Well, it’s not called the International Festival of Hot Dogs.
“Creativity” is the most-tweeted buzzword at Cannes (a.k.a. the International Festival of Creativity), according to European social monitoring company Synthesio, which tracked the top terms appearing in Cannes-related posts across all social platforms over the past week.
More than a third (35.3%) of all social content mentioning Cannes made some reference to creativity.
The rest of the list is a little more striking.
Following creativity, there’s “technology” in 15.7% of posts, “data insights” (15.4%), “business” (12.2%) and “innovation” (11.5%).
It seems people are taking notice of the plethora of ad tech companies that have gone all-out on yachts and rooftop parties this year. (That, or those companies hired some really busy social media managers.)
Over the past three years or so, Cannes has developed a substantial sideshow devoted to ad technology and digital media. Companies like The Rubicon Project, MediaMath and Index Exchange have descended on the conference — in some cases with fanfare — to strike deals and expand their businesses globally. There’s even been a separate “Cannes Innovation” festival created at the end of the week to focus on tech.
Mari Kim Novak, CMO for The Rubicon Project, told The New York Times earlier this week that the new sub-festival makes it “a really important year” for the tech industry “because it doesn’t just let us be outside of the Palais having very important conversations with the biggest and best brands and agencies and publishers from around the world… It allows us to influence and shape the dialogue.”
In other words, watch your back, creatives! Soon you could be drinking rosé at the International Festival of Data Insights.
Synthesio also looked at the most active age groups mentioning the conference on social media. Not surprisingly, 18- to 24-year-olds did most of the tweeting, sharing and posting about Cannes, but the second most active group was actually younger — in the 13-17 age range. Evidently everyone born before 1990 was too busy discussing ground-breaking technology innovations to stop and take a selfie.
