Opinions
To attend the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is an aspiration for people in the field of communications world- over. As I once again landed in this small but ultra chic town on the French Riviera, I couldn’t stop smiling at being amongst the lucky few who could make it to this Mecca of learning, this annual destination for the movers and shakers of the communications business.
This year there was an extra air of expectancy as Cannes Lions celebrates its sixtieth year. To mark this milestone, Cannes Lions broke both its attendance and competition entry records - 12000 delegates and around 36000 entries from 92 countries, making it the biggest and most inspiring festival ever in its 60 year history. The festival programme with 60 Seminars, 17 Workshops, 30 Forums, 10 Master classes, 9 Tech talk coupled with screenings, awards ceremonies, special sessions conducted by different companies and all these happening at the same time made preparing your own schedule of events to attend, a mind boggling task. Deciding which session to attend and which to miss when you want to attend both was tough.
Programme having being charted out and armed with enthusiasm, I walked toward the Palais, the festival venue with an extra bounce in my walk. The first session I attended was a workshop on radical listening. It promised to share insights and tools to dramatically improve listening skills and thereby improve key relationships and create better work. “If you do what I say, it will change your life” announced the presenter Janet Kestin. Though the workshop was engaging, it didn’t reveal any life changing formula – a disappointing start.
Compared to this another session, Free Elvis: How to unleash your inner creativity was loads of fun and left one inspired to unleash their individual creativity and create an environment that encourages creativity in the organisation. This Mediacom session conducted by creativity guru Chris Barez Brown was based on their creative leadership approach. Chris urged people to get into their Alpha state, the state of mind most conducive for creativity. In a session packed with exercises which often ended with participants throwing paper balls and aeroplanes at the speaker (at his behest) the participants learnt that to unleash their creativity they need to be relaxed, break routines, learn to live their ideas, be brave enough to express their ideas without fear of being rejected and most of all enjoy their work.
The Deutsch LA session, Why you should hire inventors ...and how you can keep them, spoke of advertising agencies recruiting a new breed of agency person - theinvention.st –people who work in the creative department of agencies and invent new digital products like apps and other digital platforms. Considering the way today’s communication ideas are moving away from traditional advertising and becoming digital and therefore dependent on technology, this appears to be a trend in the making. Mike Sheldon, CEO Deutsch LA spoke of a new position in agencies - Chief Digital Officer.
The Mindshare seminar, How to be more adaptive and why it’ll make you more creative had the CEO of McLaren, the world’s number one Formula 1 car manufacturer, speak of adaptive marketing. He explained how companies like theirs sustain their competitive advantage by constantly innovating and adapting ahead of the market. Being fast, responsive and flexible in a data abundant age was the way to win the race he said –and coming from the number one in car racing, it definitely made sense. British Formula 1 driver Jenson Button’s dramatic entry on stage - in his Formula 1 car and accompanied with his 15 man pit crew drew a thunderous applause.
The last seminar of the day, Cheil Worldwide’s, Every company is a media company, showcased the Cheil philosophy of the Lifeshare framework. By a series of captivating films, they showed us how technology and innovation is useful only when it serves people. A bridge in Korea named the bridge of death because of the number of suicides taking place from there was transformed. Thanks to technological innovations, the bridge was made in such a way that when people walked on it, they read messages, craftily written by psychologists that forced them to reconsider their choice to die. The result – a 77 per cent drop in suicide rate and the bridge being rechristened, the bridge of life. The audience loved this film and it’s no wonder that it won a Cannes Lion later in the evening.
The highlight of the day was of course the award ceremony. The Grand Audi had a new look but there was nothing new in the quality, precision and style in which the ceremony was conducted. Today the lions in PR, Promo and Activation, Creative Effectiveness and Direct were announced. The award that received maximum applause from the audience was the Russian PR campaign to remove potholes from their roads. Their idea – paint the faces of their politicians on the potholes. No wonder they got filled up the very next day. Brilliant idea and worth copying in every city that has such a problem.
