with my attendance, and I’m sorry for how pretentious that sounds, but honestly. Nick Jonas?
I did attend a master class from a really unique Belgian ad agency today, 20Something. They’re entirely run by students who take yearlong internships at the agency. It was amazing to me that they were actually able to attract clients with a premise like that, but apparently they do well enough, and clients like having a young, fresh perspective. The entire program is powered by another Belgian agency, 6+1, who act as coaches to the students. They said they’ve had some considerable challenges since they started the program but it seems to be doing well. How cool would it be to do an internship where you’re actually doing exactly what it is you’d do in a real job, handling clients and all?
Our professors set us up with another amazing speaker today, Amr Salama, an Egyptian filmmaker who was very active in the revolution. He spoke on a panel earlier today but I missed it, and I’m kicking myself for doing so, because he was so interesting. He said that, basically, consumers will use social media to call corporations on wrongdoing in the same way the Egyptians used it to speak out against Mubarak and start a revolution. Advertisers are going to have to be aware of this fact when moving forward with their social media strategies, and his word of advice to us was never to take on a client you can’t stand behind. I like to hear this, because I’ve heard a lot of talk about the good things companies like Coca-Cola or PepsiCo or McDonald’s do, but I would never work for them, despite their non-profit efforts. I disagree with the entire concept of fast-food culture and I think that doing non-profit work in a company like that is just a mask for the fact that the product has caused harm to the people that buy it. I’m well aware of the argument that people should be able to buy whatever food they want, no matter what the health costs, and I agree with this. But fast food and soft drinks have become a culture, they’ve changed the way the entire agricultural industry operates.
I could go on and on about this, about how so many low-income families are forced to eat crap food because it’s the only thing they can afford now and it’s the fault of the fast-food industry, but I’ll wrap it up. I just enjoyed hearing someone at this festival point out the fact that advertisers should be responsible, even if corporations aren’t. If the advertising world were more selective about the products they do work for rather than just going for big-money clients, the corporations couldn’t survive. As much as everyone here touts their creativity and how they’re all artists or whatever, so much of it is just about chasing a dollar, which I think is contrary to the concept of art and creativity. Of course this is the standard criticism of the industry, but until today I hadn’t heard anyone here mention it.
Amr had a really amazing personal story to tell too, about his experiences during the revolution. He was there on the first day and was one of the first to run to Tahir Square, and on that first day the police kidnapped him. He escaped and posted about the experience on Facebook, and thousands of people shared it. I asked him what the mood was like there now – whether people were still full of hope or if they’d grown disillusioned. He said that people are panicked because no one knows what their identity is or what to call themselves. But he also said that people are getting things done and everyone is working really hard to inform the population about how to be democratic citizens. I didn’t want to mention it with the group, but when he was talking about people trying to figure out how they want to align themselves, I was eerily reminded of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. She talks in that novel about how excited everyone was to find their identities at the start of the Iranian revolution, but we all know how that turned out, so it was not altogether pleasant for me to make that connection as I was listening to Amr talk about hopefulness and how convinced he is that Egypt will figure it out. In any case, it was really amazing to talk with him. I can’t imagine another time when I’d have the chance to talk to someone who was so active in the revolution.
Our professors have been really great this week about setting up times for us to talk with interesting people, and I’m appreciative for it. I think it’s these talks that will stick with me more than the huge seminars. After Amr’s talk we all headed home. I can’t believe there are only two days of the festival left, and then just a week here in France. This week has become a bit of a weird time for me, because I’m in the strange space between student and professional. I don’t feel like I’m either one of those things. It’s hard not to just think of myself as unemployed and overwhelmed, but even though I’m staying optimistic, in about a week and a half’s time I will be done with college and officially jobless. This is a talk for another day though, so I’ll wrap it up.
I did attend a master class from a really unique Belgian ad agency today, 20Something. They’re entirely run by students who take yearlong internships at the agency. It was amazing to me that they were actually able to attract clients with a premise like that, but apparently they do well enough, and clients like having a young, fresh perspective. The entire program is powered by another Belgian agency, 6+1, who act as coaches to the students. They said they’ve had some considerable challenges since they started the program but it seems to be doing well. How cool would it be to do an internship where you’re actually doing exactly what it is you’d do in a real job, handling clients and all?
Our professors set us up with another amazing speaker today, Amr Salama, an Egyptian filmmaker who was very active in the revolution. He spoke on a panel earlier today but I missed it, and I’m kicking myself for doing so, because he was so interesting. He said that, basically, consumers will use social media to call corporations on wrongdoing in the same way the Egyptians used it to speak out against Mubarak and start a revolution. Advertisers are going to have to be aware of this fact when moving forward with their social media strategies, and his word of advice to us was never to take on a client you can’t stand behind. I like to hear this, because I’ve heard a lot of talk about the good things companies like Coca-Cola or PepsiCo or McDonald’s do, but I would never work for them, despite their non-profit efforts. I disagree with the entire concept of fast-food culture and I think that doing non-profit work in a company like that is just a mask for the fact that the product has caused harm to the people that buy it. I’m well aware of the argument that people should be able to buy whatever food they want, no matter what the health costs, and I agree with this. But fast food and soft drinks have become a culture, they’ve changed the way the entire agricultural industry operates.
