Claire Davidson takes in the seminars at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity: Day 2
Claire Davidson (left) is in Cannes this year and is reporting exclusively for Campaign Brief Asia. Here’s her round up of the speaker sessions on Day 2.
Was that the Hoff who glided past me this morning on my early morning run along the Croisette today? Or Not? I immediately increased my pace and quickly set off after the silhouette in front of me. Immediacy is everything (gosh, aren’t we learning this during these Cannes seminars?), but I just wasn’t fast enough.
All of those years of sand running on Baywatch must have done wonders for The Hoff’s calf muscles, and I’m clearly just not up to Pamela-Anderson-bouncing-scratch. Actually, there were quite a few creative types out pounding the pavement this morning – maybe they saw the Hoff too, or not. Make sure you check out www.hoffornot.com this week.
After my brush with bronzed, ripped fame, I headed back to the Palais Des Festivals to take in some talks. It was a busy day in the hallways. This years Cannes Lions has 12,000 delegates attending from 90 countries, all hailing from the advertising, digital, marketing, media, PR, technology and design industries. We are also seeing 97 countries competing.
I started the day with at a forum with Matt Sanchez, CEO and Co-founder of Say Media on “Mobile is Killing Media, and Here’s What We Can Do About It”.
Matt gave us an insightful talk about how to change our approach to creative and to product – when it comes to mobile as a platform. The transition to mobile is the most important one we have seen since print went to digital. Today there are 1.9 billion mobile 3G connections globally, all of which have some form of data. To give that a little more perspective, there are 2.6 billion people worldwide connected to the internet. By 2019 it is predicted that 5.2 billion people will have smartphones. So pace is accelerating at a rate that is almost unimaginable. Everyone is going to have an internet connection, and media is going to be fundamentally different in the next five years.
Currently though, there is a five-fold gap between mobile revenue and desktop revenue for the same page. In other words, for every page viewed on a mobile device, publishers currently see only 20 percent of the revenue they’d receive from a desktop visit. This equation must change because by the end of next year two thirds of our media consumption will happen on our mobile phones. If we don’t evolve, we are going to head off a cliff. Yikes! This evolution though is a great opportunity for marketers and content creators alike to:
• Build for the medium
• Be contextual
• Be omnipresent
• Tell responsive stories
We’ve established that the fundamental building block is that the metaphor for media has changed. On our desktop devices we’re used to multiple screens, multi-column design, and so in essence we use a table for how we lay out information. Mobile is completely different, having one stream only. You have a more focused surface area on mobile. Phones and tablets are merging to become the ultimate media device. We want to engage in mobile as much as we can in desktop, and personal devices are heading to do just as much as our laptops. Engagement on mobile will increase as we continue to access content on the go. Tolerance for poor design and complex experiences must go away. As our good friend Steve Jobs said, “PCs are going to be like trucks.”
Next up I saw “Fashion, Sex, Celebrity & Character: A Candid Conversation with Sarah Jessica Parker and Joanna Coles”. Is it wrong for me to admit that I have never watched an episode of Sex In The City? And I call myself a GenX woman! I didn’t let anyone in the room in on my little secret. I was probably the only one. Today Parker and Coles, Editor-In Chief at Cosmopolitan, delivered a talk to us ladyfolk. How do busy girls such as ourselves balance work, love, relationships, sex, children, money and even power?
Sarah Jessica Parker is a brilliant case study for modern women who show us that it is all possible. We can all live the dream. We first took a look at Sex In The City (SITC) which really was a game changer (there’s that advertising word again) in television. When SITC as a project was first presented to Sarah HBO was primarily a male oriented platform, with a focus on sports and shows aimed at the male demographic. The producers created an entire first season without having an episode go to air. The show only aired after the full season was produced. There wasn’t a benchmark. SITC slowly cultivated its female audience, airing on Sunday nights at 9pm – strategically scheduled for when people were back from their weekends away at the Hamptons. The show didn’t have a destination point, they were merely trying to produce the best show that they could about a modern woman and her friends. SITC was very much in keeping with what was actually happening in women’s lives. It caught a moment in our lives that we could resonate with. It tackled multiple storylines as well as multiple social issues that were relevant and contemporary to women. Heavens, am I too late to buy the box set – this sounds BRILLIANT.
Sarah has gone on to becomen a great role model for her female audience in both subsequent tv and film work and social media such as Twitter. Sarah Jessica Parker is a power brand. Her influence extends from fashion to relationships to the arts to education to causes to politics. She’s very inspirational and shows us that it is possible to have everything. It just requires some juggling. Bravo.
I next caught up with Patrick Tom, ECD of TBWA, Shanghai (left) who was on the Direct Lions jury this year. There were 25 people on the Direct jury in 2014 and judging took six days, finally culminating last night at 1.30am. A very tired Patrick told me there was a lot of discussion, with a very mixed jury. Oowah. Patrick was one of two jurors from Asia.
Patrick’s one piece of advice as a juror was to remember to always judge the work, rather than the case studies. It was a very fair, but very tough jury, and generally tough love came out on top. He felt that overall the quality was good, with a couple of great pieces in there as well. Unfortunately for Direct this year, there wasn’t any ‘wow’ in the category. We’ll find out who made the cut when the Lions are handed out tonight at the first of Cannes Awards Ceremonies, today for Direct, PR and Promo & Activation.
