Return on Cannes Investment Many consider Cannes too expensive to attend or enter every year. Fees cost as much as $1,500 per entry, business-class flights are only getting more expensive, and one look down La Croisette’s grand promenade will give you a sense of what the city’s hotels cost. However, Alan Gee, a partner and founder of agency GJP and a 2010 Film jury member, has been attending for 15 years. He regards the cost as “the best investment I’ve ever made personally and professionally” with a “massive” return. Long an advocate of increased Canadian participation at the Lions, here’s how Gee justifies his investment. • Imm ersion Between wandering the display hall, attending top-tier seminars and award galas, the festival is hardly a vacation. “It might be nice that you can sit on the beach, but you’re actually engaged in your work from a 30,000-foot view while you do that.” • Impress the home team Gee puts together a “best of the fest” reel to show staff and clients. It inspires the team, and helps sell new concepts up the client chain when they can see similar successful campaigns. • S oci alization “One could argue, ‘I can just watch the award reel,’ but you can’t get the buzz or interaction that happens over seven days at Cannes. We talk these days about living in a social media world. There’s nothing more socially driven than actually talking to the people who make a difference.” • Gotta play to win If you ever want a Lion in your lobby, you have to attend. “You look at agencies like Jung von Matt and Forsman & Bodenfors who every year take a haul of Lions. It’s not serendipitous. They don’t just happen to get three or four projects that win. They systematically understand how Cannes works, how to create work that is successful there.” • Energi zing Your head will come back buzzing with ideas. Even if you don’t see anything you can directly apply to client work, you’ll be amazed at what your industry is capable of creating. |
Canada at Cannes So how did Canada’s performance compare to 2009? It was identical. In total, Canadian agencies won 13 Lions at the 57th Annual International Advertising Festival: 2 Gold, 3 Silver, 8 Bronze, the exact same haul as last year GOLD Direct SILVER Film Cyber Outdoor (campaign) BRONZE Film (campaign) Press (campaign) Outdoor (campaign) Outdoor Radio Radio Direct |
Cannes is many, many things.
Cannes is rows of $10 million yachts in the harbour, and a strip of luxury hotels with private beaches and a city that rolls out behind them that remains a mystery to most visitors.
Cannes is rosé and Kronenbourg 1664, and half-hour waits for a round of drinks at the Carlton hotel bar as three staff take their own sweet time to serve $12 bottles of beer (18 € for two). It is Black Eyed Peas 10 times a day and Michael Jackson 20 times a day. It is gin and Fanta at 2 a.m. and bad parkour with Young Lions soon after.
Cannes is for the young.
Cannes is a work-all-day-party-all-night kind of town, and who better than the industry’s juniors to take advantage? They find the best parties, get yelled at by police for having the most fun (fountain swimming) and then wake up on the steps of the Palais with no shoes. But aside from the sun, alcohol and loud music, they also subject themselves to hours of seminars and grab every opportunity to meet with industry illuminati to improve their craft. The young work just as hard as their elders, probably more.
Some, like Kyle Lamb and Andrew Livingston, slave for hours over client briefs in the Young Lions competition. The creative team from Toronto agency John St. won bronze in this year’s Young Film competition after days of non-stop work. While Lamb and Livingston slaved in the Palais basement, Yujia Wen was sitting in on daily seminars a few doors over. Wen is a second-year commerce student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. and was the sole Canadian representative at this year’s Roger Hatchuel Academy, a 36-member program that draws undergrads from advertising and business schools worldwide to an exclusive, very intense week-long program in Cannes.
Despite the long hours inside, she was amazed at how intimate the setting was. “You could be sitting next to a worldwide CEO or CCO,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how many times you pinch yourself, it still feels surreal.” Jesse Mykolyn had his own brush with fame. The 20-year-old student at Montreal’s Concordia University has no ambition to work in advertising, but found himself next to a giant in his chosen field nonetheless. “On my first day I was introduced to Stefan Sagmeister,” founder of Sagmeister Inc. and creator of iconic album covers for Lou Reed and The Rolling Stones, among others. “As a design student, I was ecstatic. I actually had the opportunity to talk to Mr. Sagmeister for quite some time, and I found out he’s very humble and approachable… We spoke about relevant schools, commercial practice and ethics in advertising and design.” Mykolyn also had the daunting task–assigned by his dad, Taxi global chief creative officer Steve Mykolyn–of collecting the signatures of 25 bigname creative directors. “Yes, it was embarrassing,” he said. But he got them all, thanks in part to David Droga who recruited a small handful of big name creatives and marched them over to sign Mykolyn Junior’s card.