I could go on and on about this, about how so many low-income families are forced to eat crap food because it’s the only thing they can afford now and it’s the fault of the fast-food industry, but I’ll wrap it up. I just enjoyed hearing someone at this festival point out the fact that advertisers should be responsible, even if corporations aren’t. If the advertising world were more selective about the products they do work for rather than just going for big-money clients, the corporations couldn’t survive. As much as everyone here touts their creativity and how they’re all artists or whatever, so much of it is just about chasing a dollar, which I think is contrary to the concept of art and creativity. Of course this is the standard criticism of the industry, but until today I hadn’t heard anyone here mention it.
Amr had a really amazing personal story to tell too, about his experiences during the revolution. He was there on the first day and was one of the first to run to Tahir Square, and on that first day the police kidnapped him. He escaped and posted about the experience on Facebook, and thousands of people shared it. I asked him what the mood was like there now – whether people were still full of hope or if they’d grown disillusioned. He said that people are panicked because no one knows what their identity is or what to call themselves. But he also said that people are getting things done and everyone is working really hard to inform the population about how to be democratic citizens. I didn’t want to mention it with the group, but when he was talking about people trying to figure out how they want to align themselves, I was eerily reminded of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. She talks in that novel about how excited everyone was to find their identities at the start of the Iranian revolution, but we all know how that turned out, so it was not altogether pleasant for me to make that connection as I was listening to Amr talk about hopefulness and how convinced he is that Egypt will figure it out. In any case, it was really amazing to talk with him. I can’t imagine another time when I’d have the chance to talk to someone who was so active in the revolution.
Our professors have been really great this week about setting up times for us to talk with interesting people, and I’m appreciative for it. I think it’s these talks that will stick with me more than the huge seminars. After Amr’s talk we all headed home. I can’t believe there are only two days of the festival left, and then just a week here in France. This week has become a bit of a weird time for me, because I’m in the strange space between student and professional. I don’t feel like I’m either one of those things. It’s hard not to just think of myself as unemployed and overwhelmed, but even though I’m staying optimistic, in about a week and a half’s time I will be done with college and officially jobless. This is a talk for another day though, so I’ll wrap it up.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
11 Words and Nokia’s Generosity
I think all this excitement and lack of sleep is finally catching up with me, because I woke up this morning feeling very puny with a sore throat. I decided to just kind of take it easy at the festival today and try my hardest not to get sick, so I’ve got substatially less to say in this post than my earlier ones. The first thing I did in Cannes today was to attend a meeting with David Simon, executive producer of The Wire, among other things. Hands down this was my favorite experience here so far, although Malcom Gladwell’s seminar is a close second. Dr. Kohn arranged for us to have a private chat with David in the Majestic Hotel, which was very cool – pictures of all the stars who’ve stayed there adorned all the walls, and it was definitely the nicest hotel I’ve ever stepped foot in. David is such an incredibly smart man and it was a pleasure listening to everything he had to say. Every point he made had me thinking, “Yes, that’s right, I believe that as well.”
He talked a lot about American culture and values, and at one point he said something that really intrigued me: America’s only one true export is African-American music. I’ve never thought about it in those terms before but he’s completely right. It’s kind of like I was saying in my post yesterday – there’s so much American music here because that’s what we do really well, it’s something we can give to the world that could only have been produced in America and that isn’t simply a re-make of something done by another culture. Since I’m kind of a music junkie, this whole train of thought makes me proud, in a strange way. I’m glad that, as David said, if America were wiped off the face of the earth, blues, rock and roll and jazz would remain, rather than any other aspect of American (consumer) culture. He also talked about how urban America is the real America, and that political rhetoric focusing on “small town values” is bogus. This is something I’ve thought for a long time and it was nice to hear him voice this opinion so well, especially considering that I’ve been listening to all this advertising shop talk for the past few days. Hearing about advertising is fun, but in my everyday life I’m much more apt to talk about politics or contemporary morality than I am to talk about branding, so David’s chat was refreshing.
He also said, pretty blatantly, that the work he does could not co-exist with advertising. I think this is right and that there really are things that should remain untouched by advertising. If you’re trying to talk about things that matter, in the way The Wire does, it’s incongruous and slightly disgusting to be interrupted by a glorified sales pitch. That’s a harsh way to put it, I know, but it’s true. Another thing David talked about was the fact that unrestrained capitalism must be muted by what’s best for society, and that capitalism should be simply a tool rather than a framework for society. He said, “America doesn’t plant olive trees,” which is why we’re in such a mess now – if the only focus is short-term profit, things will eventually and inevitably fall apart. This stuff is a bit self-evident but, again, it was nice to hear it voiced in this particular environment. In closing David told us his 11 words for Esquire, which was really cool because I read that article not long before I flew out of the States and I remember his standing out to me, perhaps because of its somehow appropriate use of profanity: “Fuck the money. Leave the world better than you found it.”
