Posts Tagged ‘cannes’

Let’s Ask Ourselves a Burning Question at Cannes

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

burning question

“A question asked in the right way often points to its own answer.”  —Edward Hodnett

Some of the most important changes in history began when groups of people asked difficult questions of their elders, their rulers, and their textbooks. Questions have sparked democratic revolutions from Boston to Berlin, they have driven scientific paradigm shifts from Darwin to Einstein, and they have triggered social change from San Francisco to Soweto. These “burning questions” compel us to step back from the way we have always lived our lives, help us discover that change is needed, and point us to an answer that suddenly becomes completely obvious—and betters the world. It is time for us marketers and advertisers to ask ourselves a Burning Question that will unleash needed change in the work that we do for our customers, stakeholders, employees, and society as a whole.

It is an ambitious objective, but one that is clearly ready for the first bold action. The historic model of marketing and advertising stands on the brink of failure in many corners. Mass media is increasingly an oxymoron, as our customers shift their precious eyeballs to 500 cable channels and 50 billion YouTube videos. Product and service purchases are screened through the lens of social media, not pricey ad campaigns. And citizens of the world are calling on their governments to protect them from advertisements on their mobile screens and school buses. Simply put, our traditional marketing model is unsustainable.

On Friday, June 25 at the annual Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in France, Jim Stengel and I will bring together the world’s largest brands and advertising agencies to reveal a Burning Question that will allow us to transform our work and our world. We plan to use this biggest, most-followed gathering of global marketers to spark a revolution—and we hope you will join us.

This revolution will be socialized. As we prepare to spark the revolution in June, we need your help to guide the discussion and plan to offer several ways for everyone to be involved. For starters, we are asking people to visit www.burningquestion.com and share what they believe is the Burning Question that will unlock change in our marketing paradigm. We will share the ideas openly, and Jim and I will draw on your input for our session. In a few weeks we will launch a contest in which we will identify a handful of fellow change agents to join us in Cannes (on our dime). And we will announce more ways to get involved before, during, and after this event. I can promise you that it is something that the Cannes Lions Festival has never seen before—and it will be meaningful and memorable whether you are in France with us or not.

This summer we’re going to set fire to the old assumptions about what marketing is and what it can be. Will you join us?

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Posted in Burning Question, Movement | No Comments »

Unique Coke Cannes Delivery

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009


This week I’m spending some time catching up on sharing some of the best, most meaningful marketing to be awarded in the annual Cannes Advertising Competition. Our President, Jay, and Chief Creative Officer, Peter, both came back raving about an incredibly powerful vending machine for Coca-Cola that was put up in the bottom floor of the Cannes conference. It ended up winning a Gold Lion in the Design category. Check out the video above for a glimpse of the experience.

The biggest lesson for me here is a reminder that everything your brand does with the consumer is a kind of marketing, whether it’s customer service, packaging, delivery trucks, or vending machines. And every consumer touchpoint in this broad view of marketing can be made much more meaningful. In this case, Coke has taken the boring, predictable, exchange-focused vending machine and turned it into something remarkable, entertaining, and fun. I also love how this delivers on what the Coke brand and drinking experience is really about: a few minutes of fun and enjoyment. Instead of just advertising to people on TV with equity spots that are meant to help trigger a feeling of enjoyment hours or days later when the drink is consumed, this makes entertainment and happy feelings happen at the moment of truth of refreshment.

I think there are some other really interesting things about these vending experiences. First, they are completely measurable (obviously, because they sell product). Second, they could allow Coke to charge more and achieve wider margins (say, charging $2 or more for the machine experience and fancy bottle). Third, they draw attention in public places, which attracts more users, buyers, and observers.

I am most interested to see what happens from here with the vending machines, and whether they will truly roll out broadly. Sure, it’s easy to create a concept such as this, install it in a few malls, and win an award at Cannes. The challenge is selling this in broadly and getting distributors around the world to embrace the concept. This is where the marketing department often bumps heads with the old-school crowd, finance guys and general bureaucratic commitment to not making waves.

“Marketing” sits in a skyscraper in Atlanta, Georgia, making ads, while “Sales” is out on the streets making sure machines and store shelves are full. Placing ads and maintaining fancy machines is not their job, nor in their budget. Coke distributors are used to paying $X for a basic vending machine that needs almost no service. But what happens when “headquarters” forces them to pay $5X for this special machine? Who’s going to fix them when they break? Anyone who has worked in a large company can play out this tragic scene from hours in boardrooms and conference calls. A quote that I developed in my days as a big marketer was, “Doing anything new is hard.”

My congrats to Coke on a killer idea, and our hopes are with you as you try to take this meaningful idea outside the ad-award world.

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Posted in Awards, Entertainment, Experience, Outdoor | 1 Comment »

Bleeding Billboard Slows Traffic Deaths

Monday, July 13th, 2009


It’s a few weeks after the annual Cannes Advertising Festival. I was able to post early on our agency’s Gold Lions win for Pringles, but I’m a bit slow in sharing other examples of great, meaningful advertising from the show. This week I’ll share a few examples of my favorite work.

