I’m back in the office today after a whirlwind week in Cannes, as seen in the daily posts below. Here are a few random thoughts:

More Meaning in Cannes

Jonah Bloom in Ad Age has a summary of his favorites from the show. Two that I should have featured myself are here:

• “Lowe Bangkok’s “Torture Test” used a white T-shirt as an envelope for a direct-mail piece containing a sample of Unilever laundry detergent. Consumers’ addresses were written on the T-shirt, and by the time the T-shirts made it through the Thai postal system they were filthy — presenting a real stain-removal test for the recipient. An ingenious way to put the product at the center of the marketing and show faith in its efficacy.”
• “Publicis Mojo Auckland’s effort for Speight’s beer played off the fact that New Zealanders in London had to do without their native ale. The agency put a Speight’s-serving pub on a boat that would sail around the world, via numerous ports, to England. It then ran a contest to find barmen who’d sail with the bar. Six percent of the male population of New Zealand applied for the job, and Speight’s regained its best-selling-beer slot in the country.”

Great Client Feedback

Last week I got a message from one of my Account leaders saying that her client actually built Marketing with Meaning into the brief for a big upcoming project! Apparently they were inspired by our Ad Age article and wanted to jump right in. Very, very cool and inspiring.

We’re a Best Place to Work - Again!

Finally, we just got an all-company email to announce that Bridge Worldwide has been named the #6 Best Small Company to Work For in America. This is our third consecutive year on the list and our highest ranking yet! Did I mention that we continue to hire? Why are we a great place to work, you ask? Tons of stuff. Meaningful marketing is one. Another is the fact that our people get together for events like the 48-hour film festival, which was sponsored by Bridge Worldwide. Check out our entry below - and, yeah, that’s me as Captain Bob…

It’s (too) early Sunday morning and time to wrap up our week-long coverage of the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival. Last night was the grand finale with top awards for “Film,” Integrated Campaign, the overall Grand Prix, and things like agency and agency network of the year.

One of the highlights was Procter & Gamble winning “Advertiser of the Year.” P&G CEO A.G. Lafley, and CMO Jim Stengel were gracious in accepting the award. First, Stengel gave all of the credit to the advertising agencies that helped them produce great work and results. Then Lafley finished up by asking the crowd to “come join us” in taking the work further.

As for the big winners, I was happy to see the Halo 3 “Believe” campaign co-win the big prize last night. As a Halo 3 player and fan, I can say that the marketing was especially meaningful. I spent hours interacting with the website and videos, which were something out of the History Channel 500 years from now. The marketing built an emotional experience, and helped the game rake in $170 million in first-weekend sales.

I do have to say that this final event seemed a little overdone. Guys in tuxes were handing out awards to guys in T-shirts. Lots of comments about how wonderful the “films” were. And seeing the ads on a movie screen versus in a pod of commercials during a TV show was completely unrealistic.

In conclusion, I’m very glad we came to Cannes this year and I look forward to future visits. Clearly the crowd wants awards and recognition - but a spirit of change is in the air. What everyone seems to agree on is that we will succeed by producing work that consumers enjoy and choose to engage with. The industry is ready for marketing with meaning.

I’m a little time crunched today, so just one highlight to share. In fact, it’s a build on yesterday’s post.

I mentioned yesterday that Coke’s Global Creative Director shared his insights on the power of storytelling for his brand and the possibilities for other brands to make similar meaning for people through advertising. Today Chuck Porter hit some similar points in sharing some greatest hits of his agency. He said there are six elements of good stories, and he shared examples of each:

• Surprise endings (Ikea’s lamp ad)
• Indelible characters (Subservient Chicken)
• Involve the audience (Molson’s magazine back cover ad, above)
• Ordinary people become heroes (I forget the example.)
• A little shock value (Volkswagon crash ads)
• Practical jokes (Whopper Freakout)

I was particularly won over by the Molson example from 2004. Here, the advertising set a goal of helping guys impress the ladies. Being tongue in cheek, Crispin created fake magazine covers for fictional books such as Trustfund, Animal Rescuer, and Aspiring Groom (above). I saw a case study that says these ads were read at 2x the rate of other beer ads and increased brand favorability from 29% to 60%. Further, according to Porter, these ads actually drove higher magazine sales! As I mentioned yesterday, when your customer pays for your marketing, it’s meaningful.