Later this afternoon we met with Allison Arden, publisher of Advertising Age. It was a good chat in which she pretty much just talked to us about starting out in the industry and what kinds of things are becoming important in the industry today. After that I went back to Juan-les-Pins for a couple hours to take a short break before the awards show tonight. Earlier this morning I tweeted about losing my iPhone in hopes that someone from the festival would see it and return the phone to me, and while that didn’t quite work, something good definitely came of it. Nokia, who sponsored the party last night, saw my tweet and then tweeted this back at me:
I was flabbergasted. I picked the phone up right before the awards show and it is so cool, one of the best smartphones I’ve ever used. I couldn’t believe how nice Nokia was for doing that! Talk about good customer relations. The awards show was really impressive, which was to be expected. Advertising really is a terribly glamorous industry. Last night’s awards were for design, press and cyber. The design category was very cool and included a lot of packaging-type work, which I’m interested in. Press was a bit disappointing as the jury handed out very few golds, but you’ll hear more about that later since one of my assignments for class is to do a written and oral report on the press award winners. A few very good campaigns won for cyber, including Arcade Fire’s video for “We Used to Wait,” which I was obsessed with when it first came out. The video uses Google Maps to create a really cool interactive experience while you’re watching it, and the first time I saw it I cried, if that tells you anything about its effectiveness. Arcade Fire is one of my top five bands right now so it was cool to see their work featured in a Grand Prix-winning campaign. After the awards show everyone else went to the Microsoft Advertising beach party, but I decided to catch the last train back to Juan-les-Pins and go to bed. I hated to miss the party but I really just need to get some rest tonight. I don’t want to end up sick for the remainder of my time here. And on that note, I’m going to bed.
He talked a lot about American culture and values, and at one point he said something that really intrigued me: America’s only one true export is African-American music. I’ve never thought about it in those terms before but he’s completely right. It’s kind of like I was saying in my post yesterday – there’s so much American music here because that’s what we do really well, it’s something we can give to the world that could only have been produced in America and that isn’t simply a re-make of something done by another culture. Since I’m kind of a music junkie, this whole train of thought makes me proud, in a strange way. I’m glad that, as David said, if America were wiped off the face of the earth, blues, rock and roll and jazz would remain, rather than any other aspect of American (consumer) culture. He also talked about how urban America is the real America, and that political rhetoric focusing on “small town values” is bogus. This is something I’ve thought for a long time and it was nice to hear him voice this opinion so well, especially considering that I’ve been listening to all this advertising shop talk for the past few days. Hearing about advertising is fun, but in my everyday life I’m much more apt to talk about politics or contemporary morality than I am to talk about branding, so David’s chat was refreshing.
He also said, pretty blatantly, that the work he does could not co-exist with advertising. I think this is right and that there really are things that should remain untouched by advertising. If you’re trying to talk about things that matter, in the way The Wire does, it’s incongruous and slightly disgusting to be interrupted by a glorified sales pitch. That’s a harsh way to put it, I know, but it’s true. Another thing David talked about was the fact that unrestrained capitalism must be muted by what’s best for society, and that capitalism should be simply a tool rather than a framework for society. He said, “America doesn’t plant olive trees,” which is why we’re in such a mess now – if the only focus is short-term profit, things will eventually and inevitably fall apart. This stuff is a bit self-evident but, again, it was nice to hear it voiced in this particular environment. In closing David told us his 11 words for Esquire, which was really cool because I read that article not long before I flew out of the States and I remember his standing out to me, perhaps because of its somehow appropriate use of profanity: “Fuck the money. Leave the world better than you found it.”
Later this afternoon we met with Allison Arden, publisher of Advertising Age. It was a good chat in which she pretty much just talked to us about starting out in the industry and what kinds of things are becoming important in the industry today. After that I went back to Juan-les-Pins for a couple hours to take a short break before the awards show tonight. Earlier this morning I tweeted about losing my iPhone in hopes that someone from the festival would see it and return the phone to me, and while that didn’t quite work, something good definitely came of it. Nokia, who sponsored the party last night, saw my tweet and then tweeted this back at me:
I was flabbergasted. I picked the phone up right before the awards show and it is so cool, one of the best smartphones I’ve ever used. I couldn’t believe how nice Nokia was for doing that! Talk about good customer relations. The awards show was really impressive, which was to be expected. Advertising really is a terribly glamorous industry. Last night’s awards were for design, press and cyber. The design category was very cool and included a lot of packaging-type work, which I’m interested in. Press was a bit disappointing as the jury handed out very few golds, but you’ll hear more about that later since one of my assignments for class is to do a written and oral report on the press award winners. A few very good campaigns won for cyber, including Arcade Fire’s video for “We Used to Wait,” which I was obsessed with when it first came out. The video uses Google Maps to create a really cool interactive experience while you’re watching it, and the first time I saw it I cried, if that tells you anything about its effectiveness. Arcade Fire is one of my top five bands right now so it was cool to see their work featured in a Grand Prix-winning campaign. After the awards show everyone else went to the Microsoft Advertising beach party, but I decided to catch the last train back to Juan-les-Pins and go to bed. I hated to miss the party but I really just need to get some rest tonight. I don’t want to end up sick for the remainder of my time here. And on that note, I’m going to bed.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Networking and Nightlife
Today seems to have been much more laid-back than the last two days, with more panel-style seminars and lots of group meetings with various professionals. This morning was a bit of a disaster though, the train was 30 minutes late so I missed almost all of the IPG seminar with Martha Stewart et al about gender balance in the advertising community. Everyone has been saying great things about it and I plan on watching a video of it later. Once we finally made it to Cannes the seminar room was slam-full, so Maggie and I had to watch the end of the IPG seminar and all of the Yahoo! seminar on a screen in the adjoining theater. Also, when ordering breakfast this morning, what I thought was quiche or frittata ended up being cheesecake, so I ate cheesecake… for breakfast. It was a bizarre and messy morning. The Yahoo! seminar was very cool though, because their guest was Robert Redford, whom I admire so much for his class and talent. He talked a lot about how Sundance developed and a bit about his personal film career, and it was a very interesting and engaging conversation to listen to. A choice quote: “The only thing that really succeeds is change.”