Another interesting campaign was by Ogilvy Brazil for an English school for Kids. Children were taught spellings by making them visit the Twitter accounts of their favourite celebrities and pick out their spelling mistakes. And weren’t there many!
The award that won every one’s heart was the public service campaign by McCann Melbourne for Metro Trains- “Dumb ways to die.” The campaign aimed at increasing awareness of rail safety and reducing the number of injuries and accidents during train travel. This campaign which was aimed primarily at school children consisted of the creation of a catchy song and video that soon became the third most shared video on You Tube. Further amplification of this message resulted in a 21 % reduction in injuries and accidents. Catch it on You Tube.
As we left the palais, the air of celebration was all over. People were posing with their awards. Spirits were high and loud shrills were heard everywhere. It’s not every day that you win a lion.
Authored By: Vandana Kakar- she is representing Mediavataar @ Cannes.
Through the Lens of the Digital World
Written by MediavataarMe News Desk
The Digital industry has grown from mere 30mn users to over 100 mn. With this growth marketers are evolving and now know how to use the digital medium for their brands, though there is still scope of improvement with this adoption, as some marketers are still dubious on selecting advertising on digital or mobile. The marketer today is on the web consuming content and is engaging deeper to meet every touch-point of a customer on various digital mediums. However, brands seem to be hesitant in exhaustively leveraging this medium for advertising themselves. With generation Y virtually living their lives across gadget technologies of e-smart phones and tablets, there is an era arriving, eventually, that is ready to surpass the entire cycle of desktop and laptops as they already have access to tablets. We can relate to this on the similar skip cycle that happened when our generation directly embraced mobile phones vis-à-vis pagers. Such is the fast pervasive pace in which our digital world is moving.
Today, dramatic evolution of technology is changing the way consumers are adopting new age devices at a rapid pace, thereby providing brands with the challenge to effectively tap the entire spectrum of mobile, tablet and digital platforms. Earlier till 2006 the marketing techniques were, essentially, to select few horizontal portals and do some rich media ads. Marketers found them good enough as most of the consumer traffic used to visit a particular site for all the required information to be up-to-date in news, 
finance, auto or entertainment. But over a period of time the consumer mindset has an eagle’s eye view to understand that the requirement now is much wider! For e.g. if consumers need information on cars they will go to vertical portals related to cars. If someone needs bank or insurance related information they would visit a webpage on finance and not a horizontal site. Hence it is very important to know where your target audiences are and then advertise accordingly. Thanks to smarter technologies like ‘Retargeting’ that not only helps extract details of users who have shown interest in your product but also lets you get details of those who haven’t bought or those who landed on your website or Brand page.
Essentially the three main platforms of digital medium are-
•Social Media- Facebook and Twitter have played a significant role in driving the overall digital spends and not having them as part of your outreach will hamper your marketing strategy in a big way. A quick comparison throws interesting facts on how time spend by marketers on making their TVC is significantly higher than a Facebook advertisement. Some of the largest brands taking notice of this fact, has ensured that the true power of social media and digital advertising is in fact effectively utilized to target the right set of consumers.
•Mobile- Today, mobile has not only replaced viewing content on the web but it has replaced camera, mp3 players and gaming device too. The power of mobile is yet to be exploited completely in India. If we analyse, the biggest of the digital and social media companies started as desktop services but over a period of time moved to the mobile medium as the consumer transforms at a much faster rate than what we assume. The world has moved to all kinds of apps, be it news, games, entertainment or social media. The below data shows Facebook usage on smartphones:
•Video- When Google bought YouTube in 2006 the entire world had a question mark on watching video content online, but the reality seen today is that consumers not only view video on desktops or laptops but even on their smart phones and tablets. In fact technology has transformed lives to the extent that consumers can now watch a 2 hours long movie online, without any buffering, due to an increasing broadband bandwidth. Hence it is very important for marketers to be present where their consumers are. But why will a user engage with the communications which he or she has seen a thousand times on the television? It is very important to have a communication which is specially created for online, as it will draw more attention from the user as they haven’t seen it anywhere else. Hence we see that viral works well on digital as we like to share something that is unique and not seen by all.
