out and About in Adland - Cannes Recap: Day 1

After we all arrived in Cannes, got our bearings, saw a few sights - we were ready to get down to business at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Sunday kicked off our journey through the inside look of adland.

We only dipped our toe in the pond on our first day and went to 5 seminars. They went all through the day (and we gave ourselves a lunch break) it was the best way to acclimate by just relaxing, sitting back, and letting some industry professionals give us the scoop on new industry trends.

Highlights from the day include a few famous faces and companies anyone will recognize.

SapientNitro was up first and talked about "Culture Clubbing." They believe that business should be in the business of making life better and not so focused on the bottom line. Through a shared purpose where the brand and the consumer have a relationship that brand builds its culture capital. The figurative currency that shows a brands relative power in the marketplace by how many consumers interact with it grows over time as the consumers relationship with it develops.. This also can directly lead to better sales through the authentic relationship that is forged. In the new landscape of advertising, SapientNitro believes that this Culture Capital + Digital = the Future.

SapientNitro then brought out Jennifer Frommer (the head of brand partnerships) for Interscope records. I love eminem so this was pretty cool and the video by Far East Movement on creativity, brand identity, and the culture surrounding them was a really nice touch. Frommer then spoke about Lady Gaga and cried out for all the "Little Monsters" in the audience to put their claws(?) up. Crickets and no claws. Guess Cannes is not the right audience for Gaga!

Later in the Day brought larger crowds when IMC^2 hosted a panel titled Friends With Benefits discussing in a meta sense Venn Diagrams and in an advertising sense how their is a specific audience for a particular brand and when aligned correctly can be leveraged for massive gain.

It opened with a hilarious video created by Michael Davis (super talented guy!) on the history of Venn Diagrams - the insight on facebook was great with the overlap of:
 (Facebook friends [)-people you actually like-(] likes )

To underscore the point about how audience is key for a brands relevency Nick Jonas was on the panel. Not much overlap with advertising and communication professionals; but change the audience to 14 year old girls and BAM! that's a cash cow. Aside from the 'big' name draw of nick jonas i actually thought he spoke fantastically, held is own against Bob Garfield's attempts to trip him up, and overall contributed to the conversation.

This seminar was all about the human relationships created online and the linking of brands with consumers. It is now all about shared value so brands should now be ever more concerned with the relationships they forge, maintain, and break with consumers. It is not a one way street of communication anymore, for brands right now it is multi-level conversation.

So the future resides in the consumer - this development shifts the power in their hands and for the future of advertising the customer is the new currency. This consumer currency will drive everything in the future, from the creation of content, to the relationships created between brands and consumers.

Finally we ended with The Three C's of Modern Creativity by Naked advertising.

1. Communication
2. Co-creation
3. Crowdsourcing

Again consumer engagement was stressed as the future of advertising. Naked delved into the benefits a close relationship to people who like your brand can have as then they can be utilized via crowdsourcing to create something on a much larger scale than the brand could create alone.

Speakers from Nokia discussed PUSH snowboarding (created through crowdsourcing). This is such a cool bit of software as it can monitor everything a snowboarded does on a mountain ranging from height of jumps, adrenaline spikes, and board rotation. My only question: when is PUSH skiing coming out!?

Then a represntative for LEGO came out. I LOVE LEGO blocks. They rule. They were a significant part of my childhood and i recently boxed up a ton of them I had around. After an awesome speech highlighting the great community involved with LEGO the presentation was over but a HUGE box of LEGO was thrown across the stage. Delegates were welcome to pick some up after the show. It was mentioned that 6 blocks could be combined in over a billion possible ways.

Well I had some fun (with a bit more than 6):

My lego skills.