Once the sun set on their gruelling days, there was still no rest in sight. As Jesse Mykolyn put it, “the authority of time is completely undermined.” Usual workaday imperatives like sleep are “mere suggestions” once the parties start. “I must say how impressed I am with the sheer amount of stamina found at Cannes. I’m one of the younger attendees, and yet I was probably in bed earlier and up later than just about everyone else.” Not so Wen. She was a fixture at official functions, mingling with fellow Hatchuel grads and industry vets alike.
“After a long day stranded within the Palais des Festivals, nothing feels more refreshing than to explore the beautiful energy of Cannes at night,” Wen said. But Cannes is also for the not-so-young (apologies Alan Gee, see sidebar left). Cannes is sour grapes and celebrations. It is shorts and T-shirts at black-tie galas, but black-tie galas that are always slick and elegant and fast-paced even if too long for some. It is lots of Vespas (every year) and football, football, football and even the occasional vuvuzela (this year). It is English fans in an Irish pub singing “Football is coming home” after a victory and sulking quietly after the next defeat.
It is lots and lots of talk about advertising, where the industry is going and Big Ideas–a term spoken so frequently as to be cliché, but used with such earnestness that it’s not. It is lively debates with leaders of the industry in crowded theatres and on patios, both under the sun and under the stars. Debates about the real value of social media and advertising and building brands. It is creative directors proclaiming things like: “Advertising is a tax on marketers that don’t have relationships with their customers” and then admitting the line was stolen from someone else. This year, Cannes was about the convergence of media and work submitted in multiple competitions–the “blurring of the Lions”– and digital showing up in all of them. And Cannes is a place where Swedish digital work kicks ass.
The country has been known as a digital hot spot for a while now and this year won one of two Cyber Grand Prix (“The Fun Theory” for Volkswagen) and fully one-third (five) of the Cyber Golds Lions, as well as six Silver and nine Bronze. That’s better than 20% of all awards handed out for digital work this year. Canada won one Silver. Of course, it’s hard to say why Sweden does so well, but Gustav Martner, Gothenburg-based executive creative director of Crispin Porter + Bogusky Europe, credits good schools–like Berghs and Hyper Island, look them up–and suggested early penetration of broadband and the subsequent strong move online by big Swedish brands like IKEA, Absolut, H&M and Volvo might have something to do with it.
“And in the winter time it’s pretty dark here, so we have plenty of time to spend in front of computers.” At least Canada has that going for us. Cannes is a digital battleground. Microsoft and Yahoo duked it out for visibility in every available venue–seminars, signage and even custom-built outdoor venues. Both companies built enclosures along La Croisette to provide places to court advertisers and media buyers. Yahoo’s open-air pavilion teased people with a large-screen showing World Cup updates. But unless you had a meeting scheduled, its shady tables were off limits. Microsoft’s fully enclosed, air-conditioned structure was open to all, and featured several product demonstration areas for its mobile, Surface, XBox and new Kinect technologies. Tired passersby could sit and play videogames if they wanted, provided they were open to a product pitch.
But Yahoo had the last laugh. A few blocks further east, its purple logo was all over the Gutter Bar, from large rooftop signs to display ads on a parked truck to staff wearing T-shirts. Microsoft’s air-conditioned Xanadu may have been busier during the day, but night belongs to Gutter Bar, where on at least one occasion a reveller was heard drunkenly yodelling Yahoo’s infamous mnemonic. Cannes is about the work. And it is about long days for judges poring over thousands of entries–more than 24,000 across 12 competitions– and long discussions about the merits of each.
Cannes is a steady stream of press conferences to announce the winners where there’s usually a few judges wearing sunglasses, hiding the effects of a late night celebrating the completion of their work.
And Cannes is about judging controversies. This year it was a Grand Prix that wasn’t a Grand Prix. Why? Because the print campaign was entered the year before when it won nothing. How could something so forgettable one year win a Grand Prix the next? The long-copy ads from Ogilvy Mexico for Mattel’s classic board game Scrabble told “beautiful” stories for each vowel of the alphabet, with every word in that story containing that vowel.