Authored by: Pritesh Patel, MD- India & Middle East- Komli Media
Could your country be shut off from the Internet?
Written by MediavataarMe News Desk
On Thursday 29th November, at 10:26am UTC Syria disappeared. Not geographically, not politically, but digitally. Syria went dark. The plugs were pulled.
According to network inspectors Renesys, there were a still a few Syrian networks connected to the internet, but some 12 hours later those five networks were taken offline as well.
The digital lights went out.
The chart is impressive. One moment there’s a huge chunk of internet traffic and the next, it’s gone – like driving off a cliff face.
Three days later, Syria was back online, but big questions need to be asked. Clearly the blackout was due to the civil war raging in the country and the fact that it did come back online as quickly as it went offline suggests some kind of kill switch was activated. Indeed, Renesys notes that the country actually went offline for 10 minutes four days earlier. It points to a small dry run for the shutdown, though that is only a presumption.
But the question has to be asked how an entire country was able to be taken offline in one fell swoop? The received wisdom is that the internet has been designed to be inherently resilient and resistant to attacks and sabotage – so it’s quite disconcerting that a geo-political area can be removed from cyberspace so efficiently.
The key to this supposed strength comes from decentralisation of key facilities, service, power-centres, routing equipment etc. But on a national scale this decentralisation can be neutered by the fact that the government or a small number of companies can control access to these key facilities.
To analyse the situation Renesys has created a map of the countries most at ‘Risk of Internet Disconnection’ judged by how many sources of connectivity a country has to international connections.
Countries with at more than 40 internationally connected service providers are deemed low-risk, 10-40 low-risk, fewer than 10 high-risk, and those with only one or two are deemed at severe risk. There are 61 countries in this category and no surprise to find that Syria is one of them.
This sort of information is worth considering carefully, especially for companies that are concerned about where their data may be housed. But it also shows how free internet access is tied very closely to the spread of democracy and political change, and how limiting that is a tool of those that want to take those freedoms away. Removing that access is essentially an act of terrorism, and protecting that freedom is something worth fighting for.
The importance of internet access for political and economic reasons was championed at the Broadband World Forum 2012 by Neelie Kroes, vice-president responsible for Digital Agenda, European Commission, and these issues are sure to be raised once again at the upcoming Broadband World Forum MEA, taking place on the 19th-20th March 2013 at the JW Marriott Marquis Hotel, Dubai, UAE, Dubai, UAE- you can click here to find out more about the event.
Authored by: Benny Har-Even, Broadband MEA Team
How the agency is tearing up the traditional planning process
Written by MediavataarMe News Desk
DDB Stockholm has the largest planning department in Sweden today. And planning is seen as critically important area for the agency's development.
So why is our agency, famed for its work with VW's The Fun Theory and the Swedish Armed Forces, reinventing and reshuffling the traditional account planning roles?
The belief that planning should come up with eureka-insights that creatives love is a myth. That has never happened and will never happen. In our eyes, the classic creative brief is dead. You do not need a paper that dictates what to do before you even started working..
What the creatives need is a more continuous presence in the process. When they want and ask for information, support and knowledge, they should have it. But you shouldn't come to the table with a pre-determined insight that no one has asked for.
The idea process is the least linear process imaginable. Tomorrow's working models have to reflect this in a much better way.
We need to aid free exploration of ideas, thoughts and options from the start, without imposing artificial limits. And towards the end of idea development, help the creatives narrow down the options to the ideas with most creative and business potential, and aid them in strengthening those ideas.