After Redford we had a meeting in the Young Lions Zone with Julie Winskie of Porter Novelli NY and two of her younger associates. Porter Novelli is a PR firm and I was surprised by how appealing PR sounded to me. It’s been a little daunting being here with all of these advertising people who do such amazing creative work, as I really don’t have much artistic talent of my own and I’m not sure I could hang in this world. But PR seems like a field I’d be a good fit for, and I like the fact that it seems easier to do PR rather than advertising for a nonprofit. By which I mean to say, PR seems much less product-driven than advertising, on the whole. It’s a bit strange being here with so many people, some of my classmates included, who pretty well know where their passion lies and what career path they want to follow. I’m just so fascinated by everything I see and it’s all so new to me – almost every job title I’ve heard here sounds appealing, but I’m finding myself more and more drawn to the idea of using creativity in mass communications to enact social change.
Our next meeting was with Noelle Cottrell, the creative director of Fitzgerald in Atlanta. He was entertaining and gave us lots of advice about starting out in the ad business. It’s funny how much advice differs from person to person though – it seems like no one can really agree what it is that gets you a job, and I think this kind of applies in every field. The job search isn’t formulaic like it was for our parents and so much of it just seems to be about a specific relationship between the employee and whatever particular company it is that they work for. It’s almost like dating, as in, the only people who really know what makes the relationship work are the two people in it, and what makes their relationship work wouldn’t work with any other two people. Sure there’s general advice, like be respectful and appreciative, etc., but those things aren’t really the bread-and-butter of the relationship. Same seems to apply to employees and employers, which is scary, because it seems like it’s going to take a very long time to find that right match. We also met with Nancy Seliger of Fleischman Hillard and Greg Pinelo of GMMB this afternoon. I was really interested in the work GMMB does – they work exclusively on political and public service campaigns, Democratic campaigns specifically. They handled Obama’s ’08 campaign so I really enjoyed hearing Greg’s stories about that.
Another note: I won an Xbox 360 with Kinect from a Microsoft Advertising giveaway today! They’re shipping it to me in Athens. Video games generally bore me so I’m not sure what I’ll do with it when I get back, although I have wanted to try out Kinect. I’ve never won anything before so it was pretty cool. After all the seminars ended this afternoon we went to Google’s happy hour on their beach pavilion. They had really good free drinks and lots of other cool free stuff, like a kiosk where you could design your own little Droid character and have it put on a t-shirt. Tonight was the Young Lions party, which I must say was probably one of the most fun times I’ve had on this trip. There was a great DJ (and a mediocre band) and free drinks and lots of swanky decorations. It was also on the beach, with a big dance floor and a stage set up. We had a blast mingling with the other young people there from all over the world and dancing to the DJ. I love how there is almost exclusively American music in bars and whatnot over here, for one because music is such a big part of my everyday life, but also because I’m starting to get a little homesick and it’s nice to hear some familiar stuff. In short, the party was awesome. After the party, not so much. We waited for a cab for a full two hours and when we finally got one it was expensive – and then when I got home, I realized I’d lost my iPhone at the party. Bad end to an otherwise great night, but c’est la vie (I can use that phrase now without it being annoying because I’m in France).
After Redford we had a meeting in the Young Lions Zone with Julie Winskie of Porter Novelli NY and two of her younger associates. Porter Novelli is a PR firm and I was surprised by how appealing PR sounded to me. It’s been a little daunting being here with all of these advertising people who do such amazing creative work, as I really don’t have much artistic talent of my own and I’m not sure I could hang in this world. But PR seems like a field I’d be a good fit for, and I like the fact that it seems easier to do PR rather than advertising for a nonprofit. By which I mean to say, PR seems much less product-driven than advertising, on the whole. It’s a bit strange being here with so many people, some of my classmates included, who pretty well know where their passion lies and what career path they want to follow. I’m just so fascinated by everything I see and it’s all so new to me – almost every job title I’ve heard here sounds appealing, but I’m finding myself more and more drawn to the idea of using creativity in mass communications to enact social change.
