Let’s start with last night. I was just a tad bit excited about the festival and when I get excited about something I have major issues sleeping. I woke up bright and early for Day 1 of the International Festival of Creativity. I curled my hair, placed my “official” badge around my neck, and pranced off to catch the 9:40 train to Cannes. Once our group arrived in the building, we headed straight for the Young Lions Zone, which came equipped with mango smoothies, wifi on the computers and iPads, and hp white zone (basically a big kids coloring area on many different types of surfaces.) Oh and to top it all off they have decorated the zone with a beach theme complete with beach chairs, beanbags, and a YouTube smoothie bar!!
After checking out the awesome pad, it was time to go to the first seminar of the day, which was goviral. This seminar jumped right into comparing brands with religion. When thinking about a popular brand and or religion, the same area of the brain is activated, which draws an interesting observation. Martin Lindstrom elaborated on this idea further by saying, “Campaigns work more effectively when they start offline and move online.” This was probably my most favorite quote of the day because I am all about doing EVERYTHING online. He explained that an audience is built over time and that distribution, amplification, and explosion are key to raising awareness. I thought this kicked off the festival fairly well and I was intrigued.
In between seminars, I chose to partake in my favorite hobby...people watching. Three things I observed: iPads are everywhere, males dominate the advertising industry, and the people attending the festival are from so many different places and are just SO COOL.
Ok, back to the second seminar. I attended WGSN-Align to the Macro Trends Driving Product Development. Susan Kemp was the speaker and she had the most sophisticated British voice ever. I was enthralled more by her accent than by the actual presentation. She explained that in 2013 consumers will be redefining luxury and sustainability, de-teching, embracing global shifts, sending and respond to neutral messages, and living a new lifestyle. According to this statement, Facebook will be out in 2013 and people will have “too many Facebook friends.” I find this very hard to believe and wonder how anybody can predict something this big.
The third seminar was UM, L’Oreal and BMW-Entrepreneurs are the New Creative Department (and vice versa.) Generally speaking, I found this one very confusing. They were more focused on the logistics of the company background and gave a more detailed summary of their company’s organization.
After that boring dose of blah, it was time to grab a quick panini and a bag of chips. I caught about 30 minutes of thenetworkone, which showcased independent agencies. It was by far the best 30-minute seminar of the day! Ali Ali, the creative director of Elephant Cairo had the most interesting campaign. He gave a real life account of what it was like to be in Egypt during the Revolution and he further emphasized how the people powered social media. I absolutely adored his Facebook Like Campaign. He stressed that to make it as an independent agency, radical and creative ideas are a must and no idea should be shot down.
Ali was like a protein bar to the fifth seminar and gave a little revitalization to the audience. The only thing you need to know about this seminar is that Nick Jonas was there and the shutter/click of the camera on Nick overpowered anything anybody else had to say. I DIDN’T REALIZE HOW OBSESSED I WAS WITH NICK JONAS AND I REVERTED BACK TO MY PRETEEN YEARS AND JUST TOOK PICTURES OF HIM ON STAGE (the whole time)!!! I also googled him while onstage and I learned that he is only 3 months younger than me (hey hey!!) The only things I did during this seminar was gawk over how intelligent and good looking Nick Jonas was, sing “Burnin’ Up for You Baby” in the back of my mind, and secretly wonder where he was staying in Cannes.
The sixth seminar I attended was Fleishman and Hillard-Social Mobile Marketing. Mitch Spolan, the senior vice-president of LivingSocial was the highlight of this seminar. His presentation was outstanding and he walked the audience through a video that corresponded with what he had to stay. He explored the LivingSocial app by showing how consumers are faced with decisions everyday. This app gives you discounts and rewards by making the decision for you. I actually have this app on my iPhone and had previously tried to use it before the festival. The problem with this app is that in a rural areas (where I live) these deals and discounts don’t work.
Finally, the last seminar of the day was entitled Naked-The Three C’s of Modern Creativity. The first speaker used Legos as their example. As a young girl I was never interested in Legos so why would I be interested now? That portion bored me to tears. The next speaker from Nokia described Push Snowboarding. It is a device they put at the bottom of the skateboards to track distance, speed, heart rate, and many other skateboardish things. The most shocking statistics about this campaign were that it reached over 290 million people and the ROI was over 13 times the investment. Those numbers are crazy to me and I didn’t know there was this much of a market for skateboarders out there. Oh well I guess I’m here to learn and today was just a taste of what the rest of the week will be like. I can’t wait until tomorrow!
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