After the competition was over we had a few days to enjoy the spirit of Cannes. We spend a lot of time in the interactive case kiosks which was cool, attending seminars and building networks all over the world.
One thing which was really cool was that Aegis Media had a beach house where you could bring guests, press and interesting people. And with high speed internet this was the perfect spot to hang out.
And it was really really nice..
After an hour of sleep we dressed up for the first time in our Cannes experience. We went to the Media/Outdoor and Radio Ceremony and it was a very good experience.
The fun thing was actually that Radio Lions kind of surpriced me. Talking to people about chosing media vehicles I ormally have a slight problem when it comes to radio, because of the horrible quality of radio commercials in Denmark. Therefor Radio kind of has gotten a difficult position in my head. It is an interesting media, but often it fades away due to a lack of creativity in the solutions.
Hearing the Gold and silver spots I was amazed about how much inspiration I got and how it instantly started letting Radio re-enter my communication landscape.
This was fun! And then we went out for dinner and the to the Aegis Media Party on the beach. This was really nice. Exclusive party with not to many people. More about this tomorrow…
Damn it. Even though we found the brief hard and knew that we didn’t have much time, we wanted to do our best.
Do or don’t do. There is no try!
So of cause we wanted to win. But we didn’t! Damn it.
But the press conference was fun and very nice to see the Japanese girls who won for best separate idea crying and screaming in happiness. They were so nice and they really got happy…
But still; a shame, but we didn’t expect it, so we were actually able to be happy for the winning teams who were two really nice people from Italy.
And alway a pleasure speaking to the press afterwards.. “Wy didn’t you guys win??????????” (no answer) “Hmm?” “bla bla bla bla bla” (aka of cause we don’t know – we wanted to win but obvious the judges liked the Italian solution better) . You can’t really ask people about that. We just really wanted to see what the others teams had made – but it wasn’t available yet, so no chance of knowing which truck hit us 
Wunderman was great! Perfect seminar – perfect speaker – great slides with insights and surprice. The theme was how to start conversation instead of just advertising, and most of the presentation was really great.
Of cause you can’t expect everything to be new when you spend a lot of time tracking what’s going on in the industry, but this really did a good job at continuing offering inspiration.
Especially the “always in beta” point on how ads are o longer a finish product but an ongoing process was underlines perfect by the “Double-click to edit”-slide which I loved so much that I dedicated the title of this post to it.
Then Katrine and me went to see screening of the Titanium category. It was great! Integration is the way to press fast forward now a days.
I will come back to specific cases later on. But Titanium Rocks!
For numeral reasons I’m soo glad I went to this masterclass in the Young LIons Zone.
1. It was 1 minute after our presentation so a reason for sitting thinking and no-one asking “hoooow did it goooo in a screaming tone-of-voice”
2. I love the filosophy of Naked and Paul Woolmington is a wonderful speaker. My heartbeat after have the most stressed 5 minutes of my career fell down listening to his calm, confident and clear voice.
3. I get the change for tagging this blog “Naked” which will give our little Cannes blog so much more google-juice. (Perhaps it wont be the most relevant hits, but giving the facts that googling porn and still end up clicking on a communications planning blog, proofs that marketing people also surfs for porn as well as everybody else.)
This post was actually dedicated to an ode for Naked, but sometimes things do not end up as we thought. Thank god for that.
But still two words about the masterclass:
It was great! Basic intro of the heart of independency.
I was very interested in how to sell ideas and how to make so many external partners work together. But this was more inspiration and cases of how the solutions will look if thinking concepts over “were do we make money”.
And once again – go see Noah Briers Brand Tag feature… I commented on it on my own blog channel8000 a while ago – it is really interesting.
Thanks to Paul for setting my mind free…
Early next morning we got our 5 minutes to present the assignment. This was really tough. We really looked at the competition brief to find out how to solve it, but little did it help. It said that we needed to present insights, strategy and solution – with everything explained why chosen. This was really a hard job – and we didn’t really succeed with this part. In the after light we perhaps shouldn´t have focussed so much on was we were told to explain but focused on explaining out ideas instead. We had only 5 minutes but we reached the ideas at 4.30 which was horrible because we didn´t feel at all that we had time to explain what, how and why… and we didn’t even have time to present it all.
So it was really a hard and learning experience…
This really felt like bad sex. Great expectation, too short time and a strange unfulfilled feeling afterwards.
But bad sex is better than none, so after an hour or so we started smiling a bit again And we were still satisfied with the work – but would have died for 17 minutes instead of 5.
Afterwards we went down to the Croisettes where we were going to dinner with TV2, press and the other Young Lions competitors. I was actually really ready to go home, but we really wanted to show up, so we took a deep breath and took out in the cannes evening.. And it ended up being so cosy. We had a wonderful meal and everybody were so nice and fun at the dinner. We meet so many nice people and the evening was one of the best on the whole trip.
Thanks to TV2 for a perfect evening!
