Hello All!! Today started out bright and early with the 8:09 train from Juan Les Pins to Cannes along with Christine and Whitney. We decided that we didn’t want to miss a minute of today and that we wanted to see the screenings of the films up for awards this year. We were some of the first ones let in the doors and the first to get to draw in the HP white zone, which is located in the Young Lions zone. Whitney and Christine were much more creative than me… I’m definitely more interested in client relations and possible copy than I am in the artistic side! We also had a slightly embarrassing moment when 5 of the BBDO team members started to talk to us and we were so distracted drawing that we didn’t even tell them our names!! However, I think they are there all week so we should have time to talk to them again and possibly laugh about it. I know I will be laughing at myself and come to think of it they probably will too! We then ventured off to see the screenings…. That weren’t actually playing L Instead Christine and I went to the YouTube creative area and reenacted the Hunter Hugs a Bear video…. It would have been better if I had actually been able to use my hands to pick up Christine but it was still sort of funny. We did eventually end up back at the screenings but we only saw a few of them.
Up first on our list of seminars and activities was the goviral seminar that focused on the long idea vs. the big idea. The first of the two speakers focused on how sports sponsorships and other methods of connecting with the consumer can have surprising results… It blew my mind a little bit that even though Adidas sponsors the world cup, Nike has more of the market share! I think Adidas needs to figure that one out! The second speaker talked about how religion and advertising… are similar! He came to this conclusion through brain scans and conversations with various religious leaders… give me a minute, I promise that it all comes together! There are ten pillars of religion: grandeur, vision, enemy, storytelling, mystery, symbols, sensory, rituals, belonging and evangelism. I mean really, just substitute advertising for religion and you have the ten pillars or advertising. He then did a study that looked at how people kept about brand when asked and how they felt about religion. It turns out that if you feel strongly about a brand, your brain lights up on the same area as if you had just been asked about your religion… mull that over for a minute! But it wasn’t all brands… take Apple and Microsoft. Apple was definitely considered a better storyteller by the brain scan than Microsoft. I am an HP girl so it pains me to say that! But no matter how much I liked the HP white zone, I can see why a lot of people prefer Apple. There was also a lot of focus on the customer interacting with the brand and how word of mouth can sometimes be a best and cheapest form of advertising. One person can tell 9 people whoe will then eventually influence 90 people. Funny how life is one huge game of telephone! I could see this as being potentially dangerous if the brand facts get as twisted as that game sometimes does! Some other interesting facts from this talk pertained to Coca-Cola and Alfred Hitchcock, not together. In 1915, Coca-Cola commissioned a special glass bottle that if broken, would still be recognizable as a Coca-Cola bottle from a single piece. I had no idea about that and it’s interesting to think of having a brand so specific that it is recognizable from every aspect, even when it’s only a part of the whole. Definitely food for thought on any future endeavors. The other interesting fact was that Alfred Hitchcock used to have two scripts that he worked from when making a movie: a blue one and a green one. The blue script included the actual lines and stage directions while the green one expressed what emotion should be felt at each moment of the movie. It is a good reminder that even if you have the best copy, if the emotion isn’t there it will simply fall flat. If you couldn’t tell, I really enjoyed that talk and I think that it provided a lot of fodder for future thought and great principles to apply to any work.
Next up was a meeting with the official Cannes/USA liaison, Susan Lilley who works at USA today. She was a very straightforward and open woman who seems to really enjoy her job… not to mention maybe knowing more about US advertisers than anyone else! She has to recommend around 100 people to represent the US on the various judging panels and they are all have to be premier people in their respective fields. Unfortunately, there aren’t many women in these top positions but hopefully that will keep changing J I would definitely be interested to know if she has a team working for her during the rest of the year because that sounds like very interesting work.
Then the marathon of seminars started… If you’re a non grading reader, feel free to skim over the next bit unless you just feel like being informed J
I grabbed a kiwi and apple smoothie (from the free Yahoo smoothie bar… thanks Yahoo!) to rev myself up a little and continued on to the WGSN seminar focusing on how to align to the macro trends driving product development. It was a lot simpler than it sounded. It was headed up by an amazingly interesting British woman who had such a stage presence! She predicted that 2012 was going to be a triumph of beauty with 5 steps to success: a new state of wonder, beauty at the core of all product and experience, embedded creativity while including stakeholders, find a balance between the intimate and the visionary, and focus on products and services enhancing lives. Some great examples of this were the Mulberry “Love Blossoms” campaign and the Diesel “Diesel Island” campaign (look them up on Google…. Did you know that you can’t legally say “google it”? It is Google’s way of trying to keep their brand name out of the vernacular… just a random tidbit). I am personally super excited about her predictions for 2013 which include Eco Hedonism, Radical Neutrality and Hyperculturalism. Yeah… I was a little lost for a minute as well. Eco Hedonism just means that luxury will be redefined and people will be concern with the sustainability of their more expensive products. An interesting example is the SpaWellness located in Amsterdam, it is made out of completely recycled materials. Radical Neutrality means trying to create balance and just listen to the quiet message. Hyperculturalism is avoid stereotypes and focusing on core elements. She also predicts that consumers in 2013 (here’s the exciting part) will de-tech, redefine luxury and sustainability, embrace global culture, crave their natural best self, and participate in the global south…. This means a relax in all the tweets!! I am so excited about that because that trend is driving me crazy. She then went on to have a discussion with a representative of Navyboot and Warner Bros and it was really all over the place. Apparently Navyboot makes handmade shoes out of what could be considered as exotic materials… I can only image how much those cost!