Our next meeting was with Noelle Cottrell, the creative director of Fitzgerald in Atlanta. He was entertaining and gave us lots of advice about starting out in the ad business. It’s funny how much advice differs from person to person though – it seems like no one can really agree what it is that gets you a job, and I think this kind of applies in every field. The job search isn’t formulaic like it was for our parents and so much of it just seems to be about a specific relationship between the employee and whatever particular company it is that they work for. It’s almost like dating, as in, the only people who really know what makes the relationship work are the two people in it, and what makes their relationship work wouldn’t work with any other two people. Sure there’s general advice, like be respectful and appreciative, etc., but those things aren’t really the bread-and-butter of the relationship. Same seems to apply to employees and employers, which is scary, because it seems like it’s going to take a very long time to find that right match. We also met with Nancy Seliger of Fleischman Hillard and Greg Pinelo of GMMB this afternoon. I was really interested in the work GMMB does – they work exclusively on political and public service campaigns, Democratic campaigns specifically. They handled Obama’s ’08 campaign so I really enjoyed hearing Greg’s stories about that.
Another note: I won an Xbox 360 with Kinect from a Microsoft Advertising giveaway today! They’re shipping it to me in Athens. Video games generally bore me so I’m not sure what I’ll do with it when I get back, although I have wanted to try out Kinect. I’ve never won anything before so it was pretty cool. After all the seminars ended this afternoon we went to Google’s happy hour on their beach pavilion. They had really good free drinks and lots of other cool free stuff, like a kiosk where you could design your own little Droid character and have it put on a t-shirt. Tonight was the Young Lions party, which I must say was probably one of the most fun times I’ve had on this trip. There was a great DJ (and a mediocre band) and free drinks and lots of swanky decorations. It was also on the beach, with a big dance floor and a stage set up. We had a blast mingling with the other young people there from all over the world and dancing to the DJ. I love how there is almost exclusively American music in bars and whatnot over here, for one because music is such a big part of my everyday life, but also because I’m starting to get a little homesick and it’s nice to hear some familiar stuff. In short, the party was awesome. After the party, not so much. We waited for a cab for a full two hours and when we finally got one it was expensive – and then when I got home, I realized I’d lost my iPhone at the party. Bad end to an otherwise great night, but c’est la vie (I can use that phrase now without it being annoying because I’m in France).
Monday, June 20, 2011
Fail Fast and Fix It
Another successful day at the festival. Most everyone else from the group is still in Cannes right now at a party hosted by the Dutch Young Creatives – Whitney sweet-talked us in – but I opted to come home early and try to get some rest and do some work. Tomorrow and Wednesday are both going to be very long days so I want to relax while I can. First up this morning I attended a BBDO seminar all about the way consumers react to the various screens (TV, mobile, PC, tablet) in their lives, using psychological archetypes to describe our relationships to said screens. They also used Star Wars analogies, i.e., the PC is Han Solo because it has an answer for everything, which made me smile. Nothing like a good Star Wars clip to wake me up in the morning. To sum it up briefly: consumers view the TV as a jester and an everyman, a device we consider a trusted friend and a source of comic relief. The point, then, of TV, and specifically of TV advertising, is to tap into our emotions, entertain us, help us relax and don’t make us work too hard. The PC’s archetype is that of the sage and its function is to challenge us, teach us and give us something that makes us look good. Mobile is the lover of the group, the most personal device, and its content must provide us with surprise, delight, a personal connection and utility. Lastly, the tablet is the wizard. It’s the newest device of the four and it makes cool things happen for us in mysterious ways. One of the consumer interviews they showed was of a French guy saying the tablet was like “a beautiful lady that come from the future,” which made me laugh. The take-away idea is that, while each one of these screens is becoming increasingly important in our lives and each has its own particular function and personality, so to speak, the most effective campaigns are those that can build stories across these platforms. If you can make a campaign that utilizes the strengths of each device rather than just uniform content, you’re doing pretty well. It’s a bit self-evident but it was still interesting to hear about all the research BBDO did with Microsoft Advertising to come to these conclusions.
Next up was my favorite seminar of the day, Malcolm Gladwell for Kraft Foods. I’ve heard of him before but never read any of his books, though I certainly plan on doing so now. The entire time he spoke I was riveted to my seat, barely wanting to glance down long enough to jot a few notes. It was nice to hear some truly intellectual content after so much businesslike stuff. He spoke about the paradoxes of innovation, and how really it isn’t best to be the first to pioneer a new idea or product. He used several really interesting and convincing examples, the first of which being a fascinating story about the Becca Valley Turkey Shoot of 1982, a battle between the Israelis and the Syrians. Rather than being first, he said that really in terms of innovation, we should try to be third. The first guy, the one who comes up with the idea, is often too wrapped up in the thinking process to find a practical application for his idea. The second guy, who takes the initiative to create whatever this new product may be, often achieves production but just doesn’t have the best result yet. It’s the third guy, who tweaks, improvises and utilizes the new technology, who ends up with the best product. A few of the companies or products he mentioned that came on the scene third are Apple, Google, the Kindle, and Facebook – all of which found success by building on existing technologies, not creating new ones. My favorite quote from his seminar is, “A culture built for invention is not optimized for innovation,” which I think is a pretty interesting note on today’s American economy. His advice was not to just throw resources at problems, but to work with what you’ve got to produce the best possible solution.
