Cannes Stripped Bare - Day 3

One of the highlights of attending Cannes is that everyone gets a goodie bag, just like at the Oscars.

At the Cannes film festival last month, attendees were provided with a swag bag containing handcrafted jewelry, spa and bath products, fine art photography and more, in a package valued at $1,180.

So it was with some excitement that I opened the Cannes advertising festival gift bag.

And I wasn't to be disappointed.

Every delegate receives this exclusive plastic fan, kindly sponsored by Korean Air.

No more sweltering at the beach. Simply move the fan in a back-and-forth motion for an immediate cooling effect.

Also, this ball.

Crafted from hand-selected polyurethane and designed to fit perfectly in the hand, it's not just an advertisement for kiip's Mobile Forum (Tuesday, 9.30am - unfortunately I wasn't able to be there) but also a versatile entertainment system, which can switch seamlessly between either throwing or bouncing mode.

Those who claim the 2,500 Euro cost of attending Cannes is excessive, may not be aware that as part of the package, each attendee receives a specially-designed T-shirt. The T-shirt is available in a variety of sizes - I went for Medium.

And finally, at the Cannes festival of creativity, no delegate need go hungry. So long as he or she likes marzipan. There was also a weird chocolate pie thing, not shown because I ate half of it in a weak moment.

Cannes Stripped Bare - Day 2

As Advertising Creatives, we are permanently searching for the new and innovative - our job is a neverending quest to do something that no one else has done before.

And that's why we refuse to follow trends.

Sorry Google Beach. Sorry Grand Audi Room. Sorry Spotify Garden. Sorry all the other brands that are trying to gain currency with creatives in Cannes. Ray-Ban owns this town, with near 100% top-of-shirt awareness.

All pictures from last night's Campaign Brief cocktail party.

Cannes Stripped Bare - Day 1

So here I am in the SOF, where many delegates are writing informative blog posts about the state of our industry. I thought about doing that too. Then I thought 'nah'.

Welcome to 'the other side of Cannes' - guaranteed no coverage at all of jury rooms, seminars, or award shows.


Those of you who are stuck back at the office, working, may be feeling ball-shrinkingly jealous of the glamour we delegates get to experience.

And so you should!

Check out my hotel, for example.

 

Situated on an award-winning industrial estate just outside Cannes, it's right across the street from one of the region's most prestigious tile manufacturers.

A

And a bus-wash.

But this is no ordinary bus-washing facility. That's a Mistral XB2 right there. State-of-the-art stuff.


Now let me take you inside the hotel.

Thirsty? Not a problem. Simply select a beverage from the minibar.

This place has every amenity.

Be sure to check back tomorrow, for my first party report!

Is The Era Of Scam Coming To An End?

One of my favourite campaigns at the awards this year is DDB New York's 'First World Problems' for WATERisLIFE. It's brilliantly clever, and brilliantly executed.

But interestingly, five years ago this campaign would have been scam.

It would have been entered in the TV category, having run once on an obscure TV station at 3am. No one would have seen it other than awards juries. It wouldn't have got PR, and it wouldn't have raised any money for charity.

Today, it's real. Over 2 million people have seen the film on YouTube. Many others have interacted with the idea via Twitter. It's got tons of PR, and raised real money for the charity.

So a welcome side-effect of the rise of the internet is that good ideas can become real, be seen, and actually have an effect in the world.

They don't have to be scam.

In fact since any video can be put on the internet and potentially find an audience, there is by definition no longer any such thing as scam in TV, which is a really welcome development, I reckon.

Though the press category is another matter of course...

Likeable Ways To Die

So D&AD is this week, and Cannes next week, and it looks like 'Dumb Ways To Die' is going to clean up at both.

In all the discussion of why it's so good - great animation, great song, clever strategy - there's one aspect that's been overlooked: it's just so damn likeable.

We don't talk about likeability much; perhaps we should.

It's a better-understood concept in Hollywood. Producers there are acutely aware that most popular movies are built around a likeable character - e.g. Han Solo, anybody played by Bruce Willis, Tony Stark, anybody played by Tom Hanks.
 
I met John Mescall (creator of Dumb Ways To Die) at an awards do recently and was struck by what a likeable chap he is. In fact, one of the industry magazines voted him 'most likeable person in advertising' last year.

So it's perhaps no surprise that he created such a likeable ad.

But what if you're not the most likeable person in advertising? Is there a formula for making our work likeable? What are the ingredients?

I'm going to suggest two (happy to hear more ideas also).

The first one is vulnerability or failure. Superman (as Clark Kent) is shy, and he is also vulnerable to Kryptonite - these help make him likeable. Indiana Jones is afraid of snakes. The characters in Dumb Ways To Die are all idiotic failures. 