As a consequence of this DDB Stockholm is turning the whole process the conventional planner role upside down: Planners no longer brief the creatives.
We are changing our view of planning from scratch. We want to re-engineer planning to create the best possible conditions for continuing to deliver ideas that make a real difference to our clients.
Insight and Conceptual Planning
To aid this change, the planning department at DDB has been divided into two areas - Insight Planning and Conceptual planning - that work like this:
Insight Planning is about providing more depth and understanding. Insight planners will help the creative team when they need to understand consumer behavior and the outside world that the client's brand operates in, and when they need to get hypotheses about consumers, the market or anything else verified.
Conceptual planning is about providing direction and a larger perspective. Conceptual planners will help the teams develop and clarify a creative direction for the client's brand, act as a sounding board during the creative process, ensuring that ideas always correspond to brief and helping the team formulate a clear unifying idea.
In this way we ensure that the right ideas rise to their full potential and leave DDB packaged in a clear and pedagogical manner. A great idea isn't worth anything if a client can't understand it, see its potential and commit to it.
Another area of improvement the planning department at DDB is exploring is the redefinition of the word 'insight'. An insight is just a truth with creative potential, after all. But this potential is not always apparent at first glance.
We prefer to work with 'hypotheses' - actual suggestions for how to solve the specific client problem, discussing and pointing the way to potential solutions, rather than leaving the teams adrift on their own with an insight that may or may not prove valuable in the end.
This reshuffling and re-evaluation of how planning works will help foster new and better ideas for DDB Stockholm's clients.
By changing the dynamics between roles, just like Bill Bernbach did in the 60's when he first put together art directors and copywriters as a creative team, we hope to deliver even more innovative and powerful ideas in the future.
A recent example of this in action is the latest campaign for the Swedish Armed Forces, where DDB challenges the way the Facebook Likes work. Because the SAF is looking for people who really care about things and put effort into this they have placed a number of physical 'Like' stations around Sweden.
It's not always right to let strategy guide creativity, often it should be the other way around.
Authored by: David Sandström, CEO at DDB Stockholm
5 Key Questions and Focus Areas in Email Marketing for Small Businesses
Written by MediavataarMe News Desk
Social, local and mobile marketing are changing the way content is delivered to consumers. With animated images, countdown timers, live social media content and rendering for different screens, email marketing has become fancy too.
While small businesses usually find it easier to adapt to the changing digital marketing landscape, they also need to balance speed with limited budgets and do not always have the insights from bigger agency partners.
With the limited budget and resources, might it be sensible for small business to re-evaluate where to focus on some of the key email marketing areas?
Here's looking at the 5 key areas in email marketing – D.E.L.T.A.:
1 Design
2 Email Content
3 List
4 Testing
5 Analytics
1. Design
More and more emails are being viewed on mobiles and smartphones. Coding your emails for mobiles and tablets is already becoming a norm.
There are various posts and articles on how-to code the emails for mobiles, one of my favorite one is here (http://stylecampaign.com/blog/2011/07/finger-snafu/).
Key Questions: What percentage of your email views are from mobiles? How has that changed in the last 6 months?
Focus Areas: Can your brand communication make do with skinny email templates? Could a good mobile ready email template, that has room for small images serve your purpose?
Here is how the twitter emails look:
But you might say, that's twitter, it's inherently a 140-characters content, isn't it? Which brings us to the next point.
2. Email Content
Content is the heart of your emails and often the most time consuming activity that gets completed only near the deadline.
Key Questions: What is the reason your emails exist? What type of email communication can suffice your need?
Focus Areas: Emails are scanned not read. At best you have 2 to 5 seconds for you to grab the reader's attention. Can your brand communication make do with a twitter-like email that has highlighted words, bold headings, links that readers can quickly click through if interested and large call-to-action buttons?
For example, CopyBlogger sends very short emails for their Internet Marketing for Smart People series. The email itself is pure text; it's four to eight sentences long, with one link that takes you to a post, that's all.