After Gladwell spoke, Draftfcb hosted a seminar about the science of creativity with Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide. I’d been looking forward to this one and it did not disappoint. Lehrer talked about how neurological research shows that there are basically two creative processes in our brain: the moment of insight and the feeling of knowing. We can only obtain insight when our brains are releasing alpha waves, which make us relax. Once the noise of the world is drowned out we are often able to have our best creative moments. I know I’ve run into this while working on papers for school – sometimes you just have to stop looking for what you want to say and take a break and then, bam, there it is, exactly what you were trying to say. The other form of creation, the one based around the feeling of knowing, doesn’t require relaxation. Rather, it requires attention and diligence. Lehrer described the feeling of knowing as being like when you run into someone on the street but can’t remember their name, although you know that you know their name and if you only thought about it for long enough you would remember it. If you’re trying to create something and you already have this feeling of knowing, trying to gain insight won’t work. You have to just sit down and work on it until you find the answer. He also had a lot to say about group creativity, mainly that the most effective group creativity happens when you have the right balance of friends and outsiders and when criticism is encouraged. On criticism, Lehrer quoted a Pixar executive, who said of their creative process, “It’s not about failure avoidance. It’s about failing fast and fixing it.” I like that notion a lot, because I think you can extend it much further than just the creative process. I mean, that’s pretty much life in a nutshell, isn’t it?
After the three morning seminars I stepped out to have lunch and meet up with a social media strategist for McCann Worldgroup, who I met on Twitter, of all places. He was very nice and it was a really good networking opportunity. It’s great to hear the story of another fairly recent college grad who’s found success and who is doing some very cool things in the advertising world. Following lunch was the biggest seminar I’ve been to yet, the AOL seminar with Arianna Huffington. She was very engaging and it was really fun and informative to listen to her talk about why she thinks the Huffington Post works so well. Her “four pillars of the Internet,” as she called them, are the following: trust, authenticity, engagement, and redefining the pursuit of happiness. To be honest I didn’t take a whole lot of notes during this session, because it was so easy to get caught up in just listening to everything Arianna was talking about. Certainly it was one of the more entertaining seminars I’ve been to. After that we went as a group to the Microsoft Experience Center, where the folks at Microsoft Advertising were nice enough to give us a private tour. Apparently one of their team members is a UGA grad, so they’ve been very good to us. In the Experience Center we got to sneak a few previews of new stuff Microsoft Advertising is working on, including some cool new interactive technologies. It was a neat place – did I mention that the facility was part of their beach pavilion? Pretty ritzy!
The last seminar of the day was about how advertising can successfully address social issues. I’m not sure if it was just because I was tired at the end of the day, but this seminar seemed to start out pretty interesting and then gradually fade into boring. It was hosted by ACT Responsible and the Ad Council, and I really like the idea of advertising for social change, so I thought this would be a great one. Basically it consisted of the CEO of the Ad Council, Peggy Conlon, asking three panelists various questions about how their agencies have created nonprofit advertising in the past. The ads themselves were cool, and I recognized several of them as old favorites, but the discussion left much to be desired. I’d be interested to know how much nonprofit advertising differs from political advertising, as I would lump both of those into the broad category of advertising to address social issues. Well, that’s just about it for today. I may not be able to post tomorrow, as we’re attending the Young Lions party tomorrow evening, but I’ll definitely have a post up by early Wednesday. Au revoir!
Next up was my favorite seminar of the day, Malcolm Gladwell for Kraft Foods. I’ve heard of him before but never read any of his books, though I certainly plan on doing so now. The entire time he spoke I was riveted to my seat, barely wanting to glance down long enough to jot a few notes. It was nice to hear some truly intellectual content after so much businesslike stuff. He spoke about the paradoxes of innovation, and how really it isn’t best to be the first to pioneer a new idea or product. He used several really interesting and convincing examples, the first of which being a fascinating story about the Becca Valley Turkey Shoot of 1982, a battle between the Israelis and the Syrians. Rather than being first, he said that really in terms of innovation, we should try to be third. The first guy, the one who comes up with the idea, is often too wrapped up in the thinking process to find a practical application for his idea. The second guy, who takes the initiative to create whatever this new product may be, often achieves production but just doesn’t have the best result yet. It’s the third guy, who tweaks, improvises and utilizes the new technology, who ends up with the best product. A few of the companies or products he mentioned that came on the scene third are Apple, Google, the Kindle, and Facebook – all of which found success by building on existing technologies, not creating new ones. My favorite quote from his seminar is, “A culture built for invention is not optimized for innovation,” which I think is a pretty interesting note on today’s American economy. His advice was not to just throw resources at problems, but to work with what you’ve got to produce the best possible solution.