First up is this incredibly powerful and simple idea from BBDO in New Zealand that won a Bronze Lion in the Design competition. The video above tells the story much better than I can, but in summary, its goal is to reduce car accidents on the roads of Papakura, New Zealand, which tend to spike when rains come and roads become slippery. This campaign reduced road deaths on this particular piece of roadway to zero.

It is great to see a piece of brilliant, meaningful marketing for a nonprofit issue here. One might argue that all cause-related and nonprofit marketing is meaningful, but I don’t believe that is the case. Issue-related nonprofits are in sales just like regular businesses; their goal is to “sell in” their point of view on a topic. But unless they draw true engagement and value for the targeted audience, they fail.

In this case, local government is trying to “sell” its drivers on the need to slow down during rain. To measure success, instead of tracking sales of a product, it is tracking the number of road accidents and fatalities. And clearly some marketing is more effective than others. Imagine TV commercials or print ads with a policeman or government official lecturing a viewer about the need to drive cautiously during rains. Failure is almost assured for such an approach because it does not come at a relevant time in an engaging way. Here, the bleeding billboards not only come at the right place and time (roadside during rain), but they communicate the message in a way that embodies the tragedy of drivers’ failure to adjust—the photo of a young child. This beats a flashing yellow warning sign any day. Not only is this effective in its roadside ad placement, but the ad has been viewed nearly 500,000 times on YouTube in less than a month.

My hope is that the concept and framework of Marketing with Meaning is also used by nonprofit organizations to better their strategy and results. Coming up in my book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, I share the story of how another nonprofit issue organization, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, dramatically shifted its marketing approach from interruptive ads to meaningful messages and advice. I may also try to do something in the marketing of the book to specifically reach out to nonprofits, perhaps in a nonprofit way. Stay tuned and, as always, your ideas in the comments are welcome and appreciated!

(Special thanks to Chris Zieverink from our Creative team, who not only sent me this link but just created a killer logo for Marketing with Meaning that I’ll be sharing here soon.)

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Posted in Cause Related, Outdoor, non-profit | 1 Comment »

Celebrating Pringles Cannes Hands

Monday, June 29th, 2009

As most marketing readers likely know, last week was the annual Cannes Advertising Festival in France—unarguably the world’s most prominent advertising industry get-together, where the brightest creative minds in our business gather to compare the best work over the past 12 months. Last year I got to attend for the first time (with blog posts here if you’re interested), but this year I was on vacation in Italy with my family instead of Cannes.

I missed one of the biggest moments of the history of my company, Bridge Worldwide, when our team won a Gold Cyber Lions award for the Pringles banner ad above. While “only” a banner, this remarkable little ad unit offers a great case study in meaningful marketing for both B2C and B2B.

The Consumer Story: Once You Click, You Can’t Stop

Before reading any further, go ahead and click on the banner above. A new window will open to our staging server where you can see our banner in context, just like the judges at Cannes did. Spend as much or as little time interacting with it and return here to keep reading…

…Welcome back. If you’re anything like the Cannes award judges or the thousands of other people who have viewed this ad online in the past few days, you enjoyed, too. Our team created a banner ad that makes people laugh for a few minutes, and then share it with their friends online. This happens to be a perfect fit with what the Pringles brand itself is all about: a few minutes of fun, and sharing with friends.

What I love about this ad is that it takes banner space that most people ignore or find annoying, and turns it into a fun, engaging moment of play with the brand. That five minutes of fun is rewarding for the viewer who chooses to engage with it, falling under a category of meaningful marketing that we call “Entertaining Connections.”

Aside from great data on clicks and time spent with the ad, we measure its success in the word of mouth that it is drawing. Since winning the award and posting the ad on our staging server we are seeing a steady, growing number of people discovering the ad and sharing it with their social networks. Twitter in particular is becoming the barometer of the buzz, and I’m seeing about one person per minute Twittering about the ad with 100% positive comments. Here’s a sample of some of my favorite recent comments from search.twitter.com:

  • @steveklabnik: Best. Ad. Ever.  Pringles are amazing.
  • @MegLG: A banner ad that is actually engaging…Can hands: Pringles. I probably just made someone a million $ for clicking so much.
  • @lisahattery: Bored? Go here…Click on the banner ad. Keep clicking. It’s not spam or porn, I swear. I want Pringles.
  • @floatnsink: This is probably the best & only advertisement that I want to click.
  • @stuartwitts: Award winning banner ad from Pringles. Great work. Can’t remember last time a banner ad made me laugh.
  • @adamcoomes: Best banner ad I’ve ever seen. This is hilarious! Props to Pringles.
  • @hunterupton: please please PLEASE! check out this banner ad. Hilarious Pringles! it’s the best i’ve ever seen!

