Last Day!

Today I tried to make up for some of me leaner days and stayed for the last four seminars of the day… if you weren’t there then you really didn’t miss that much.

                The day started out with a presentation from B reel… and giving it a B would have been generous if we were grading seminars.  The leader didn’t transition well and the group was all over the place as far as answers.  The basis for the talk was what makes a great digital idea and they broke it into participocalypse, pioneering technology, hacking mentally, human centered value, and utilitainment.  Yeah… so participocalypse is where you provide incentive for people to participate. Any easy was to do this is to provide a celebrity factor that they can get behind.  The example for this was the Ford Fiesta project where they gave anyone with over 500 Twitter followers a Ford Fiesta for a year and the only condition was that they Tweet about it.  Pioneering technology was about using technology in a new way, even if it wasn’t the latest model of technology.  Here they stressed that the message has to be very clear in order to not get lost in the technology. Hacking mentally is about taking an existing platform and giving it a new spin.  Whopper Sacrifice on Facebook was a great example of this.  Human centered value is a change from disruptive communication to engaging communication. Value can be utility, education, storytelling, or environment.  It’s hard for brands to stand out when they can be avoided through the internet so it’s very important to engage your target audience.  Utilitainment emphasizes that the ultimate goal should be to provide utility and entertainment for the brand. Wii Fit is an example of utilitainment.  At this point you might be asking yourself, “okay great, now how do we do that?” Nothing can be done without leadership and trust.  The product has to appear wonderful… but also real.  You have to create a medium where users can interact and make the project their own.

                Up next was a fact filled session on Brazil…. I wish this had been my country! To condense some of it… Brazil is a very large country with an emerging middle class so therefore it is a growing market.  However, to enter this market a potential brand needs to have a large difference between itself and its competitors.  The Brazilian people are very brand loyal so it will take a lot for them to switch brands.  The people of Brazil are also very social people so online shopping will not take off here as it does in other countries.  The people love going to the store and talking to everyone along the way.  In terms of advertising, clients tend to stay with their agency as long as they feel they are the most creative.  However, even if a client is perfectly happy, they could be persuaded to switch if they feel another firm will take more creative risks with their products.  Most agencies are based in Sao Paolo with a smattering in Rio and Brasília. Pay in these agencies is still centered around commission but is gradually moving towards fees.  A major difference is that the client will not pay for a company to give them a pitch… I suppose that is incentive to make the pitch very very good! The presenters made comparisons between Brazil and other markets…. But they made sure to pick markets where Brazil would come out on top so that was very biased reporting in my opinion.  I have more facts and figures in my notes but that pretty much sums it up.

                Next up was a presentation from a Swedish company that emphasized useful advertising… but they couldn’t tell us exactly what that meant.  It seemed like they were just emphasizing creativity that attracted a lot of buzz.  They had a speaker making swallow a small speaker and then people could play music through his torso, they challenged the people of Sweden to “unbottle” themselves and do crazy challenges, and they put people on top of a mountain to pose for Christmas cards that were each unique because the people moved around. Each idea was very creative and you have to wonder how they convinced their clients that they were going to work.  It was nice to see that these idea that could be considered way outside the box were rewarded with results for their clients.

                Last but not least was the Monkey See seminar.  These advertisers are basically testing sex on monkeys in association with a brand logo.  There is a place up north where they have taught monkeys how to use money is a set up marketplace and it showed that monkeys follow the same buying patterns that humans do so they wanted to test to see if advertising also had an effect.  This project is still in its infancy so they couldn’t really share any information but it will be interesting to see where the project goes in the future.

                A hit and miss last day but I was glad to attend the last day of this amazing festival.

xoxo

Kitty

Day Six!

Today turned out to be quite an interesting day….