After Gladwell spoke, Draftfcb hosted a seminar about the science of creativity with Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide. I’d been looking forward to this one and it did not disappoint. Lehrer talked about how neurological research shows that there are basically two creative processes in our brain: the moment of insight and the feeling of knowing. We can only obtain insight when our brains are releasing alpha waves, which make us relax. Once the noise of the world is drowned out we are often able to have our best creative moments. I know I’ve run into this while working on papers for school – sometimes you just have to stop looking for what you want to say and take a break and then, bam, there it is, exactly what you were trying to say. The other form of creation, the one based around the feeling of knowing, doesn’t require relaxation. Rather, it requires attention and diligence. Lehrer described the feeling of knowing as being like when you run into someone on the street but can’t remember their name, although you know that you know their name and if you only thought about it for long enough you would remember it. If you’re trying to create something and you already have this feeling of knowing, trying to gain insight won’t work. You have to just sit down and work on it until you find the answer. He also had a lot to say about group creativity, mainly that the most effective group creativity happens when you have the right balance of friends and outsiders and when criticism is encouraged. On criticism, Lehrer quoted a Pixar executive, who said of their creative process, “It’s not about failure avoidance. It’s about failing fast and fixing it.” I like that notion a lot, because I think you can extend it much further than just the creative process. I mean, that’s pretty much life in a nutshell, isn’t it?
After the three morning seminars I stepped out to have lunch and meet up with a social media strategist for McCann Worldgroup, who I met on Twitter, of all places. He was very nice and it was a really good networking opportunity. It’s great to hear the story of another fairly recent college grad who’s found success and who is doing some very cool things in the advertising world. Following lunch was the biggest seminar I’ve been to yet, the AOL seminar with Arianna Huffington. She was very engaging and it was really fun and informative to listen to her talk about why she thinks the Huffington Post works so well. Her “four pillars of the Internet,” as she called them, are the following: trust, authenticity, engagement, and redefining the pursuit of happiness. To be honest I didn’t take a whole lot of notes during this session, because it was so easy to get caught up in just listening to everything Arianna was talking about. Certainly it was one of the more entertaining seminars I’ve been to. After that we went as a group to the Microsoft Experience Center, where the folks at Microsoft Advertising were nice enough to give us a private tour. Apparently one of their team members is a UGA grad, so they’ve been very good to us. In the Experience Center we got to sneak a few previews of new stuff Microsoft Advertising is working on, including some cool new interactive technologies. It was a neat place – did I mention that the facility was part of their beach pavilion? Pretty ritzy!
The last seminar of the day was about how advertising can successfully address social issues. I’m not sure if it was just because I was tired at the end of the day, but this seminar seemed to start out pretty interesting and then gradually fade into boring. It was hosted by ACT Responsible and the Ad Council, and I really like the idea of advertising for social change, so I thought this would be a great one. Basically it consisted of the CEO of the Ad Council, Peggy Conlon, asking three panelists various questions about how their agencies have created nonprofit advertising in the past. The ads themselves were cool, and I recognized several of them as old favorites, but the discussion left much to be desired. I’d be interested to know how much nonprofit advertising differs from political advertising, as I would lump both of those into the broad category of advertising to address social issues. Well, that’s just about it for today. I may not be able to post tomorrow, as we’re attending the Young Lions party tomorrow evening, but I’ll definitely have a post up by early Wednesday. Au revoir!
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Cannes You Believe The Festival Already Started?
I want to preface this entry on a personal note, rather than adding it at the end, by way of explaining my reactions to everything I’ve seen today. At various stages of my life I’ve wanted to “be” everything from a WNBA player (no I’ve never played basketball) to a veterinarian to a writer to a lawyer, and lots of other things in between. Ten months ago I wanted to get my doctorate and teach Comparative Literature. Advertising is, then, a very recent interest for me. I wanted to go on this particular study abroad trip to get a taste of advertising, in an experiential and academic fashion, before I commit to a job in this field in the fall. And I believe today I may have fallen in love with the entire communications industry. This is the first year that Cannes Lions has been billed as a Festival of Creativity rather than strictly an Advertising Festival, and I can see why – the entire Palais was covered floor-to-ceiling with amazing design, and there were young, hip, stylish people walking around everywhere. I think the rest of this festival is going to be my honeymoon phase with advertising and I’m so looking forward to it. Everything I see here I’m translating to job opportunities with awesome companies and possibilities for a relevant and interesting career in general. That being said, excuse me for sounding overeager.
This morning’s first seminar was presented by goviral and was all about what they termed “The Long Idea” – brands maintaining long-term conversations with consumers and, basically, forming an emotional and deep-rooted connection with them. Martin Lindstrom, author of Buyology, presented some research he’d been involved in that linked brand loyalty to religion, which I thought was really interesting but also pretty messed up. The most powerful brands, those with really strong images, sounds, and ideas tied to them (think: Apple, VW) activate the same regions in our brain as powerful religions do. Of course, people don’t talk about brands the same way they talk about religion. The example he cited was a study in which most people responded verbally the same way about both Microsoft and Apple, but their neurological reactions were much stronger to Apple, due to their stronger, ritualistic and more emotion-based branding. Lindstrom called this “smashable” branding, based on an anecdote from Coke in the early 20th century. When Coke redesigned their glass bottles in 1919, they wanted to create a bottle that, even if it fell on the floor and was smashed into lots of little glass pieces, you could still pick up a shard of and tell that it was a Coke bottle. Brands achieve this by creating a certain something that just can’t be disassociated from their product, like the Jaws theme song, which virtually everyone in the room recognized after just two notes. Letting consumers “feel” a brand in this way, form an indelible connection to it, is much more effective than simply telling them about the brand. Also, Lindstrom talked about how branding during a casual conversation, as in word-of-mouth recommendations, is more effective than simply putting your brand out there on the Internet, even if you have really awesome Internet content. The idea is for a brand to move from offline to online, not the other way around. To be totally honest I have issues with a lot of these concepts – is it socially responsible to try and make a consumer “feel” a brand? Obviously it’s doable, but do we, as a people, want to feel an emotional connection to a product in the same way we feel an emotional connection to our religion? I mean, ultimately, is making a sale that important? From a client’s standpoint I suppose the answer is yes, but I just don’t know if I like this kind of psychological toying-around.