At 8 am the doors opened for the competion area downstairs the palais. Small boxes with a huge mac and a password for gettyimages. Then GO!
12 hours of laughs, coffee, near-death experiences and so much stress.
But it was fun and very challenging. But thanks god we’re are ot working like this on a regular basis. It was really a tough job.
The last 4 hours flew – we didn’t really manage to do all the nice things we planned late in the past evening. But we finished the presentation (almost) and pressed save just 2 minutes till 8 pm were we got kicked out.
Our solution were a network strategy with focus on activating the network around the very wealthy and get their attention through personal recommendations. The campaign idea was called Backstage due to the duality in War Child’s engagement in music and the need from the target group to be able to see the outcome of their donations. The lack of transparency in the charity landscape gave a possible positioning for war child due to the small, engaged culture. So we wanted to take the connection backstage to exclusivity, music, transparency and networks.
The key idea was parted in two: What money can’t buy and track your money. First we had The War Child secret gigs with huge bands playing for only the network at a backstage concert and a lot of PR and network activities evolving around those. And second we offered a wide range of digital connection tolls to engage the network with desktop apps, widgets and private member zones, to make it possible to customize the communication in the network. This was off cause a tool to face the discussion about the problems in charities and make War Child stand out as the personal, transparent and engaged charity having an attitude towards making everything and every penny count in a tracking of results.
We used contextual print and online ads as well as personal placed outdoor facings, and a direct marketing postcard with a private message from the saved children targeted very strongly on these networks of wealth, to crate awareness and public attention.
This was just a short description of some of the things we came up with and why.
At 20pm we left the palais – exhausted but with a big smile.
According to Katrines post earlier I just wanted to comment on this Cheil seminar too.
Three things that I found interesting was the cultural insight on eastern behavior where decisions are made, not by the individual, but a decision made collectively in the herds of the young people.
Then I found the insight, as Katrine also commented on, on girls as technology drivers very interesting. When technology no longer is the goal for the fascination, but the technology as a mean to enter a social process the girls, who are far more social creatures than boys, tends to drive the technology. I actually extended this discussion to a social event where I meet Claus Moseholm from GoViral with whom I talked about how the nature of Viral campaigns in Europe right now seems driven by a masculine humour and the nature of girls, linked up to networking and sharing of information/stories/gossip, aren’t adressed in viral campaigns although their nature would be a perfect catalyst for spreading a message if it is possible to use in their social deeds.
Third I LOVED the discussion of branded services. Let get down to business. All this talk about brand channels, viral, product placement and so on. The real key to the mayor potential would be in making services, that are so relevant to the brand, so appealing to the target group and so well carried out that the consumer sees it as a service. A little help in their life.
So these are my key take-out’s from this seminar.
A seminar called ‘Can We Be Friends’ with reference to the possibilities of Facebook, Myspace, Bebo and the likes was on the programme tuesday after we finished our oral presentation. I work exclusively with the young target group in the Aegis Media agency DIST, so I though this must be something for me. However, I must say I was disappointed. I don’t know if it was the moderator or the fact that the market is so competitive that the speakers were holding all their interesting thoughts back. But this seminar never got under the surface of social networking sites and their challenges and possibilities for advertisers.
Clients often come to me and want to do ’something on Facebook’. This ’something’ is often undefined and bound in a wish to follow the hype, which I totally understand. When it comes to the young target group, I always advice my clients to meet them on their ‘home ground’ instead of using a lot of money and energy driving them to a place, where they don’t come naturally. However, as Paul Woolimington from Naked said at his Young Lions masterclass, with reference to Facebook; ‘Don’t chase shiny objects’. I couldn’t agree more. There are thousands and thousands of groups and applications on Facebook that do not serve any other purpose than promoting a brand. They are developed by agencies who don’t really know the mechanisms behind social networking sites or in turn don’t really care as long as they make money. But guess what, this is not in the interest of their clients.
Blake Chandler from Facebook spoke about utility as the key driver of Facebook. This is interesting when you look at the current phase, that Facebook is in. But perhaps it says something about how Facebook aims to develop in the future. Power back to the users!
The only thing that I got out of this seminar was a confirmation of the fact that the only way to succeed commercially on social networking sites is by acknowleding that they are all about utility. Identify how you add value by giving something back to the community. This is the key behind succeeding commercially on social networks.
Working exclusively with the target group young people, mobile phones are an inevitable part of the media landscape. However, unlike what many believe, Danish youths are not that mobile-tech-savvy. This was indeed proven by the Cheil Worldwide seminar I attended on wednesday, along with Pernille and Lisa. Cheil Worldwide has made an interactive exploration of marketing technology among the YMCs (Young-Minded Consumer) in Seoul. This more than showed that Danish youths, and obviously also Danish mobile companies, are far behind when it comes to exploiting the possibilities of the little device you take with you everywhere you go.