3. List
Every email marketer will tell you that you should segment the lists and send personalized content.
An event marketing company, for example, may carve out a slice of data and create a list of past delegates who have opened the email last 3 times so that a special discount email can be sent to them.
While this is a great practice, unless this data is fed back into the central repository, it might remain as a hanging piece of knowledge in the email marketing vendor's system.
Key Questions: How will your campaign data feed into your central CRM repository? What percentage of your email readers also are on your social media?
Focus Areas: Personalize emails with data from social media, past email and website behavior. More importantly, get readers to reply, irrespective of the list, or segmentation.
In most cases replying to an email gets you in the safe senders or contacts list and improves email delivery. If one of the metrics to measure readers' engagement with your brand is email click rate, then replying is an even bigger sign of it.
4. Testing
Do you know which words in the subject line were "hot" last quarter? Is A/B testing a regular part of your email sending process?
Most standard email marketing systems have subject line and content testing features at no extra cost. This is one feature that should be your BFF.
Many marketers want to reach the inbox at a certain time, expecting that their marketing messages will be read at that time or near about the time the email lands in the inbox. However, readers' habits are changing.
Since the time I have started recording TV programs I have hardly watched anything "live". I record the ones I want and watch them at leisure. More and more people want to read emails at a time convenient to them and not necessarily when the email arrives in the inbox. Some "star" it in the priority inbox, others "flag" it while many, like me, file it in folders for later reading.
Key Questions: What time are your readers reading the emails? What words in the subject line are "hot" for your business?
Focus Areas: Is the frequency of email more important for your business than the time it was read? How often should your messages reach your audience so that it serves your brand better?
5. Analytics
Time spent on site, and number of pages seen by the visitors are not the typical benchmarks one sees in Email marketing.
My experience, in a B2B environment has been that readers who take the trouble to open the email in an increasingly cluttered inbox, click the links and visit the website, are highly engaged. I have seen them spend more time on the website than social media visitors. But this could be different for your business.
Key Questions: What are my key email marketing metrics? What email marketing benchmarks can I measure my campaign against?
Focus Areas: What percentage of your email list has never opened your emails? What does this mean for your business and how can you get these people interested?
As a digital marketer I understand the need of rendering the email in 10 different mobile email clients, but as a consumer I very happily read the eight sentence text emails of CopyBlogger.com as well as the simple email feed of the long blog posts of Avinash Kaushik (Kaushik.net).
Sometimes the mere fact that so many options are available can overwhelm digital marketers. It's important to step back and re-evaluate how best you can use the new opportunities and at what point they are needed for your business.
(This article was first published on iMediaConnection.)
The grand finale signaled the close of yet another momentous festival. A festival with many firsts –introduction of the concepts of Forums, new award categories like mobile and branded entertainment, Young Creative Lions, to name a few. For the first time, countries like Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Tunisia, Puerto Rico and Columbia were in the winner’s lists. Just goes to show that creativity knows no boundaries.
India won the Gold Lion in the Film Craft category. This is for the Mumbai Mirror TVC– I am Mumbai. The audience belonging to different nationalities saluted this effort with a round of applause. Felt proud to be an Indian though a bit embarrassed by this display of Indian poverty to a worldwide audience.
The films I found most hard hitting were -the three little pigs for The Guradian ; Blood Relations, Back to the start and P&Gs - Thank you Mom. I noticed that I get teary eyed each time I see this film. I found - Return of Dictator Ben Ali a wonderful example of using creativity to get results. Do check out the Cannes Lions website to see these and other award winning work. Truly inspirational!
Weiden and Kennedy, Portland, an agency I had never heard of till before the festival, received the agency of the year and a happy Dan Weiden, the person behind Nike’s, Let’s do it tag line came on stage to receive this award and the prestigious Lion of St Marks award. Sir Martin Sorrell received the Holding company of the year for WPP and Mars was announced as the advertiser of the year. The Mars philosophy behind winning - “We have to get noticed and remembered…and tell stories that engage.”
