It was standing room only in at least two of the Palais des Festivals’ theatres on Tuesday afternoon as comedian Ben Stiller and advertising guru Jeff Goodby took the stage at the 57th annual Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. It was one of several well-attended seminars that packed the festival’s Debussy Theatre.
The session, presented by Yahoo, one of the week’s most visible media players, was billed as “a discussion around the role of creativity in shaping our world.” What resulted was a wide-ranging and at times stilted conversation about digital platforms, Twitter fame and male model fashion poses.
Things were off to a shaky start for Stiller and Goody as audio problems kept moderator Elisa Steele, chief marketing officer at Yahoo, from hearing her guests. Stiller was mostly successful in keeping things rolling with humour.
“Let me just say, for me, this is just such a dream come true, to finally be at the Cannes Film Festival,” said Stiller. “This isn’t the film festival? That explains all the purple crap in my room,” he said, referring to his Yahoo-branded swag bag.
After a few more jibes, Stiller got around to answering Steele’s question about the value of digital platforms in creative industries.
“There’s opportunities for people with no money to put [their work] out there and get feedback. It’s just hugely different for us than even 10 years ago.”
Stiller pointed to web properties such as FunnyOrDie.com as examples of performers (in this case Will Ferrell) taking creative and production processes online to maintain more control. Ideas get to market faster, Stiller said, contrasting this model to the Hollywood system whereby films take years to reach the market and do so only after much fundraising, reworking and testing.
Stiller still has feet in both worlds however. In addition to creating a web series with Yahoo featuring his parents–comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara–and a web-driven charitable effort to fund schools in Haiti called Stillerstrong, the 44-year-old actor hinted that a sequel to his 2001 hit Zoolander is in the works.
Goodby, co-chairman and creative director at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, spent most of the session removing layers of T-shirts, each bearing his Twitter handle and different tongue-in-cheek prizes on offer for “following” him on his newly made Twitter account, @JeffBadby. It was a light-hearted attempt to reach the same number of followers as Stiller–an audience exceeding 1.2 million people.
Goodby did speak to the changing nature of entertainment online however. Based on sites he’s seen where donations provide access to deeper content, he sees a future for donation-driven, episodic storytelling.
The session concluded with a group photo of the panelists and the entire audience, all wearing Stillerstrong headbands (a loving rip-off of Lance Armstrong’s charitable “Live Strong” wristbands). As Stiller revived his famous “Blue Steel” male model pose from Zoolander, the audience was told that for every person who views the photo, Yahoo will donate $1 to Stiller’s charity.
Yahoo’s Steele challenged the audience to see how fast they could raise $50,000 by sharing the photo through their social networks.
Earlier in the day, the crowds packed the Debussy for a seminar of a different sort. The Independent Agency Showcase, produced by TheNetworkOne, featured three agencies with unconventional business structures–the Montreal-born Sid Lee among them.
Sid Lee outlined its “collective” philosophy, which not only puts architects at the table with creative directors and retail designers, it spreads management of the company among more than 20 partners.
“The organizational chart gets a little messy sometimes,” said Alexandre Pasini, director of strategic planning. But it allows the company to be “very agile and adaptable.”
Pasini also showcased some of Sid Lee’s varied assignments, from designing Adidas Originals stores, to launching a spa on a boat later this summer in Montreal harbour, to designing Red Bull’s offices in The Netherlands.
Joining Pasini on stage were Karen Corrigan and Greg Titeca from Brussels-based agency Happiness, and Agnello Dias, co-founder of Taproot India. As well as showing off their work, including how they used a car to “draw” the various strokes of the IQ font–a typeface developed as a campaign for Toyota–Corrigan, Titeca outlined several of their agency’s philosophies. They ranged from the practical need for “creative management” that merges strategy and creative at top levels, to staffing the agency with Undefined Perpetually Mutating Specimens: their term for people with wide-ranging and adaptable skill sets.
Dias closed the presentation with a horror story of entrepreneurship. Less than two years after leaving JWT India–where he had won the nation’s first Grand Prix in Cannes for “Lead India” for The Times of India newspaper–Dias’ new Taproot offices burned down, leaving client work half-finished or destroyed.
While thin on details of his business’s recovery, Dias showed some of the campaigns that rose from those ashes, including “Aman Ki Asha” for The Times of India. It began as an editorial project between the newspaper and Pakistan’s Jang Group media company to promote peace in the wake of the Mumbai terrorist bombings of 2008.
Dias showed a video outlining the ways the campaign has expanded from a front-page story with the headline “Love Pakistan” to include Indian/Pakistani concerts and recent business summits. It brought the audience to its feet.
Seminars continue in Cannes throughout the week.