The ad for E, told the story of Efren and Esther who turn against their “celestiel chief” and follow a heretical rebel, a decision that gets them expelled from Eden. Problem was, the Spanish stories couldn’t be translated–or at least not translated with the featured vowel in every word–and the unique concept was not fully explained in 2009 so the judges never gave it the time or the credit it deserved.
Which brings us to our next point: Cannes is all about the presentation. Time and again Canadian judges told Marketing, Canada could do better, should do better, but must submit more work and will win more awards if they improve the presentation of their submissions. (And find someone other than Coldplay to use as the soundtrack for your submission videos.) As it was, Canada won 13 Lions in 2010, duplicating exactly the performance from 2009 Cannes is for clients, now. There was once a quiet fear among many Lionsgoers that if clients came en masse and looked around at the partying, expensive agency dinners and artsy seminars about “inspiration,” all they’d do is throw their hands up and scream “I’m paying for all this?” But come they did, and in greater numbers than ever before. Nearly 10% of the more than 8,000 registered attendees were marketers, and many were on board with Cannes’ creativity vibe.
For Gary Raucher, the youthful-looking VP and head of integrated marketing communications at Philips, who just won his second Grand Prix in two years, creativity is all important. “The world that our industry operates in has changed forever and we can no longer just force messages onto our consumers. We have to develop relevant and engaging content so that people will choose to spend time with our brand,” he said. “We believe that our brand has to drive creativity because creativity is the surest way to achieve effectiveness.” Ganon Jones, VP of portfolio marketing for Frito-Lay’s biggest chip brands, is also tracking the correlation between creativity and market performance.
That’s what drew him to France for the second consecutive year. He sat in a dark theatre one sunny afternoon to watch the entire film shortlist reel. The work he saw there, as well as some of the seminar presentations, were his highlights. But not every seminar impressed him.
“Some are just propaganda,” he said. “It’s interesting how you can really look forward to a client seminar, and then it’s just a waste of time. Yet you might think ‘I’ll just duck into this one quickly,’ ” as he did for Chuck Porter’s presentation on starting an agency, “and it totally blows you away.” Bill Moir, chief marketing officer at Tim Hortons, led a contingent from his company to Cannes for the first time.
“It’s always interesting to know where you stack up against creative and campaigns from other parts of the world… The opportunity to see work and meet people from other parts of the world is very invigorating. Makes you think about how you get better with your own brand.” “[I] had a chance to listen to the CMOs of both P&G and Unilever and that was very interesting from a strategic perspective,” he said, but agreed with Jones that some seminars just weren’t up to snuff. “I thought the interview with Spike Jonze was lousy. Cannes is seven full days of speakers, speeches, seminars and debates on stage. Cannes is Mark Zuckerberg talking honestly about mistakes on Facebook and where it’ll go from here; it is Martin Sorrell clearly a little skeptical about the hype over social media, pointedly asking Unilever’s top marketer about crowdsourced advertising; it’s Ben Stiller talking about creative inspiration (and pleasing the crowd with his announcement that a Zoolander sequel is in the works).
One delegate wondered if Cannes is trying to become more TED-like with its speakers, but Festival president Philip Thomas bristled at the suggestion. “TED attended Cannes as paying delegates, we presume to come and see how we do things. We understand they were impressed with what they saw,” he said.
“We have no desire to emulate TED. Cannes Lions is a 57-year-old event with a rich heritage that has no need to emulate anyone.” The speakers are world class and have been for years, he added, from Al Gore to Rupert Murdoch, Bob Geldof to Kofi Annan. However, he conceded seminar attendance has “skyrocketed in recent years” including a 55% increase this year. “We have around 150 requests for the 55 speaking slots each year. We accept only the very best.” Cannes is also Yoko Ono screeching on stage.
Cannes is pompous, self-important creative captains of this industry and quiet, introverted geniuses waiting to be discovered. Cannes is a party. Cannes is competition. Cannes is school. Cannes is inspirational, depressing, shocking and experimental. Cannes is seven loud, exhausting days and nights made of equal parts fear and excitement for an uncertain future.
Cannes is advertising.