The awards followed by the grand gala marked the close of a wonderful week. A week where 11000 people from different corners of the world, representing different aspects of communication, got together to learn, get inspired, network, award creativity and set the standards for the industry.
With a heavy heart, I put away my delegate badge, which had almost become a part of me during this week. Au revoir Cannes !!!
Authored By: Vandana Kakar, she is representing Mediavataar @ Cannes.
Advertising masters gracing the finale night at the Cannes Festival 2012
Written by MediavataarMe News DeskThe best for the last! The last day of the festival appeared to be chock-a-block with some of the best names in the world of advertising and a handful of celebrities gracing the Cannes stage. Sir Martin Sorrell, Sir John Hearty, Maurice Levy, Deboray Harry and even the footballer Ronaldo.
By 2050, the population of the world will be 9 ½ billion. We are already eating into the capital of the world. 2/3 rd of the world has water stress. In some places in Mumbai, people get water for only two hours at home. These are some of the facts thrown by Keith Weed, chief marketing and communication officer, Unilever while speaking about the environment impact on growth. This was the backdrop for him to introduce the fundamental reinvention of Unilever’s marketing plan.
“We aim to double our business while reducing our environment impact,” he stated to a houseful audience. The principles of their new strategy titled, Crafting Brands for Life, involved putting people first by empathising with them; Building brand love with superior products and compelling ideas; and sustainable living. He also used this opportunity to introduce an initiative by Unilever Charitable Foundation – Waterworks. Aimed at providing clean drinking water to 500 million people by 2020, this project connects Face Book users directly with the NGOs and gives people the chance to contribute to this cause. Those interested can visit –joinwaterworks.com.
Legendary and celebrated admen, Sir John Hegarty, Worldwide Creative Director and Founder BBH and Dan Wieden, Co-founder and Creative Director. Wieden+Kennedy, discussed creativity, lessons learnt and inspirations in a freewheeling chat. They showed us some of their best work - Nike, Google, Old Spice, Guardian, X Box. The P&G ad (The hardest job in the world –Thank you mom) gave me goose bumps. Their mantra for path breaking communication –“It’s about ideas and telling stories in such a powerful way that people are drawn in.” They used these principles even in the Google ad and managed to humanize a technology company. They further advised, “Think of the emotional essence of the issue and not the strategy.”
The Cannes Debate, a regular feature had Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive WPP speak to World Cup winner Ronaldo and Lord Sebastian Coe, Chair, London 2012 Organizing Committee. While Lord Sebastian Coe spoke about the economic and social benefits of hosting the Olympics, Ronaldo discussed Rio Olympics 2014. Speaking in Portuguese (there was an interpreter present) he threw light on the preparation taking place in Rio for the Olympics and the World Cup and the sponsorship opportunities available.
Grey’s –Annual Legends of Music, featured a talk with Deborah Harry, lead singer of the punk rock band –Blondie. My son said that she is famous, so I stayed back to see her but left mid way.
“Haven’t other internet platforms become more trendy than you?” asked Maurice Levy, the Chairman and Chief Executive of Publicis Group as he started his frank chat with Ross Levinsohn, Interim CEO, Yahoo. The response –With 700 million users, Yahoo continues to grow and stay relevant to its customers. “What does Yahoo expect from its communication agencies?” Answer – Help us figure out a way to stay connected to our consumers. After so many sessions, I had started to notice the common theme in all the talks –Talk to your consumers. Tell them stories. Empathize with them. Treat them like real people in a real world!!!
“If I have three choices for an agency, I will select you, you and you” For a client to say this is a dream for every agency. And a client did say it. The last session of the festival titled, “Can your client be your friend?” had two ‘friends,’ –Joel Ewanick, Global Chief Marketing Officer, General Motors and Jeff Goody, Co Founder and Chairman, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners go down memory lane. They reminisced over their twenty year old relationship as client and agency, the work they have done together, the $1.3 billion account that was given without a pitch and such matters. Just goes to show that if the chemistry is right, your client can surely be your friend.