My old mate William Fowler has written about how we are drawn to failure. "Let’s try a quiz," he writes. "What was the name of the boy who flew too close to the sun? What about his father, whose flight was successful? Name the two sister ships of the Titanic. Name one perfectly upright tower in northern Italy."

The difficulty of course is that clients always want to portray their brands as perfect. Worth bearing in mind that as humans we recoil from perfection, and find the wonky appealing.

The second factor is attractiveness. We like Jerry Maguire (even though he's a bit of a cock) because he's played by Tom Cruise. We like James Bond (even though he's a bastard) because he's handsome. And we like the characters in Dumb Ways To Die because they're cute.

Northern Planner was getting at something similar when he wrote a post about how the best archetype for a brand was "Victoria's Secret model."

So there you have it. Of course we still need to worry about things like media strategy and messaging. But let's not forget to be likeable.

The 37 Richest People In Advertising

Businesser Insider have just released their annual list of the 37 best-paid people in advertising.

There is only one woman on it (No.17 - Mercedes Erra, the 'E' in France's BETC). Right, because science has proven that possession of two x chromosomes is a huge inhibitor of advertising ability.
And all 37 executives on the list are white. Surely fair - advertising talent and skin pigmentation are clearly correlated.

Interestingly, the list finally resolves a question we've all pondered: "Who earns the really big bucks - suits, creatives, or planners?"

Answer: none of the above.

The best-paid people in advertising are the finance guys!

Digging into the backgrounds of those on the list, we can observe that only three are former account handlers. Five are strategy types, but before any of my planner friends get excited, none of them are ad strategists - all five are from consulting. 

Three are lawyers (Omnicom group general counsel, etc), one is from a marketing background (Kevin Roberts, worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, at No.9), three are media types, and two have backgrounds that I couldn't determine, during my approximately ten minutes of total research.

Meanwhile, a whopping 18 of the 37 highest-paid folks in our business have a finance or accounting background. Hurrah! And what's more, the bean-counters score four of the top five spots, with big guns like Martin Sorrell, John Wren, and Michael Roth (the head of Interpublic).

But I've saved the biggest flaw until last.

It's outrageous, I'm sure you'll agree, but somehow a creative person has snuck on there (Jacques Seguela, the 'S' in Euro RSCG, now chief creative officer of Havas Worldwide, at No.28). A creative person, on the list of the highest-paid people in the ad industry? But what possible value do they add?

To the young creatives reading this who harbour a desire to one day pull down a million dollar a year salary, the path is clear - chuck in your job and get an accounting qualification.

And most of all, please bin your skinny jeans, get rid of that ridiculous facial hair, and try to model yourselves a little more closely on the true heroes of our industry - men such as David B. Doft, and Randall J. Weisenburger.

David B. Doft,  CFO (chief financial officer)

of US-based network MDC Partners

(No.36, earned $714,144 last year),

 Randall J. Weisenburger, CFO of Omnicom

(No.5, earned $10.6 million last year)

I Can't Wait Until Data Takes Over

Most creatives aren't excited about data. But I actually think that 'true data' is going to set us free.

Right now, because data-gathering on advertising effectiveness is in its infancy, we are living in an age of seriously shoddy data.

We are measuring things like 'recall', which may or may not translate into sales. We are measuring things like 'persuasiveness'... which we can only measure after we've deliberately exposed someone to an ad, so we have no way of knowing if the consumer would have looked at the ad if we hadn't asked them to.

Which is why so many of the ads that pass research are 'saying all the right things' but don't actually work in the marketplace, where they are competing against (in the case of TV) seven other ads in the break, a toilet, a smartphone in the viewer's pocket, the conversation of someone else in the room, and the chance to make a cup of tea.

I am hugely encouraged by the data being generated from YouTube's relatively new 'skippable ad' feature.

The average skip rate for YouTube ads is greater than 80%. Source.

But an insider tells me that within that 80%, there's a huge variation. The most popular ads are skipped only 10% of the time. While the least popular are skipped 90% of the time. In other words, some ads are NINE TIMES as engaging as others.

This just confirms what we creatives have known in our bones, since time began.

That creativity works.

In the future, technology and data will be able to tell us exactly who saw a marketing message (in whatever medium) and then, from their subsequent purchasing behaviour, whether that ad was effective.

When this happens, creativity will finally triumph.

All the advertisers who thought that it was enough to simply say whatever they wanted to say, and gave insufficient thought to engagement, will be shown empirically to be wrong.

And on that day, I propose we hold a massive party.