The Cannes judges agreed completely. In a video that was shown during the Cyber Lions event Wednesday night, they said they each spent 5 minutes on the banner, laughing out loud at their desks. Our Pringles banner was one of only 19 Gold Lions that were awarded in the entire digital category, and only six of these went to U.S.-based agencies. But what are awards for, anyway…?

It’s Starting to Go Viral

Over the weekend we started to notice comments and traffic to our staging server spike. We worked to post links on Fark, Digg, Reddit, BuzzFeed, and other places. I checked in with our Tech team Saturday afternoon and learned that more than 100,000 people had visited the page in the past day! If this was a number of views on YouTube, we would consider it a viral video success with that number alone. It will be fun to watch the traffic this week and see the other places it gets picked up.

Building the Bridge Worldwide Brand

Advertising awards are a big deal in our industry. Thousands of entries are made every year to awards shows like Cannes, with each agency hoping to get credit for the work they have done. The purpose of awards is mainly for agency marketing, a business-to-business approach. Awards allow agencies to brag about the quality of their creative work in new business pitches. But are they meaningful marketing in a B2B environment?

Many, many advertising industry pundits cry that we are too obsessed with awards. But I actually do believe that they can be meaningful to the companies that are searching for an agency partner. Here’s the rationale: First, the creative work is really the number-one thing that brands need in their advertising agencies. It’s the job they cannot do themselves. Second, it’s very, very difficult to judge the quality of an agency’s creative product through the pitching process. Case studies show work for other clients, but it is difficult to judge it because beauty is in the mind of the brief holder—i.e., clients can’t judge whether work for a different business than their own was successful or not. As a result, clients look for other ways to get comfortable with the creative potential of prospective partners.

Here’s where awards can come in—they give clients an impartial measure of the quality of creative work. Agencies that have won awards have “proof” that the work was good, as measured by very experienced judges, and as measured against many other agencies that are putting their best work up against it. While creative quality is only one piece of what clients need to see in an agency, and awards are only one of several ways to judge this, winning a big award such as a Cannes Lion shows that our agency can do some of the best work in the world.

A Cannes Lions award can also be very meaningful to an agency’s current clients. Our Pringles brand team and the senior management at P&G were ecstatic about this recognition. Within minutes of the announcement we were cheered by email from clients at all levels. A handful of top leaders got to see the show in person and they enjoyed a toast together in Cannes, immediately talking excitedly about what else we could do in this space. For P&G as a whole, it was the company’s first-ever Gold Lion in the digital category. This award is another step in the world’s largest marketer’s shift to winning in the still-developing digital space.

This win renews current clients’ confidence in us as an agency partner, shows them that we can help them compete with the best in the world, and challenges them to buy “bigger” work that we bring to them.

Impact on Our Company Culture

As an agency we only first visited the show in person last year. Our three-person delegation of Jay Woffington (President), Peter Schwartz (Chief Creative Officer), and me talked often during that week about the work we saw and wondered what it would take for us to bring home a Gold Lion. We decided that we wanted one and that our company was up to the challenge. We thought it would be a three- to five-year journey, and as Jay said, “I knew we had the ability, the talented people, and the desire… but an award such as this is not easy.”

By setting this goal and sharing our experiences with the company upon our return last year, it got our teams fired up and determined. I believe our work across the board was better in the past 12 months, and we felt confident enough to submit four pieces for Cannes. We were excited just to be short-listed for one, and the Pringles Gold win blew everyone away.

What I love is that this is truly “the agency’s award.” Our Creative Director on Pringles, Jason Bender, accepted the award on behalf of many who made it a success. As people were congratulating him late into Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, he continually deferred credit to the team behind it. And to paraphrase Bender, we all woke up Thursday morning as employees of a Cannes Gold-winning agency. I couldn’t be more proud of the team and of the agency I work for.

Conclusion

I hope this story illustrates how meaningful marketing can be a multilayered win for your brand or agency. Marketing with meaning breaks through the clutter to deliver quality work and business-building results, it gets your clients and new business prospects excited, and it can help make your company a great place to work.

As for Cannes, the statue wasn’t even back in the U.S. before Peter came to me talking about how we have a chance to win the “agency of the year” Cyber Lion next year—and I think our other creative teams are anxious to get in the spotlight next year. It will be fun to see the impact of this award on our agency in the year to come, and I’m so excited to be a part of it.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, B2B, Banners, Connection, Entertainment | 1 Comment »

Monday Randoms

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Brita joins the dark side

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…

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Posted in Awards, Clients | No Comments »

Cannes ‘08 Wrap Up

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

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.

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Posted in Awards, Connection, Entertainment, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Cannes Day 3: More on Stories for Meaning

Friday, June 20th, 2008

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:

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.

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Posted in Entertainment | No Comments »

Cannes Day 2: Coca-Cola Storytelling

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

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….

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Posted in Connection, Entertainment | 1 Comment »

Cannes Day 1: Meaning Abounds

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

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.

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Posted in Achievement, Applications, Awards, Connection, Social Networking | 1 Comment »

Off to Cannes

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

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!

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Posted in Awards | No Comments »