Roll up, roll up for the Greatest Show on Earth

Advertising folk of a certain age reminisce fondly about the Cannes of the past: a smallish arty affair, mainly European with a mere 4 categories alternating between Venice and Cannes.

 

Not having been before I can’t make comparisons with the recent past but by all accounts this 2015 was the largest, the most multinational and in some ways the most bizarre. ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ says their own ad.
 

I have been searching for a description and the closest I can get is that Cannes has become the love child of P.T. Barnum and Sepp Blatter. This is not meant anything like as cynical of critical as it sounds and I am certainly not accusing this vast money making machine of corruption. But the scale is huge (54 countries). And as for the P.T. Barnum comparison, Kim Kardashian, Monica Lewinsky and Marilyn Manson are scarcely the equivalent of Barnum’s Bearded Lady, Siamese Twins and Elephant Man, but one does wonder what in the world they are doing there.  

 

The atmosphere is frenetic, and importunate

After all, what are people there for but frantically longing for an award, a client, a meeting, a drink, a dinner, a party, a yacht, a celebrity introduction? All the time this vast stream of humanity (about 3000) are poking away at mobiles with laser-like intensity; if a phone was lost, suicide would inevitably follow.

 

The organisation is spectacularly smooth, all things considered, but it differs from any event I’ve organised or attended, Rather than setting a theme, determining categories and then allocating contributions appropriately this seems exactly the opposite. Someone once said that ‘when the world tilts, everything that isn’t nailed down slides to California.’ Much the same sense of disconnected randomness is true here with virtually anything that isn’t nailed down (and can cough up the fee) slides to Cannes. Individuals like the above named trio, politicians, movie actors, advertisers, and camp followers, all hovered up and categories and sub-categories emerge arbitrarily. Twelve of them (including one mysteriously called ‘Glass’) - most of which have dozens of sub-categories.

 

And boy, all really do have to have prizes: the sum total of Lions awards was a staggering 1,169.              

 

Isn’t it a bit strange though to have a specific category called ‘Creative Effectiveness’? Isn’t everything supposed to effective? But of course, that’s not the criterion. When the day comes that proved effectiveness is the key criteria for entry, a mature Cannes Lions will have arrived - but I’m not holding my breath. Nevertheless, a workshop with Merry Baskin and Gurdep Puri provided a highly intelligent guide to how to think about effectiveness; and Paul Feldwick in an encouragingly over-subscribed WARC workshop.

 

Themes 

Oh, yes, the creativity. Some sensationally good stuff which will no doubt be seen and known by everyone by now from the trade press.  

 

Were there themes? As has been true over the past few years companies are hopping on to the social issues band wagon: concerns about women, safety, low literacy, sustainability, purpose above and beyond commerce abound. (Julian Saunders analyses this in a recent article and Paul Twivy in the September issue of Market Leader makes a passionate plea for marketers to take what Julian calls HPB (High Purpose Branding) seriously.  Although Paul and Julian are rightly dubious of the transparently phoney efforts to ‘goodwash’. We will be seeing a lot of this in coming years. Recent speeches from our own trade associations in Britain echoed the concerns with trust and honesty (AA); ethics (ISBA) and Advertising for Good (IPA) – plus an excellent, if familiar presentation by Keith Weed – describing Unilever’s activities in this regard. 

 

And then up pops filmmaker Richard Curtis, he of Comic Relief success, who has co-opted Sir John Hegarty into writing an advertisement (WEHAVEAPLAN) aimed at making sure the UN keeps to its goals for a better, safer, cleaner, richer world - to be shown around the world on 25 September.

  

Digital reigns

Bu there is no doubt that the real action (in the sense of innovation, interest and confusion) is in the digital world which appears to have everyone running faster and faster but, as far as I could tell, not quite keeping up. A particularly impressive presentation by Bob Greenberg and colleagues of RGA left me wondering if this was the state of the art and if so, traditional agencies busily bolting on extras have a long way to go.   

 

But just how successfully RGA delivers on its Very Big Promises to integrate anything and everything is another matter. An agency that backs innovators, makes films, ties all the digital offerings together seems too good to be true even if presumably desirable. My sense of the digital world is a wildly fragmented one with new offerings popping up daily with different names and promises, leaving what must be the almost impossible job of pulling it all together to the client. The Cyber’ category alone had 60 categories of activities all competing for fragments of a budget. 

 

Martin Hayward recently reminded me of the Gartner technology hype cycle which tracks technological innovation through various phases from ‘innovation trigger’, to the soaring heights of ‘inflated expectations’, down to the’ trough of disillusionment’ and gradually up the ‘slope of enlightenment’ to the ‘plateau of productivity’. Cannes leaves me with the impression we are at the dizzying heights of inflated expectations at the moment.

 

Lots of cute stunts which are too tempting to ignore. The winner in the direct category was an ingenuous hi-jacking Twitter effort by Volvo, in which viewers of the Super Bowl were told to tweet Volvo whenever ANY car ad appeared which would enter them in a lottery to win a car.  The close runner-up (as the jury assured us) in was an ad for ‘quality’ (their description) porn subscription which allowed the viewer to watch free porn indefinitely provided hands remained on the keyboard. 

 

If anything captures the Zeitgeist of hoopla, deal making, meeting taking, creative envelope pushing, celebrity cruising, drinks, parties and yacht blagging it is the Cannes Lions Festival. And in only 11 months it hits the road again.

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Read more from Judie Lannon in our Clubhouse.