                To kick it all off, I went to the HP Master Class in the Young Lion’s Zone.  It was alright… it was a topic with a very cool outcome but the presentation was slightly disjointed.  They had done a campaign for Billboard magazine and had created different fonts that corresponded to different singers’ lives.  Some of the letters were fairly hard to distinguish but they had clearly put a lot of time and effort into it. They also remade stars’ faces with the faces of what they would consider their influences.  They also had an out of home component where you could pick your influences, take a picture, and then print your newly compiled face off of Flickr later in the day. The company brought in a software guy to write a program just to make the images which is now to sale but very expensive.  They also talked about how easy digital printing could make a project.  They redid a whole building, inside and out, in one day and it looked very professional.  It’s really quite impressive what they can do with digital printing. (In the HP White Zone I would have loved to have taken the bean bag home!)

                Next up was a meeting with the CEO of BBDO Atlanta. He was a lot more down to earth than I would have thought and has a son who is at the same stage of the game of life as some of us so his information really hit home.  His first point of the meeting was that creative communication is eleven times more effective in the market place.  People don’t want to see the same old ads and being creative is a way to create that competitive advantage.  Next, he pressed upon us that this is the Golden Age of Creativity because everything can be used as a media vehicle.  Technological advancements have made much more possible than ever before (i.e. re-do an entire building in one day using digital printing).  He thinks that there will be technological advances in the next ten years as there have been in the last twenty-five years…. Which is a little daunting when you think about the technological advances in the last twenty-five years!  He also emphasized that great work is a team sport and that nothing will get done without it.  To have a successful integrated campaign you have to have a team to orchestrate the different facets.  There has to be a leader and a supporting cast… very much like a hit band.  By taking all of these principles, it will help to win awards which will in turn attract clients.  Clients are interested in taking risks in this current economic climate which seems to be the perfect breeding ground for some astounding work.

                After the talk, Sandy and I stayed to answer some questions for Porter Novelli on camera.  I had a wonderful talk with a woman from Porter Novelli who stressed that people came to public relations through all channels… which as a nontraditional major was great to hear!! Then it was my turn on camera… it made me a little nervous but the guy for Porter Novelli was very encouraging and apparently I hit the right buzz words because I got a lot of thumbs up. The camera men were less than enthused with me because apparently I move around a little too much… but I supposed I made a nervous face (shocking right?) and he was quick to reassure me that it was fine this time because they were professionals but that I might was to hold still for next time.  The interviews we did will be spliced into a video that Porter Novelli is doing for Cannes… it will be interesting to see what makes it into the video!

                Also interesting, one of the BBDO Atlanta men asked for my email after confirming that I was graduating in December… it will be interesting to see what happens there!

xoxo

Kitty

Day Five!

                Last night was a lot of fun at the Microsoft Party and then a subsequent after party at the Carlton Hotel.  We were some of the first ones into the Microsoft Party and kept it going right up until the end… that we tried to stall as long as possible! A few of us then made our way to the Carlton Hotel with some new Microsoft friends. I was in awe that I was going to be in this hotel for an actual purpose and not to just wander around and pretend that I had a purpose!  The night became very interesting after  that and not in a good way.  We ended up going to the Martinez for a little while and while I was there I managed to step on some glass that was not fun but a gallant Canadian man picked me up and carried me to the lobby to they could pick the glass out of my foot… which continued to bleed on and off until, unable to catch a cab for hours, we caught the 6:40 AM train back to JLP.  Needless to say, we didn’t make it to the morning events of the festival. 

