My very unofficial Cannes Lions 2011 recap. So, last week, thousands of lucky advertising industry professionals from every corner of the globe flew, drove, rode, sailed and railed it down to Cannes, France for the 2011 edition of the Advertising Creative festival known across the world as the Cannes Lions. I was there, and since I keep being asked what I thought about the week-long event, this is my very unofficial recap. But first, a few quick thoughts. What didn’t rock (aside from the €35 cocktails). The wi-fi. Clichés, clichés, clichés, and more clichés. What rocked. Cannes in June. Speaking of coverage, I have to give serious props to the Porter-Novelli team for the job they did both on their blog and on Twitter this year, and particularly Danny Devriendt and Marta Majeska for taking over the #CannesLions hashtag on the twitternets. Some key articles you should look over: Analysis of conversations at #CannesLions Applying the Silicon Valley approach to Marketing Why ad agencies should act more like tech startups Beautiful. 1. 2.
5 Ways the Advertising Industry Is Preparing for a Digital Future. Chris Schreiber is director of marketing at social video advertising company Sharethrough. A leading expert on social content strategy, Chris recently presented a two-hour workshop on viral video at the Cannes Lions festival, entitled "Making Videos Go Viral: Creative, Social, and Technological Techniques. " Last week, the world's top brands and agencies descended on the Cannes Lions festival to discuss creativity in modern advertising and to anoint the campaigns that most effectively captured our imaginations. While the conference was renamed this year to the "International Festival of Creativity" (previously the "International Advertising Festival"), it featured an unprecedented amount of participation from blockbuster technology companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
Over the course of the week, the significant relationship between the powerful new forces in technology and the creative output from the advertising industry became quite clear. Technology And Advertising, Together At Last. I suspect 2011’s Cannes Lions festival may be looked back upon as the year advertising and technology agreed to meet and get married on the beach. Sure, previous years have seen tech company attendance (Yahoo! Is a regular at the festival) but this year the commitment to one another was unprecedented, visible and visceral. Unquestionably, the two industries have much still to work out about each other.
Nonetheless, the re-branding of that bastion of old school ad cool, Cannes Lions, as a ‘festival of creativity’ this year signaled a broadening mindset. And Facebook’s VP of Global Marketing Solutions, Carolyn Everson, took a big step towards agencies, speaking compellingly about Facebook as a “platform for creativity” and the company’s desire to “stay small and empower agencies.” This shared acceptance spilled out beyond the seminar speeches and awards. Mel Exon is a Managing Partner of BBH and founder of BBH Labs. [Image: Flickr user Giampaolo Macorig] 12 Trends from Cannes 2011. Cannes Lions 2011 Redux: Advertising Creativity Is In The Midst Of An Evolution, Not A Revolution. For one week every year, the South of France becomes the center of the advertising universe. Now in its 58th year, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has slowly but surely transformed itself from an advertising awards show into an event that brings together the world’s leading minds on advertising, film, music, and technology to debate the future of advertising.
To the uninitiated, Cannes Lions is a seven-day festival that recognizes and showcases the most creative advertising from around the world in every medium: film, digital, radio, print, outdoor, design, promotions, and integrated campaigns. The entire week is packed with screenings of all of the work, more than 50 seminars, 20-plus workshops, and, of course, the award ceremonies. This year it attracted more than 9,000 registered attendees and garnered almost 29,000 competition entries. Here are a few of my takeaways and highlights from the Cannes Lions Festival 2011: Cannes POV: Don Draper Has Been Replaced By Your User Experience Designer. For those unfamiliar with the nuances and evolution of the advertising business, educated primarily through the wonderful fiction of "Mad Men," conventional wisdom would signal that much of the power in the ecosystem revolves around charming and dapper creative types.
And for much of the history of modern advertising, that would be broadly accurate. In advertising's early years, there were only a few channels to create for, literally and figuratively, so the media buying and planning was fairly straightforward, and executives focused on a brands budget and producing exceptional creative content to spend that budget.
For a more accurate and slightly more up-to-date picture of the role of creative directors and the advertising business, Doug Pray's "Art & Copy" tells a more realistic tale. Instead of Mr. Fast-forward to today, where consumer preference and attention extends infinitely and across multiple devices and the definition of content has been wildly expanded.