With this I bid adieu to the seminars. Tomorrow would be devoted purely to seeing award winning work. the last of awards and a quick trip to Nice.
Authored By: Vandana Kakar, she is representing Mediavataar @ Cannes.
Twitter, X BOX, You Tube and few more Awards @ Cannes 2012
Written by MediavataarMe News DeskThe Cannes festival has become like Disney Land. 45 minutes in queue for a 45 session. What is remarkable however is that the sessions start and finish bang on time.
I started the day with a workshop on sound branding. A fascinating talk by Walter Werzowa, the creator of the memorable three second Intel tune and Zanna Lopes from Brazil. Apparently, Intel sales went up from 24 to 94 per cent after the tune was introduced. Seems hard to believe. We learnt about the ways in which retailers use music to manipulate the customer’s buying behavior. Mc Donalds plays fast paced music so that the customers eat fast and leave early while seven eleven scared off the homeless people hanging around their shops by playing classical music.
X Box Bing –ESPN please. You give this command and your meek TV obeys your voice and shows you the latest soccer match that is taking place. Gimme More. You gesture with your hand and the TV shows you glimpses of all the matches in the tournament. Not fantasy. These are just a few innovations revealed by X Box that will revolutionize the usage of TV in the world.
In this fun session, we learnt about Active TV where you can change the outcome of the show and even Jump In TV where you can literally enter the programme and help the characters go about their work. The best thing is that these technologies are now available and will be in operation in the next six months. Wow! We are waiting. And when you find such a TV in the market, remember you first heard about it here.
Cadbury discontinued their chocolate – Wispa Gold. People unhappy with this move, started conversations on Twitter. By tracking these conversations, Cadburys realized that the brand was still popular and decided to re launch it. In the same way a “I want an Audi” hash tag by an Audi fan became such a rage that the company started a programme by which the car’s enthusiasts could drive it for the weekend. This increased the brand’s engagement with its customers and led to even more conversations on Twitter.
By citing such examples, Dick Costolo, CEO Twitter, illustrated how brands can initiate programmes – both online and offline just by being responsive to conversations on Twitter. Don’t just plan campaigns on Twitter he said. Adapt the campaign to the moment.
A standing ovation, the first I’ve ever seen at Cannes was given to a young street artist –JR who with his excellent oratory skills enchanted the audience with his thoughts on how art can turn the world inside out.
The award ceremonies were next on the agenda. The Design Lions were the first to be announced. Mudra won a Gold for their campaign for The Ministry of Tourism, The Hinglish Project. Other interesting examples of design were – A cook book with a difference. Different because it was made of pasta. Put the book in the oven and bingo, your meal is ready. Another beautiful example was the sun bathing shower. A huge shower on a beach where you see the dancing rays of the sun instead of water. The Solar Annual Report won the Grand Prix. An annual report made with special ink so that it can only be read in the sun. What an idea sirji.
Other categories awards were announced. Jack Dorsey, the founder and chairman of Twitter received the media person of the year award. He gave a short speech. Thankfully, it was already very late, where he urged people to tell their stories and share them with ‘a small world.’ “The entire world is waiting to listen to you.” After such persuasion, I think I just have to open a Twitter account.
It was really late but the legendary Times of India party could not be missed. French girls in saris greeted us along with loud Bollywood music and the delicious aroma of Indian food. Advertising industry hot shots present in Cannes were all here. Piyush Pandey, Prasoon Joshi, Colvyn Harris, Madhukar Kamath, Pratap Bose, Josey Paul, Vivek Suchanti – everyone seemed to be having a good time. The music was good and more than the Indians, the French seemed to enjoy gyrating to Sheela ki jawani, jalebi bai and such songs.