                After cleaning up my foot again, Emily and I made our way to the festival in time for the meeting with Amr Slama, an Egyptian Filmmaker.  That was all of the title we were given for a man who was a pivotal figure in the recent Egyptian revolution.  He was very humble about it, but he is one of the key people.  He was one of the leaders for the first charge on the square, was kidnapped, had to escape, and still he continued to tweet the safe routes for the rebels to take in order to try to avoid harm.  He still works very hard to produce videos to educate people about the Egyptian constitution and their new rights.  He told us that no one thought that Egypt would rebel because Egyptian people tend to live up to a stereotype of being lazy and not caring.  However, social networking changed that.  It allowed people to see the posting of a brother of a young man who had been kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the Egyptian police… before and after.  The brother took a picture of the corpse and posted the before and after pictures on the internet.  This sparked outrage in the Egyptian society. Having just looked at the pictures myself, I am brought to tears by the cruelty that occurred in broad daylight.  It makes you just have to stop and consider how lucky we are in the US today that we take certain privileges for granted and call them undeniable rights.  It was amazing to hear that the government didn’t report anything on the first revolt and thought that if they just ignored it that it would go away… I think this is where Facebook came in because the government could censor it.  It was quite strange to hear Amr talking about censorship.  He made it sound like they were going to still have some forms of it even after the revolution. I realize that the country might not be able to handle that much change all at once but any form of censorship does not seem like a good idea.  He says that the people are very and that you can feel the change in attitude just being out in the streets.  They are getting to know their neighbors for the first time because they aren’t afraid of saying the wrong thing.  Amr encouraged us all to be rebels in our own way and defined a rebel as someone who disobeys when they see something that they think is wrong.  He took this a step farther and said to not advertise for products that weren’t good for people and didn’t benefit society.

                This talk today is definitely one of my favorites and I truly enjoyed hearing about the new hope for these people. 

xoxo

Kitty

Day Four!

Today was unconventional but very much enjoyed.

                It started out with a meeting with a woman from Interscope Records.  Her job is to put artists with brands that they want t represent.  She does this with a very small team of people and she tried to match the artists with brands that they can really get behind and not just any old brand.  She said that in her industry social media is a huge plus because right after an event, they can see what people thought of it.  She was genuine and very technology oriented. 

                I went to catch the tail end of the seminar led by Piers Morgan and containing our next group speaker, David Simon.  I missed the beginning but when I arrived they were talking about how Twitter could be used to attract viewers if used in the correct manner.  David thinks that the internet isn’t helping because getting everything you want when you want it is great, but the quality is going downhill.  He said that life and stories are more complicated than Twitter can handle and I would have to agree with that statement.  One good is that you can have longer stories online because there aren’t space constrictions. Newspapers also messed up when they didn’t start out charging for their content. People don’t want to pay for it now but the newspaper needs to protect its copyright and pay its journalists and staff.  TV started out free and now charges because of the content… I don’t really understand how this is different from the paper charging for online news…  TV is different though because most people can watch it on a portable device anywhere. I’m sure this seminar had more of a message that I missed in the beginning but it was entertaining.

                We then took a nice short stroll to the Majestic Hotel so meet with David Simon in person.  He is quite cynical but it was refreshing to have someone tell you how they really feel, not how they think you want them to feel.  He tends to write darker shows that do not attract a lot of advertising.  He’s lucky to have an organization like HBO supporting him so that he can actually write the way he wants to write.  HBO writing can be different than regular TV writing because success doesn’t depend on the number of eyeballs watching the show.  He tends to write how events and society are actually going, not the happy, sunny, everything is perfect television that most people like to watch.  When he worked for regular TV, he used to get asked to make the scenes “happier.” He went on to talk about how New Orleans was destroyed because of the government and saved by its own culture.  New Orleans culture is the only real product of America in Simons view because it is the one thing that could not have been created anywhere else.  He gave us life advice in eleven words: fuck the money, leave the world better than you found it.  I love that he said this and I wish that he had said this on the panel to a room full of agencies trying to out party each other this week.

                After this experience, we made our way back to wait for the Leo Burnett seminar.  This one was about brands keeping up with the language.  Two types of language were mentioned: brand that speak consumer and brands that speak human.  Brands that speak consumer speak stock holder speech and won’t fair well in the future whereas brand that speak human are humorous, interesting and they have to really know their humans to make the connection.  First, the company needs to focus on the human purpose of the brand – what do people want from it? How can it improve their lives? They used the Eos example from Canon where they created a sharing website for photographers of all levels complete with online gallery space, tips, advice from professionals, etc. Another example was New York Rewrites Itself.  In this campaign, Leo Burnett has people go around NY and take in events witnessed and heard.  They compile this and encourage people to view it and be inspired.  One of my favorite things that had been over heard was “don’t white knuckle the ideas.” I could be completely wrong, but to me that means don’t be so afraid of the ideas that you don’t let them take shape.  This seems to be a common principle throughout the festival so the fact that it appeared in a current campaign really stuck with me.  They also emphasized that the brand has to live its purpose and in can only do so through acts.  The example used for this was the fronts made from Gandhi’s glasses to try to continue to unite all of the Indian cultures. 