Next up was the UM, L’Oreal + BMW seminar…. Yeah all I really learned from this is that L’Oreal has a cool interactive website that I should check out in all of my free time this week (riiight). This seminar was a panel setup and the people on the panel didn’t really answer the questions they were asked and instead just talked about whatever they seemed to want to say at that moment.
This next seminar was the best one all day!!! It involved four independent agencies: thenetworkone, Special Group, Elephant Cairo, and MUH-TAY-ZIK I HOF-FER. I’m not really sure what the story of that last one’s crazy name but oh well. They all had great presentations that were actually informative, shocking I know. Lots of nervous is good, if it looks like an ad then start over, and if you do what you always do, you will get what you always get. They encouraged us to step out of the box and go for the riskier ideas. Also, just pitch one idea. It can send the client mixed messages if you present 3 ideas that could work for them… not very confident. Some memorable quotes…. The secret of a viral campaign is similar to “an infinite number of monkeys pounding at an infinite number of typewriters and it will eventually produce the complete work of Shakespeare.” Also, that “most consumers are smarter than your average client.” “Kissing is still the best idea” is one of my favorites as well and might be making a reappearance on my Facebook at some point… J I loved this seminar… the only creepy part was when the one guy banged the deer leg at the beginning and end of his part of the seminar… I hope he knows he helped kill Bambi’s mom….
Grr… this next one really cooked my grits. It was a panel involving Nick Jonas from the Jonas Brothers. This guy may do a great job manipulating tweens (I am considering their 55% over 18 demographic still tweens as heart) but inviting him to talk at this festival was just another feather in his cap and made him way too big for his britches (which where black skinny pants btw… the kid couldn’t even put on a real shirt under his blazer and wore a white v-neck under it instead). He really got me at the end when he said that not every brand stood for something and his example was ham… which IS NOT A BRAND!!!! He could have said a multitude of brand associated with ham ranging from the producer, the butcher, the packaging company, the store that sells it but no he had to act like ham in and of itself was a brand. (So I was corrected in that he said Spam and not ham... but Spam is meant to not go bad in case of disaster so I would say that it still has a purpose). Some good points were brought up in that if you are going to create a following then they need to be passionate… but I feel like this could have been achieved just as well without adding a Jonas Brother. The mediator was kind of a jerk as well because he continuously cut people off who seemed like they were actually about the make a point. His best line was in response to him saying that Nick Jonas took advantage of his followers but that “to take advantage of [his] audience would be illegal in most states.”
The penultimate seminar was very information, very if a little different from the rest of the day. Fleishman-Hillard was the leader in this one and he introduced two very different speakers. One was Dr. Orin Levine, promoting the need to vaccine for pneumonia in developing countries, and the other was Mitch Spolan , the VP of Living Social. It was an interesting pairing but they were both beautiful (don’t take offence boys!) speakers who I would image can pitch just about anything. If you are interesting in saving children in developing countries, look up IVAC on Google (don’t turn it into a verb!) and try to make a point to give on November 12th which is World Pneumonia Day… although if you actually have pneumonia please do so from home. Some facts on pneumonia in Kenya are that 1 in 8 kids will die before the age of 5 because of the disease, there is one doctor for every 9000 people, yet there are 2 cell phones per person. Seems a little backwards, huh? Look up Killer Cure on YouTube for more information. The Living Social guy was great as well and he emphasized how instantaneous and easy the decision could be.
No offense to Nokia or Lego’s, but the last seminar was a little bit of a bust. It focused on the three C’s of Creativity: Community, Co-Creation, and Crowd sourcing.... all were fairly similar and had some sort differentiation involving how you manipulate the public. Nokia has a very interesting campaign involving snowboarders and measuring elation, heart rate, height of jump, speed and other factors. Lego people…. Have way to must time on their hands. Apparently you can create 915,103,765 different variations of objects with just 6 two inch old school Lego’s… now image what people can make with all the other types! Interesting but a little sad at the same time because so many are created by adults.
Overall I am very excited to at this festival, though a little intimidated since I don’t come from a purely advertising background. Oh well, I’m still pumped to be here (yes I’m about to graduate and just used the word pumped… judge away!) and am certainly looking forward to tomorrow!
xoxo
Kitty
No comments:
Post a Comment