Well, here we are in the South of France once again for the annual Cannes Lions Advertising Festival. I was last here two years ago for the yearly meeting of the world’s marketing leaders. (You can see some of my previous posts starting here.) Now, it’s one year after the economic crisis that impacted the advertising industry particularly hard. Attendance here at Cannes went down from a high of around 10,000 people to a mere 6,000. But things are looking up! Supposedly attendance is up to 8,000 or more and there is a positive spirit in the air here. Things are also looking up, of course, because we’re here preparing to answer The Burning Question on Friday this week. Preparation for our big event is going very well and I really wish we were on the stage presenting already. But while waiting for our big moment I’ve had the chance to listen and learn from others’ sessions and conversations over drinks. I will blog daily here to share a few things from each day. Read on for my takeaways from yesterday (Monday), the first major day at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival.

JWT Presents “Ideas People Want to Spend Time With”

Bob Jeffery, CEO, and Fernando Vega Olmos, Creative Chairman, of our sister agency JWT presented some examples of their best work around the world, which represents an entirely new direction for one of the largest and oldest advertising agencies. Jeffery started by making the point that, “Time is the new currency… so we must create ideas that people want to spend time with.” It’s a concept that is perfectly consistent with Marketing with Meaning.

The pair proceeded to share examples of some killer work that is completely consistent with our concept of Marketing with Meaning. Examples included things that you’ve probably seen me tweet about over the past few weeks, including the Heineken classical music concert prank and hilarious videos for Kotex that poke fun of decades of tampon ads. But I was most impressed by two cause-related ideas that the company launched over the past year. First, a campaign for UNICEF in which vending machines were placed with the opportunity for people to donate their change to provide fresh water in Haiti. The campaign created a new way to donate and most users had never donated before. A second campaign for the Red Cross in Mexico created children’s rides (like the ones that used to be outside of supermarkets) in which all donations went to the Red Cross and kids got the chance to “play” hero. The campaign resulted in a +20% increase in donations during the horrible economy last year.

Schematic and Bridge Worldwide Show the Possibilities of a New Meaning Medium

One of our WPP sister digital agencies, Schematic, was back at Cannes with its revolutionary “touchwall” technology. Think of it as a giant iPad on steroids that reads an RFID tag in your conference badge and helps you get more out the event. You can find people, arrange for places to meet, get descriptions of the day’s sessions, and check out nearby restaurants.

This year our agency, Bridge Worldwide, was invited to join the Schematic demo to show how this new “medium” could be used for a variety of brands. We developed two ideas based on brands that we work on. We showed how Charmin could create an entertaining interactive game with mysterious people behind bathroom-stall doors, and we showed a concept for the Bounty brand in which people around the world could collaborate to make a work of art using the device. We’re a long way from having touchwalls installed worldwide, but the unit was a great chance to explore how new technology can become meaningful from the beginning.

Another Question…

One of my favorite things about coming to an event such as this is that you start hearing some common threads of thought as people have time to experience, reflect, and discuss. While we’ve been asking The Burning Question, a new question came to me when I did an interview with the Cannes Eye team here: “Should the word ‘advertising’ be dropped from the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival?” I had not really thought of that before, but the question came up a few hours later over drinks with my friend Rick Boyko, Director of the VCU Brandcenter (which I wrote about previously here). Rick talked about how we should evolve our craft away from “advertising” and all of its negative connotations and move toward something that is more relevant for our present evolution of marketing—around creating experiences and telling stories.

I’m not sure what the answer is yet, but a move away from “advertising” in Cannes and in our industry might be the “reset button” that we all need to elevate our game.