Day seven has died and gone to heaven.

The final day of the festival is over. It’s saddening. This was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I have learned so much about this industry and I’ve learned a lot about myself. The individuals who work in this industry are people who I can see myself hanging out with. There are not too many assholes here. They are friendly and outgoing. They are willing to take time out of there day and talk to a student, like myself, and provide advice. That’s something I really admire. One thing this festival has done has been pulling the curtain back on the industry. Before this I didn’t really know what my career was going to consist of. Now I do. I know that I can do this work, before I had my doubts. I believe now that I am a head of the game. This was the greatest classroom that I have ever had. Be here and learning here are like no other. The ideas that are coming back with me to the states are the ideas of communicating to consumers, not interrupting them, engaging in a conversations with consumers, and finally it’s all about the idea. A simple idea that has a strong human insight can go across all platforms, whether it’s television, print, or digital.

There were two big events that happened to me today. The first, I met Brian Elliott, who is the CEO of Amsterdam Worldwide. I got his card. How many people can say that they got a CEO’s card? I’ve got some things to think about because there was a hint of him giving me an internship. The second was the final awards ceremony. The ceremony was built around Film and Film Craft. I was surprised that Old Spice was the winner of the top prize. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great commercial, I just don’t know if it was worthy of the Grand Prix. With that said, the USA dominated Cannes this year in Film and Cyber. American advertising is alive and well.

Eve of the last day.

The six day of the festival was a weird one, if I say so myself. It started out with the Beetle-killer herself, Yoko Ono. This was one of the strangest seminars, maybe even one of the strangest moments in my life. It was a true WTF moment. Yoko pulled the famous white blanket technique in which she and the moderator placed themselves under a white sheet and began to take their clothes off. But thank god that didn’t happen. It was a performance stunt and nothing more. The whole seminar was a performance stunt. Yoko ran around the stage; the moderator’s questions just bouncing off her brain. Only on questions which she was interested in, basically ones about her own work, did she sit down and “try” and give a reasonable response. I think I understand where Yoko is coming from in her philosophy. She believes that women have a power that is hidden within them. They are afraid to unleash it because of society. She isn’t the first woman to believe in this, but she is one of the first to express this philosophy in the way she does. Poems, yelling at the top of her lungs, and creating things that she believes to be art are her own ways of expressing herself. Even though I find her, how do I say weird, she is a creative person and she isn’t afraid to express herself. For that, I have respect. Yoko may seem on the edge of a being a crazy person, but aren’t we all a little crazy? We have to be crazy to put our ideas out there for everyone to critique. We have to have a tough skin. Crazy is thinking outside the box. Yoko thinks outside the box. I try and think outside the box. Doing things differently is crazy. Everyone in this industry is a little crazy. Let’s be crazy together and create the best creative work that this world has ever seen.

Day five and I'm still alive.

The day started off with a very exclusive, UGA VIP only, meeting with a man by the name of Gilad Kat. Gilad was a UGA grad and his specialty is in media. He is now an account executive in an advertising firm that is based in Israel. Gilad was a judge for the media category at this year’s Cannes Lions, which is a great honor in itself. His company also won a Grand Prix, the most prestigious awards in the Cannes festival, in 2005 for P & G. It’s safe to say that he has got a pretty sexy resume. Gilad’s advice for the group was to always tell your story in a simple way so that nothing gets lost in translation. That has really been a theme of the festival this year. Simple ideas win big. If your concept is presented in a simple manner, than more people will understand and therefore more results will come. Gilad also spoke of not being afraid. Don’t be afraid of flashing out local insights to the world. Be diverse. Diversity is good for the world.

After we spoke with Gilad, the group went to a master class that was presented by the kind himself, Jeff Goodby. Now this is a man who I wouldn’t mind sitting down and having a drink with, maybe a few other things too. He just seems like a cool cat. He doesn’t censor himself and that is something that I respect. He doesn’t use thick vocabulary and that might be a result from all the years of creating great advertisements. Great ads are easy to understand. Goodby’s main focus was to do things outside of advertising. Don’t work yourself to death. I mean personally I don’t like to work, who does? But I do love doing creative things. That is advertising, but his idea was to do creative things other than advertising. You can’t keep working your brain all the time. It needs time to rest. It needs time to learn new things. That was his main point, let your brain rest for a while and then great things will come. That sounds like a damn plan to me.

Day four has gone out the door.

The fourth day of the Cannes Lions Festival started off with a seminar held with the wonderful writer, producer, and director, Spike Jonzes. His topic was that of creativity. The main sticking point of his speech was that at the center of everything is a core idea. No matter if it’s an advertisement or a film, the core idea is what makes it or breaks it. I agreed with Spike that most advertisers out there have this great core idea, but then something happens to it. It gets lost. It gets smothered by un-needed baggage. Advertisers try to expand on this core idea with too much shit basically. Sometimes this happens because the client is too afraid to trust in the idea. Therefore, they want something bigger and more expensive. Something they believe will catch the consumer’s eyes, but as Spike said this is usually not the case. People connect with emotion, not with huge production. The simplest ad in the world can change lives if the core idea is communicated effectively through emotion. I believe in this strategy because those are the ads that I connect with the most. They are the ones I remember.