As we left the party, we saw people on the croisette moving to the Indian beats. Music knows no barriers.
Authored By: Vandana Kakar, she is representing Mediavataar @ Cannes.
The day promised to be hectic with a series of award announcements, seminars and workshops. Deciding what to attend and what to skip appeared to be the toughest decision. I started my day by attending the various press conferences laid out through the morning. Hearing the jury members share their views on the parameters of award winning work, reasons why some made it and some didn’t (“some people were just too lazy to explain in detail”) and the
trends and challenges facing the industry were an education in themselves.
This year a new award category was announced – Mobile Lions. With 6 billion mobiles and 1 million tablets,
mobiles as a category can no longer be ignored. Dubai won a Gold Lion with the famous campaign by TBWA/RAAD –Fridge Magnet. To help their client a pizza firm –Red Tomato Pizza increase home delivery orders, the agency devised an app by which the clients could order a pizza simply by clicking on their mobiles. It was heartening to see the Dubai team walk on stage to receive their award amongst thunderous applause.
The Grand prix in this category was awarded to the Coca cola campaign where people could gift a free coke to anyone, anywhere in the world by clicking on their mobiles. Another interesting win was Backseat driving by Toyota which by now was collecting a nice kitty of awards.
A key parameter for awards in this category – “from this can also be done on mobile to this CANT be done without a mobile” The outdoor awards category announced two grand prix winners. Two, as both the entries represented two diametrically opposite mediums. One a simple billboard by Coca cola called Coke Hands by Ogilvy Shanghai and the other a “triumph of technology inspired inventiveness” by Mercedes, developed by Jung von Matt, Hamburg. Mercedes developed a zero emission car and showcased their eco friendly message by creating an invisible car – a car that could not be seen by people or the environment. Millions saw the invisible car and helped Mercedes present a compelling case for their brand.
India won its first Gold Lion at the awards with a hoarding for Western Union Money Transfer. This campaign by Mc Caan showed the changing faces on currency notes from Manmohan Singh to Abraham Lincoln and others. Prasoon
Joshi walked on his stage in his trademark black shirt to receive the award later in the evening.
Axe received the Creative effectiveness award for their campaign – even angels will fall by proving that the client’s sales had increased manifold due to the effectiveness of the campaign and not due to other causes like distribution, competitor activity etc.
The India seminar dedicated to Indian creativity and its influence globally was a much awaited event. Balki from Lintas and Shekhar Kapur were interviewed by Wired magazine editor –David Rowan. Balki spoke about why global campaigns and brands had to behave Indian to succeed here. His advice to global companied wishing to succeed in India – live in India, watch Indian movies and leave it to the Indians. Shekhar Kapur asked the world not to treat India as a market but look at it as a culture. My view on this session – confused!
Serpentine lines awaited as I tried to attend the Face book session on -the psychology and creativity of sharing. The packed hall apparently unnerved Face Book’s young Global Head of Brand Design Paul Adams. He started speaking but got nervous, and forgot his lines. He then left the stage saying “give me a minute, I’ll be back in a second.” He returned and was welcomed back with an encouraging roar from the supportive audience. Confidence restored, he went on to enthrall the audience.
Paul spoke about the changes that will take place in news and TV. The new format for news will be –world
news; local news; news you are interested in; news your friends are watching. People don’t love brands, they love their friends. This was the message shared through the FB and then the You Tube session. New learnings here – brands must appoint specialist YouTube content developers if they want their films on You Tube to stand out. Creative agencies should be rewarded by their clients depending on the number of people who choose to see their ads on YouTube.
The award ceremony in the evening was held with its usual sophistication. What I enjoyed more was the celebration by the award winners immediately after the awards. People laughing, dancing, posing with their awards. A happy moment indeed!
Authored By: Vandana Kakar, she is representing Mediavataar @ Cannes.