Chuck Porter also commented on something that is at the core of the Marketing with Meaning concept: Interruptive marketing is becoming a tougher path, but “it’s easier than ever for them to fall in love with you” - i.e., with meaningful marketing.

The watchout for all of this, as our President, Jay, reminds me, is that we allow 30-second ads to fall into the meaning camp by claiming that they entertain people. We spent an hour watching hilarious television commercials from around the world, and sure, we smiled and laughed quite a few times (prediction: Axe cleans up tomorrow night). But I think there is a guardrail around interruption that is important to maintain. If TV or print become a part of a “meaningful marketing ecosystem” - say, part of a campaign that is about consumer involvement, storytelling, etc. - then I think it can work; but if we maintain that a pod of clever commercials is still the way to go, then we’ve lost.

Last night was a late one. We were out past 2 a.m. and discovered the infamous Gutter Bar here at Cannes. As noobs to the scene we were walking around looking for a sign for The Gutter Bar, which we heard was THE late- night scene. Our President, Jay, finally asked someone and we discovered we were standing in it. The Gutter Bar opens when the bars around the Hotel Martinez overflow their banks and spill drinkers into the streets. Now you know.

I’m actually embarrassed to even say how late I slept in, but we did manage to get our butts back into the ad fest before noon. My highlight of the day was a session by Coca-Cola and Wieden+Kennedy focused on the art of storytelling and the story of its “Happiness Factory“. Ivan Wicksteed, Global Creative Director of Coca-Cola, shed light on how the company turned a 30-second ad into a marketing platform that is expected to last for 30 years. Now that’s something gutsy to put in your creative brief.

Wicksteed spent time teaching the audience about what makes a good story. Stories need to be timeless, reveal deep characters, have multiple access points, and show us the truth. Further, he spoke about why storytelling should be embraced by brands. He used the rapidly spreading phrase: “It’s not what they buy, it’s what they buy into,” and he spoke about the enduring success of the Coke Santa and Polar Bears, which have lasted 70 years and 30 years, respectively, because they hold storytelling elements.

The Happiness Factory ad was the best tested ad in Coke’s history and has enjoyed more than 100 million views since December 2007. Why? Because it created a meaningful experience for the viewer. Especially when they chose to view it online, or were ready for a movie-like experience at the theater, people laughed, smiled, and developed a closer connection to the brand. Laughs or smiles is really a higher-level benefit that the Coca-Cola product itself aims for. It’s syrup-water, after all, so the brand must deliver something more.

Wicksteed ended his session by promising that much more was to come from the Happiness Factory. He is setting the next stage of its development with a challenge to “become income generating at some point… if people will pay to enter it, you’ve got a pretty good story.” His team is looking at feature-length films, merchandising, and video games, for example. Bottom line: Marketing that people are willing to pay for is another good test for meaning.

Bonus insight: New Directors Shine

We also caught the last half of The New Director’s Showcase, hosted by Saatchi & Saatchi. I really wish I had gotten there a few minutes earlier for the entire show. It spotlighted short films (mostly non-commercials) by several up-and-coming directors. One of my favorites is below. It left me wondering, though, why we don’t have an economy where this kind of talent can make a living just making art - rather than having to find ways to merge an advertisement into it….

I’ve been here at the Cannes advertising festival less than 10 hours and what I have seen and heard so far has blown away my expectations in terms of meaningful marketing. Of course my going-in impression was that Cannes is a tribute to navel-gazing creative work that desperately wants to be considered artwork. I pictured a lot of people in too-school-for-cool outfits smoking cigarettes and exchanging cynicisms. Instead, I find Cannes to be a more egalitarian environment of people anxious to break our careers into something more meaningful. Net, the epicenter of advertising is ready for meaningful marketing.

