Cannes Day three & four: Beyond the awards

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Paul in Cannes.jpgPaulYole, head of strategy at The Brand Agency, has been a delegate inCannes for the past five years. Here’s his ‘beyond the awards’ take onthe third day in Cannes…

DAY THREE

After a slow start, things are picking up.

There was a good session with draftfcb this morning, with hardly a wankword to be heard. Having surveyed 2000 people they’ve worked out that we have an average of 6.5 seconds before people walk away from our ad messages. That’s longer than I thought and a hell of a lot less time than I’ve given some of the speakers this week.

Draftfcb also showed an interesting project from Sweden called Radiojanst – The Hero. Check it out here

After draftfcb we had a real treat with a presentation from Charlie Todd, the founder of Improv Everywhere. Very funny.

Next up, a workshop with Nick Law from R/GA and Ty Montague ex-JWT. Talked about how storytellers and systems designers need to work together. Amazing that most agencies have still not worked this out.

Unfortunately being in the workshop meant I missed out on Ben Stiller, along with 400 others.

It’s the Opening Gala tonight, where I’ll be celebrating a few wins for some friends. The biggest item for discussion will not be about what will win film Grand Prix, but “where the hell is Kim Shaw?”

DAY FOUR

The Grand Prix for funniest Tweet of the festival has been won by Ashadi Hopper of JWT Sydney, who wrote, during the most cringe worthy presentation in Cannes’ history, “is there a sniper in the house? Take the shot, take the shot.”

The speaker opened up with this remark that sent the Wankometer into overdrive: “In-content communication across multiple touch points delivered at the moment of consideration.” Sadly, it was the most lucid part of his talk and when he eventually finished the applause was more out of relief than admiration.

 

We saw a couple of great presentations yesterday morning, from Google and MOFILM. Google gave us some insight into the speed at which TV and Internet are converging, and pointed to their belief that feature-led advertising will be the way to go. Post testing campaigns will become a thing of the past as we’ll be doing more pre-testing and real-time evaluation.

 

The dramatic changes that Google is predicting will take place within the next 12-36 months. If you think back, You Tube is only 5 years old and now has over 3bn views every day. Another interesting You Tube statistic – there are 573,000 videos about Lego, almost all produced by the public.

 

The MOFILM competition was won by a couple of guys who made an ad for Coke Zero, called ‘Frankencouch’. Check it out here

 

Back for more this afternoon, and then tomorrow morning the film shortlist is announced.