                This was the last seminar of the day and we’re heading to the Google Beach and then the Microsoft Party… more to follow tomorrow J

xoxo

Kitty

Day Number Three!

Today was full of interesting seminars and people…. Along with ice cream and Coke J

First up was the seminar with the company Fiat.  Fiat seems to be trying to be a socially and globally conscious company…. Well the heads of advertising were giving the presentation.  But 95% of Fiat’s cars run on alternative fuel sources so it can’t be all bad. They stressed the need to listen to the consumer.  They have just created a car that was designed based on the suggestions of their client base on the basis that they usually know the problems better than the designers… which is very true!  They also wanted to share their brand and have a conversation with their customers through their brand and through the theory of open innovation.  I could see this going one of two ways: either people will buy the car and talk it up because they had an input or the car will be very different than the picture they had in their heads and they will not want to actually drive the car.  It will be very interesting to try to keep up with how sales of this car go for Fiat.

                Up next was one of the star studded seminars with Soledad O’Brien and Martha Stewart on the panel.  This panel was about women in advertising, the glass ceiling, etc.  Martha discounted the glass ceiling by saying that she never felt it… but she also started her company herself and it took off.  She’s had a great run with her company and I hope that she is right about there not being a glass ceiling but almost everyone else on the panel mentioned it so I’m going to have to go with it existing in some form.  Apparently I’m going to have to work on my swagger because one, slightly masculine, panelist said that women do not have the same attitude when walking into a room.  Well, this I can do put I feel like with good posture and a smile, much can be accomplished as well.  The life balance was also mentioned several times.  This means that women have to balance work and home life much more than most men do and that the way to success is through collaboration in both work and home lives.  (This has been a major theme throughout the festival).   One woman stressed the need to have mentors, both male and female, because they will help guide us throughout our careers.  I like that she brought in the collaboration aspect on a much more personal level (as far as office life goes) than just working on a team project.  There was an Asian women on the panel that didn’t quite go with the rest of the panelists in that she said there is not a glass ceiling in the Asian market and that child can’t isn’t a problem because of their one child policy (this means that 6 adults can take care of the one child)…. Guess I’m going to go try my hand in the Asian market! Haha… not really.  It was interesting to hear about the Asian market but I think she would have been better suited on a different panel. 

                Next up was my favorite seminar of the festival so far.  It helped that it contained Robert Redford (sigh) but he truly is an amazing person who I could have listened to for hours on end.  He was able to spin every word he said into a story, not just his life history. One story of his life involved Cannes.  He was a travelling artist in Europe, whether for jobs or just to travel is unknown, when he was dropped off in Cannes, France, very late at night. He decided that is was too late to try to get a hotel so he went to the beach to sleep by the pier. As he was trying to get comfortable, he looked up and saw people in tuxedos drinking on the balcony on the Carlton Hotel and thought to himself, “I wonder what it’s like to be one of those people.” Sixteen years later, as he was putting on his tuxedo he looked out of his window at the Carlton Hotel at the pier he had slept and wondered under.  He had the realization that he was one of those people now.  I can only image the little smirk and head shake that accompanied that thought.  When asked what kept him going, he replied completely deadpan, “sex.”  He waited for our laugher to die down and then went on to say that the risks that life has to offer kept him going and that they helped to keep him fresh.  He stressed that in life, risk is a good thing and that we shouldn’t be afraid to be attracted to the offbeat side of life.  If he hadn’t followed through with this, the Sundance Film Festival would not exist.  Everyone, namely his agent, thought he was crazy for wanting to start a place where people could get away from it all and make their films.  When asked what made a good movie, he again replied sex, this time with a smirk.  Again having to wait for us to stop laughing, he went on to say that for him a good movie is one that tells a story that was previously unknown and hits you emotionally.  I could name a number of Robert Redford films that have hit me that way, but I think that I will just let you think of that one your own.  The interviewer then when on to have a fan moment and asked if Redford had a favorite of his movies and did he actually hit the ball in The Natural. In response to the first, Redford gave multiple answers.  To keep it short, he said that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was the most fun for him because it involved horses and the country he loved.  Apparently the film was originally supposed to be called the Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy but when they were approached for the jobs, Redford wanted to play the Sundance Kid and Paul Newman wanted to play Butch Cassidy, so they switched.  The name changed because whatever character Newman played was going to appear first in the title. And Redford did actually play baseball in The Natural for those of you who were wondering.  When asked what was next for advertising, he replied danger and online.  Danger is regard to just because a media is invented does not mean that is has to be used and online because even though everything is moving online, the content still needs to be held to a higher standard.