There were two sessions that really got me charged up and had me wearing through a notebook. First was a session featuring Nike’s Stefan Olander, Global Director for Brand Connections. As you might have guessed, Nike is a leading brand in the move to create more meaningful marketing, and Stefan presented several killer insights. For example:

• Nike added a design studio with consultants to its Nike Stores to help people better design their Nike ID shoes.
• They created “The Ballers Network” after noticing that a big issue with playing basketball is organizing the dates and times among friends. It’s an application in Facebook that makes it easy for friends to coordinate. On top of this useful tool it adds locations and info from 1,700 courts around the world, player reviews and scouting reports, score recordings, and a mobile version for courtside.
• Nike is promoting its Nike+ service with “The Human Race 10k,” which will have races in 25 cities and including people running and uploading from their homes. The hope is to have 1 million participants on one day around the world.
• Finally, Nike announced the launch of a new avatar tool called the “Nike+ Mini” (example above). It’s like a Nintendo Mii that you design as you like and post to your blog or Facebook page. Further, it actually reacts according to how much you’re running in the real world, i.e., run a lot, and it goes faster, slack off and it, too, loses pace. It’s a great way to create fun, deepen the community, and add a little more motivation (”I don’t want to make my Mini look like he’s slacking!”).

Nike continues to blow me away with its wholehearted dive into meaningful marketing. Stefan also shared data, such as the fact that “30% of Nike+ users come to the site three or more times per week.” He said that people who don’t have their Nike+ sensors with them will simply skip running “because they want credit for their achievements.” Overall, Stefan summed up Nike’s approach as follows:

“If we can do something good for somebody, they will repay us with sales.”

My second interesting session came from Contagious Magazine and Leo Burnett Worldwide. Leo is driving a meaningful-marketing-type quote around “moving from ads to acts,” and Contagious has “been tracking the branded utility space for three years.” (In fact, a reporter from the magazine interviewed me two weeks ago for a big upcoming piece.) The two shared several examples of meaningful marketing, some new, some old. I was struck, though, by how the examples they shared touched so few people - especially compared to traditional advertising’s reach into the tens of millions. For example:

• 7,900 people downloaded a widget for Nike+.
• Guinness created a mobile tour guide in Catonese for the 20,000 people who visited Hong Kong for a rugby tournament.
• 5,000 people in Australia uploaded photos for a Canon promotion.
• Big brands are running product placement on a webiseries called “Kate Modern” that 1.5 million people view each week around the world.

These are small numbers. So small that I’d have a hard time telling a client these looked good, much less bragging in front of thousands of people at Cannes. I’m personally a big fan of much deeper engagement with fewer people, rather than a massive reach play with millions of interruptions. But we also need to take a hard look at the numbers behind these amazingly creative (and meaningful) programs, and ensure that they are achieving enough scale to actually move the needle on revenues.

OK, time to cat nap before my first night on the town at Cannes. We’ll see if the cocktail conversation is as meaningful as the work we saw today.

After several days working on a huge new business pitch, I’m headed to the beach. Nope, not your typical drive to the coast with the family. I’ve still got to work on this trip. Instead, I’m catching a flight to France to experience the biggest annual advertising event in the world: The Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

There are a few reasons why we’re going this year. First, we’ve grown to a size now where we need to be in the mix at such events. Second, as part of WPP, this is a great opportunity to network with our network and connect with partners from around the world. Third, one of our biggest clients, P&G, is receiving an award as advertiser of the year.

Aside from these reasons, I’m also excited to attend so that I can measure the best in the business against the Marketing with Meaning concept. The Cannes Lions awards are often considered a distraction from both business and meaning building. It’s the most edgy, beautiful, or artistic work… that is often more about the advertising agency’s self-expression than work that is supposed to drive sales. But in recent years the Lions seem to be moving toward meaning. Last year, for example, the show’s overall Grand Prix winner was Dove’s Evolution viral video.

So I’m going into the event with as a kind of unbiased reporter, and I promise to blog daily on what I see and hear from the shows - not only the work on display, but the cocktail conversations as well. Au revoir!