I next went to see the Dentsu seminar brought to us by Nigel Morris, CEO, Americas & EMEA, Densu Aegis Network, Jean Lin, Global CEO, Isobar and Andy Lippman, Associate Director MIT Media Lab. They spoke to us on “Prototyping The Future – The Opportunity for Innovation in a Convergent World”.
We’re constantly told nowadays that marketing is slow, and innovation is fast. This doesn’t need to be the case.
We need to make the future. Innovation is going to be the core of success for business and brands. Innovation should not just be thought of in te
rms of what is new, but of substance as well. It’s currently a time of opportunity for all of our industries. We can lead the change in business and in culture.
Connection points today are people – the consumers and the customers, whom we can measure with data. That point of connection between the brand and the person can lead to a transaction that’s measurable. Producers and consumers today have equal understanding.
We’ve had twenty years of disruption, which has caused a lot of friction in the economy and in business. For the next three to five years we will restructure; we’ll innovate the new and we’ll innovate the existing. To do that, we need to focus on people, rather than technology. Personal + adaptive + valuable. Consumers still make decisions based on personal opinion. So lovely to hear we’re not all robots! From this we garner data and big data. This digital experience is about technology, society and media – it’s big data, real time, authenticated identity, geo location, social, mobile media, and ecosystems. On top of this the rate of change of society is proportional to the dominant technology of the time. The dominant technology today is computers and communications.
Digital understanding needs to encompass:
Analytics: Data in scope and time
People: learning, psychology
Sensing: bits of activity from us and the world
Spaces: from bodies to cities
Big data is resolution on a new scale. It extends beyond the purpose for which it is collected. It’s real time. It’s ubiquitous. It’s wedded to advanced representations.
We now have control of the platform. It’s not about content and story and creative, but it’s now also about the platform. Innovation is all about change. The possibility of the future can be prototyped. We’ve learned during the evolution process.
How do you bring innovation in and keep complexity out in your business? Find people who are pirates of innovation, with confidence and without fear. Create an environment which empowers these people. Scale only matters when the platform you create is personal, adaptive and valuable. This will help you to come up with ideas without limits. There is a new role of an agency as designers of Narrative Spaces for brands. Adapt your organisation to convergence and data. Everything is interconnected, interdependent and transparent.
It was then time to catch Spike Jonze, who is one of my all time favourite filmmakers. Spike and Gaston Legorburo, Worldwide CCO, Saptient Nitro (pictured left), brought us “Meet The Disrupters: Building Worlds With Technology and Story”.
Spike has always been a trailblazer in his filmmaking. He started out making skate videos and music videos for the Beastie Boys. This led to more music videos with bigger and bigger artists. It also led to MTV’s Jackass being born. They gave Spike and the team 20 minutes per week to do whatever they wanted. They didn’t want Johnny Knoxville to just introduce music videos. The Jackass franchise went on to yield multiple seasons, three features and most recently Bad Grandpa as well. Spike’s other credits of course include the feature films Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Her.
Although Spike’s work has paved the way in it’s innovation, he remains clear about one thing. His work is the idea first and the medium second. Today people are scared of the change around us… and people are excited of the change around us. Spike feels both are important. Follow your feelings. Follow your inspiration. The end result for him is the emotional experience of the viewer. His passion extends not just from a story told but a story lived.
Every project for Spike starts with a feeling – something that moves him or excites him. That feeling is his guidepost for his projects, be it a music video, a TVC, a television show or a feature film. The medium that you are working in is irrelevant, as long as you put yourself into it authentically. Whether it’s a linear or a non-linear project, Spike approaches it in the same way. Technology has not changed this for him. He has of course embraced technology in his work, and been a leader at times in this area, but it hasn’t overtaken or encompassed the way he now works.
Spike’s mantra is “an idea is an idea”. If something doesn’t work on one technological platform, Spike will work it out to fit on another.
So unlike everything that we are told at these advertising seminars around the world time and time again, Spike Jonze hasn’t agreed to exhort the same insight. To him, technology hasn’t disrupted his world. He’s just continued to disrupt our worlds with his ideas and his filmmaking. All hail Spike.
All of the Cannes parties start to kick off tonight, which means the hangovers are going to get more severe day by day. On that note, I’m off now to the Campaign Brief Party to see my friend Lynchy. Cheers. I hope to come out the other side and see you all tomorrow.
Oh, and don’t forget to visit the TRUST Collective / Sloppy Cannes team this week. In a celebration of all things debaucherous, the TRUST Collective is running a competition that gathers all the dirty laundry from the week. Submit a photo of someone either ‘making awesomeness happen’ or looking a little worse for wear oops sorry I mean enjoying a party, with #SloppyCannes. The most memorable post, as judged by the TRUST team at the end of the festivities, will win an iPad. Chin Chin!!
Claire Davidson, Executive Producer ASIA & MENA @ The SweetShop, reporting for Campaign Brief Asia at Cannes Lions 2014.