                Up next was a meeting with three people from the New York office of Porter Novelli and then a meeting with a man from Fitzgerald & Co located in Atlanta, GA.  Each was very encouraging, engaging, and relaxed.  They really tried to tell us interesting aspects of their business/companies and answer all of our questions with a refreshingly straightforward perspective.

                The Coca-Cola seminar was next on the day’s docket.  I know some people loved this seminar and I thought that it was well put together but it also led to some disturbing questions.  One of their campaigns that they talked about was focused on teens… shouldn’t we not be trying to get teens to drink more soda during the years that they are growing and developing? They mentioned that they could be found in over 200 countries… some of them the same countries where a Coke is cheaper than fresh water.  The campaign was an amazing campaign and very successful but I think that Coca-Cola needs to become more socially responsible and examine what their company is going to stand for because people might call it in to question in the near future.  I thought that the presentation was very well put together, everyone who spoke was very eloquent (especially the first speaker), but the chapters during the first part got on my nerves…. And the intense clapping after everything, I didn’t feel that it was necessary.

                I then decided to stay for the Angry Birds seminar. Given that I don’t own a smart phone nor have I ever played the game this was pretty much a waste of time.  He talked about the game and what they were doing to expand it while protecting its brand integrity.  He said to make your brand stand out and pay attention to details… not exactly earth shattering revelations.  Oh well, you win some and you lose some.

                Overall I had a great day at the festival and learned some interesting things about people, companies and myself.

xoxo
Kitty

Day Number Two!

Today was a hit and miss day. I chose to go to the first master class of the day and it was a bit of a bust.  It was put on by The Times and it was about using the Apple Tablet for the newspaper to allow updated content and better advertising.  Right now, people just ignore banner ads because they know that it means someone is trying to sell them something. They also said that it is hard to build brand with digital media which is interesting because most everyone thinks that digital is the new way to go with a campaign… food for thought.  Apparently the Tablet is considered a “lean back” medium whereas working on a regular computer is a “lean forward” medium.  This means that people are more relaxed when they are using their Tablet and are more likely to use it more often.  Two ways to utilize the Tablet are immersion, using beautiful films and visuals, and interaction, making advertising synonymous with applications.   With the Tablet there can be an added depth to the ad and every interaction can be measured.  This medium is flying very low under the radar and it will be interesting to see where it goes in the future.  All of this was said in the first 15-20 minutes of the master class. It is quite possible that other important points were made but I was unable to hear them due to the incessant chattering of three French men behind me throughout the whole class… all 20 minutes of it.  I suppose the speakers thought that more people would ask questions because it was supposed to last for an hour.  The Young Lions zone may not be the best place for those classes because it doesn’t help with not being able to hear the speaker…

