Beyond the awards – Day one & two

June 22 2010, 5:30 am | BY | 3 Comments

Paul in Cannes.jpgPaulYole, head of strategy at The Brand Agency, has been a delegate inCannes for the past five years. Here’s his ‘beyond the awards’ take onthe first two days in Cannes…

Bloody hell it’s actually cold here. I blame Kim Shaw. The first yearhe decides not to come to Cannes is the first year I have to wear a teeshirt under my cool new Paul Smith night club shirt. It’s not a good look.

Sunday is the day when those who want to present a seminar, but aren’tgood enough or rich enough to make a Monday slot, get a gig. And by allaccounts they were pretty crap today. A bit like the weather.


I’m looking forward to Monday though. Rory Sutherland is speaking and
so too are Go Viral and Guy Murphy, a great planner from JWT.

But I’m going to be checking out my Wankometer this week. I don’t know
know about you, but I’m sick of the use of the C word in our business.
Content, co-creation, connection, community, and so on. These guys are
just getting too carried away.

The Wankword of today was “stratergery”.

Go figure.

Tomorrow can only get better.

DAY TWO
I think I could make money here teaching presentation skills but there was some decent content today.

Talking
of content, I put the Wankometer into action and counted that C word 51
times – yes 51 – during the first presentation. And I lost count of how
many times they said, “the online space”. God help us.

Interesting and frightening that the Nokia marketing planner Daniel
Goodall; said, “It’s important for Nokia to make sure we don’t use just
one source for content creation.”

Rory Sutherland was good as always. “Human desire doesn’t necessarily
translate into action.” A timely reminder about the importance of
salesmanship.

JWT showed some great work, especially for Heineken’s ‘Are you still
with us?’ campaign. Check this out – I’ve included some French words
for authenticity….

David Harris from Wunderman is not a brilliant presenter but what he
delivered was great. He has done research into how inspiration happens
and somewhat perversely came up with a formula for the process:
Problem
Thinking time
Dispersal
The trigger
Epiphany
Communicating the idea

Finished off the day with drinks on the Carlton terrace. Met Nick Laws
as well as old friends Stu (Mills) and Yanti from Ogilvy & TBWA Singapore respectively. It’s
Yanti’s birthday today so I think a big night is ahead. We’ll probably
end up at the newly sponsored Yahoo Gutter Bar. I took a photo on my
morning run.

GutterBar.jpg