After the first seminar we had a short meeting with Susan Lilley of USA Today, the official US representative at Cannes Lions. She helps out all of the American delegates here and gave us some good info and recommendations for the festival. Then it was on to another seminar, this one presented by WGSN about consumer insights that are currently driving creativity. Susanna Kempe, CEO of WGSN, talked about how 2012 is predicted to be a year all about “the triumph of beauty.” Going even further into the future, 2013 will supposedly be all about “Eco Hedonism,” “Radical Neutrality,” and “Hyperculture.” The seminar was interesting but all I really got out of it was a long list of buzzwords that don’t have a whole lot of meaning on their own. I understand the concepts at play here – consumers want sustainability to be easier and more pleasurable, a shift back to simplicity in our products and services, and the creation of cultural harmony. But the vocabulary of all this just seemed silly and self-important. As an example, Kempe described eco hedonism as “crafting a post-natural luxury and engineering the mystical.” Really? One of the panelists, Bruno Schwobthaler of Warner Bros, had some interesting things to say about how their licensed superheroes have been put to work to support green initiatives lately, though. You see all kinds of eco awareness ads featuring some sort of Superman imagery, and I realized as he was talking that I have seen lots of ads like that, I just hadn’t really paid attention. He said one thing that really stuck with me: society has developed a need to associate a superhero with every problem of the day, which is why their superheroes have so much brand elasticity. This idea of society needing a hero resonated with a lot of the things I’ve concerned myself with in literature, so it was cool to see this kind of crossover of ideas.
Next up was probably my favorite seminar of the day, presented by UM, L’Oreal & BMW titled “Entrepreneurs are the New Creative Department.” It was my favorite because it highlighted just how little I know about the various outlets of creativity in communications, and I had the opportunity to learn a lot of basic stuff from this talk. I’ve been unsure of the distinctions between marketing, branding, advertising, and media, and as it turns out most of the industry seems to be unsure of these distinctions as well. The two media companies present, Demand Media and Say Media, kept talking about the content they’ve produced in conjunction with their clients, and I realized that, if that’s the case, what does the advertising agency do? If the media company is responsible for content production and release and they work directly with the client, what role does an ad agency have left to play? I suppose for someone who’s been in the industry for a long time these questions would be pretty scary, but for a newcomer, it’s really exciting to see the new ways in which people are using technology to drive communications and advertising. It seems very logical to me that media planning and content production should be conceived in the same breath, and that a fully integrated campaign shouldn’t be broken up between various agencies doing various things. I guess that means I’m a fan of synergy… Jack Donaghy would love me.
I’ll try to summarize the last two seminars of the day a little more briefly than the earlier ones. Fleishman Hillard presented a really cool seminar about social mobile marketing, featuring Dr. Orin Levine of the non-profit IVAC, an organization dedicated to providing pneumonia vaccines to children in Kenya and other third-world countries, and Mitch Spolan of LivingSocial. As an iPhone junkie I’m fascinated by all the possibilities mobile opens up, and I just get all warm and fuzzy when I find a new app that really does make my life easier or put some fun into my day. It was refreshing, too, to see these technologies applied to enact some positive change in the world. I definitely reacted a lot better to IVAC’s mission than I did to the idea of eco hedonism, and it got me thinking, maybe I’d like to work in nonprofit advertising or public relations rather than just advertising to create brand loyalty and corporate gain. The last seminar of the day was presented by Naked, a London creative agency I read about in Adland, about the 3 C’s of modern creativity: community, crowdsourcing and co-creation. Again, lots of buzzwords without a whole lot of meaning. All three of their C’s just seemed like the same idea to me, but perhaps that’s because I’ve never worked in the industry and can’t tell the little nuances you’d run into in a working scenario apart from each other. Lego and Nokia both had panelists present and they showed some sweet videos – people are so creative with Legos! Other than that, though, I can’t say I gained much from the final seminar.
One more thing I want to mention: the Young Lions Zone. There is a free YouTube smoothie bar, a huge screen that constantly shows all the new tweets with various Cannes Lions hashtags, the HP White Space where everything is white and there are sharpies all around to draw all over everything with, and free WiFi (although the WiFi runs all throughout the Palais). So many awesome companies are present at the festival giving away free stuff and setting up cool booths and whatnot, and the Young Lions Zone is such a great place for us to hang out. I feel like I’m getting VIP treatment at the festival or something. Did I mention there is also free Red Bull, Vitamin Water, Coke Zero, ice cream, and I heard a rumor about some free espresso somewhere today… it’s grand. Tomorrow is going to be even busier than today but I’ll try to make my next post a bit less wordy. What Cannes I say? I’m just so excited to be here.
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