While most Danish youth still primarily use their mobilephone for texting and calling (yes, that is how it is) South Korean youths are making the mobilephone an extension of their existence. Besides Internet, mobile TV, m-commerce, m-banking and m-movies, other and more sophisticated mobile services were introduced. For instance the Polygraph which is a mobile lie detector allowing South Korean girls to test if their boyfriends are telling them the truth about their where-abouts etc. Very effective – but also a bit scary! Another interesting mobile service, that the seminar introduced, was the so-called Navi Call Taxi Service. This service is an sms-gps taxi service that evolves around making the taxi experience more safe for young women by i.e. sending a text message to the parents and/or friends with the name and number of the taxi and its location.
It is a common fact that South Korea as a highly developed market when it comes to mobile communication. However, it could have been interesting to know, how many of the South Korean youth actually use these advanced mobile services. The interesting part was, that the mobile services discussed by Cheil were primarily targeted young females, and that these served as drivers of the services making them a natural part of their daily lives and social connections. This could definetely be a source of inspiration for Danish mobile companies in their never-ending quest for the young target group.
Sunday at 5pm we started the brief after a few hours of training from Getty Images and Apple. These people were so friendly and helpful. Thanks to both – this was really a pleasure! We saw some cool Keynote features… Sorry to say it, but keynote beats Powerpoint 10-0. Of cause a challenge working in a new program but we learned a lot – and the interface was really intuitive, so it went quite well. Getty is just nice as always… Didn’t know though that it contained video files to. So that was interesting – but we didn’t have the time to really use it in the assignment.
We got the assignment from War Child. The task was to raise money from huge private donations, and this was really a challenging brief, because of the crowded charity landscape and the very hard to reach target. But challenges are good. We discussed the brief for a while. Then we went home to work….
At 2am we fell a sleep..
This was really interesting… There was so many good things – I’ll get back to this later)
(this post will be updated)
Quotes:
“creativity requires the courage to let go of ertainties” Niels Bohr
Trevor the mentos intern
“When dealing with people remember that your are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion” Dale Carnegie
4% of fortune 500 company sites contain links to porn
Ariel frpm Ink direct
- perfect case – (more later)
Sunday morning we went to a workshop with Giovanni Rivetti og Roberto Feres from New Content.
They started out with a madison and vine approach and it started out very interesting. But after 5 minutes we experienced that the whole workshop would be solely about IFE (In-flight entertainment) and the key points was spoken out pretty quickly, so after an hour we left.
Most interesting was the idea about in-flight learning, with an obvious but interesting base in language learning but evolved to everything else. Think about a 3 hour trip to Egypt learning the basic glossary.
Interesting but a little bit to long….
Saturday night we hooked up with the danish ad agency envision and got the first taste of cannes with a bottle of rosé and a view over the marina.
Here’s a picture of Katrine together with Anders Rasmussen who is going to compete in the film competition.
We arrived saturday evening. Katrine came here early and Pernille arrived in the evening. We went to take a look at the palais, but everything was still quiet.
Last year everybody talked about Nike+. When I saw RGA and Nike on the seminar program this year I was intrigued by the “Is this going to be something we already have heard 1000 times” or “Are they coming up with new steps into the world of letting the consumers connect to them” -discussion that went about in Cannes about this seminar.
So I went.
And I’m happy.
This was really great.
Stefan, Nike Global Brand Connection, held a perfect seminar about the next steps for connecting to the consumers and tapping into different areas of sport based on simple, logic and relevant insights that drove a “why not” but “I wish I had come up with this” awe in the audience.
He presented the human race, baller’s network and MY mini, which are all brilliant initiatives – all well argumented and even though I am already a Nike+ member I wanted to go home and “do more”. Aka connect more to Nike. This is so fun and taps very well into the earlier discussion about branded services. Because what is Nike getting out of making a small facebook avatar showing my run status? Hmm you can’t see it on the ROI next month. But great brands need great horizons – If Nike can help me run more – perhaps I’ll need shoes, clothes and so on more often and the I will go to the brand I feel most connected to – and of cause it will pay of in the long run (sorry the corny metaphor)
Arrived in Cannes this afternoon and I am very pleased to find, that the Internet in our appartment is actually high-speed… Makes researching a lot more fun! So how do you do research for an assignment, you know almost nothing about, besides that it evolves around developing a media and contact strategy for an NGO you don’t yet know the name of? Well, thats what I am about to find out… Inspiration is a good place to start.
Pernille and I will, along with the rest of the 20 teams competing in the media category, receive the brief of our assignment tomorrow afternoon and will then have a little more than 24 hours to solve it. I look very much forward to the whole proces. It always amazes me how much high-quality work, that can be done when under extreme time pressure. Makes me wonder that perhaps we should work like this more often at home…
In the perspective of going to Cannes and participating in the Young Lions Competition I did a bit of thinking on why we see this need for a new approach to planning.
I did an article on the subject for our monthly Aegis Media Danmark newsletter called zoom news. Here it is – still in danish though… You can subscribe to it on this page too….
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