                Next up was the Mindscapes workshop. I almost didn’t make it into this one which would have been very annoying because I tried to get there early and was told to come back at 12.30… which is when it was set to start. However it all worked out alright as I was one of the last 5 people let into the room.  I got a nice up close and person, if not entirely comfortable, view of the speaker because I went and sat on the floor in front of everyone J This lecture was about the rules behind breaking the creativity rules. Up first was the need to fight for a cause and the importance of the brand creating the platform for people to fight for their causes so that it becomes associated with the brand.  It doesn’t even face to be a real or serious cause, just something that people can understand and get behind.  Another point was to create a new product/service and because people interact with it, the core brand/message will be reinforced.  One example of this was when a concert hall had lagging ticket sales they played the music to cows and sold the milk.  Apparently different music causes the cows to produce different flavors of milk.  As a result, ticket sales went way up and they now make a profit by selling the milk.  Another thought process was to use an offline concept to promote online products.  Playstation did this by setting up Mr. Lee’s Tailor shop where people in Lisbon could get super hero or villain costumes made and it was to promote a new game.  I’m not a “gamer” so this was a little harder for me to follow and I’m assuming there was an online component to the game.  The main focus of the workshop was the principle of removal or sabotage.  Most people think that creativity means creating something where is can also mean the removal of something… I mean after all doesn’t creativity usually signify change?  A prime example of this is the “Whopper Sacrifice” on Facebook where you had to delete 10 Facebook friends in order to get a coupon for a free Whopper.  Or another one from BK called “Whopper Freak Out” where the workers at BK were instructed to tell people that that Whopper was no longer available.  As a result, the customers freaked out and their reactions were filmed J One might be asking what these “rules” are good for when rules cannot replace talent. This is very true but they can open the mind up to new possibilities and provide a clear direction of where to start looking for ideas. For the workshop part of the workshop I worked with a man from Saudi Arabia and a man from Kuwait. The exercise involved the promotion of an online dictionary and we had to apply the theory of sabotage or removal.  We came up with having the papers, both print and online, be blank for a day and on then filter the consumers to a website explaining that the native language is disappearing and to use the online dictionary for their native languages.  All of us in this workshop that I talked to agreed that this was a hard concept to figure out in ten minutes but I feel like my group gave it a decent shot. For more information, go to themindscapes.com.

                The awesome part about going to the workshop is that I met a delegate from Russia! I am very glad that this happened in person and that I was able to get some more useful insight than I was getting from the internet.  Apparently one of the big problems for Russian advertising in the corruption in the system which does not work out well for creative people and smaller agencies.  They also seem to be having a tough time transitioning to digital because of it.  He also said that the direction of advertising in Russia should be to move towards integrated campaigns and to establish two way communication between the brand and the consumer.  He is currently working on a Panasonic project where customers can go to a website and look up and share information and get credits that can be spent on the site for doing so.  The project also has a phone application where if you are out shopping and don’t know what to get you can input characteristics of the person and it will suggest a nearby Panasonic gift to get them.  Too bad France doesn’t have that for some of the people I’m trying to get gifts for!

                I hung out for a little bit and then the 2^nd half of the Microsoft group headed to the Microsoft experience center to check out what the company is working on.  I’m not a super technological person so some of it went a little over my head but one really good thing was the Samsung touch screen table.  It is like a huge touch screen computer that is very interactive and can read special bar code so it can see as well as feel.  They are going to be out on the market this year for a cool $7900… pocket change right?? It is being marketed towards companies where that amount of money is seen as an investment, not necessarily the average consumer…. Although I’m sure we’ll hear about someone not so average person getting one of the first ones.

                Last up for my day, and the first seminar, was the Act Responsive seminar.  This was definitely the best panel that I have attended yet.  Each member has a set speech and videos of their various campaigns to go with them.  Some key thoughts for creating effective public service announcements are to treat them like normal brands to actually cause change, to sell hope, to be positive, and to understand human behavior. They had many other amazing phrases and examples but that was basically the gist.  Sorry to cut this one short but I am exhausted! I need to hit the hay so I can be bright eyed in the morning J

xoxo

Kitty

                

First Day of the Festival

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 12^th 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