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!
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