Day three, it’s hard to believe.

The festival was full of excitement. You could feel the floating around the atmosphere of the Palai. The stars were aligning in Cannes. Ben Stiller, Nick Cannon, and Common all made appearances during seminars at the festival. Stiller’s personality resonates with the character’s he plays in his films. Funny man that Ben Stiller. The one and only Blue Steel. The reason the celebrities where at Cannes was to give their perspectives on advertising and where they think the industry could be heading. The conclusion, integration is taking over interruption. Advertisers must realize that consumers no longer want to be interrupted. We must integrate our brands with entertainment while maintaining authenticity and originality.

Other than the celebrities, the seminar that really stuck me was from Draft FCB. They spoke of the reduction of complexity. We, as advertisers, must be simple enough without being too simple. According to Draft, simplicity lies in numbers. Not ordinary numbers but HOLY SHIT numbers, numbers that not only have a quantitative meaning but also a qualitative meaning. I agree with Draft’s philosophy. Through numbers that have a meaning lies the key to emotional connection. Once you find that holy shit number, you find your insight that consumers connect with. Creativity flows from that insight that sprouts from numbers. Numbers are simple and I believe that simplicity is a must. Consumers remember simple, but it has to be engaging. To end I’ll leave with a little something I learned in grade school.

KISS - Keep. It. Simple. Stupid.

Day two is through.

So, the second day of the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival is in the books. The day was a crowded one compared to Sunday. Seminars were packed to the brink, but we were still able to get some decent seats despite the crowd. Some of the big players had seminars today including EA games which was quite interesting if I say so myself. A useful fact about gaming is that gaming systems are no longer in the basement being played by boys. They are now located in the family rooms and are played by fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. The whole family is now integrated into gaming, which is good news for advertisers who advertise in-game. The gaming demographic is now larger. Depending on the type of game, advertisers can implement ads and communication strategies in the games that will grab the attention of the gaming multiple gaming generations that are now playing together. This area of the field should continue to grow, especially when considering that every 1-4 dollar that is spent on entertainment is spent on gaming.

Two words, 3D advertising. It’s the new frontier when it comes to cinema and now even television advertising. The seminar conducted by SAWA was one of the most amazing and coolest experiences of my life. I never knew 3D could look so good. I learned that to make 3D film, producers used a special camera that has a right and a left lens, just like the human eyes. This gave the images a three-dimensional look. It was fascinating. We were shown some really striking ads that will be coming out soon in 3D and all in all they were amazing, engaging, and they had the WOW factor. I can see that in the near future 3D advertising is going to take off around the globe. My only concern with this new medium is that it may become too much of a WOW factor. While watching, I found myself being amazed by the 3D images popping out into my face. I forgot the brand. I missed the brand logo. Not every time, but a quite a few. Will consumers be able to get over the WOW factor and remember the brand that is selling to them? If not, then the medium has failed. Only time will tell.

Festivus For the Rest of Us

So it has begun…

Today, June 20^th 2010, was the first day of the extra-extraordinary and completely un-ordinary Cannes Loins Advertising Festival. Before arriving, I didn’t know what type of journey was ahead of me. No one in our group of wolves knew what to expect. Once the group made it inside, we were given our special VIP badges, aka student badges. On long with our badges we were given a nice satchel full of free goodies. Free things are the best.

First of all…I have to mention the high tech equipment that was posted up along the hallways. I’ve never seen technology like this. 3-D TVs that do not require GLASSES. Pretty sick. Ice cream vending machines that produce free ice cream by scanning the costumers face to see if they are smiling. Huge touch screen maps of the entire area. That, my friends, was pretty awesome.

Let’s move on. The real reason behind the madness is of course advertising. As a group we all attended the work shop, Mobile Mania. We were given a book to go along with it. This book is really awesome. It explains the multiple points that were made in the session while also giving some random, maybe useful someday, facts. I love those types of facts. There were two points that really interested me about this workshop and the role of mobile/application advertising.

Number one, the mobile advertising revolution will be un-American, unlike the first internet revolution which was USA all the way. This is because call quality, signal quality is actually better in countries located in Asia and Europe. America will for the first time in a good minute not lead the way in a revolution. Quite frightening for Americans, I would assume.

Number two is mobile augmented reality. This is some straight-up terminator shit. Augmented reality is the ability of a web-based app to read visual information via barcodes and other web-information. For example, a person holding a smart phone next to a group of houses that their friends reside in will allow them to see if they are home or not. It’s kind of like a GPS device but for people. Also, the smart phone will pick up certain stores that a consumer ventures into and send coupons for that store straight to their phone screen. Some individuals see this as invasion of privacy. It may indeed be just that. But think of it this way, we always want gratification instantly. This will give consumers just that. It’s like Arnold as a machine, scanning the information of the human race, but this time it’s not a movie it’s a phone.

Those are just two of the very interesting points that were made in the Mobile Mania workshop. They really cause your mind to think about where the world is heading. We are in the middle of a revolution. The mobile revolution.