Paul Yole in Cannes – Day Three
The Brand Agency, Perth’s Head of Strategy Paul Yole presents his take from the Cannes Lions 2011 so far…
DAY THREE Is it really only Tuesday?
The quality of the seminars is getting better each day so by Thursday I think it’s going to be hard to pick only one highlight to talk about, and today was a good example of that.
I had to choose between the amazing story of the world’s first crowd-sourced car, the Fiat Mio, Robert Redford and TED@Cannes. I picked the latter.
We had two great TED talks from people who are not in the ad business.
One is an entrepreneur who happened to co-found Netscape. Bill Barhydt told us about social networks in undeveloped countries, where SMS is the most reliable and popular form of connection.
The biggest selling mobile device in the world in the good old Nokia 1100 and it is helping to change lives in places as far apart as South Africa, Kenya and Afghanistan.
In South Africa Dr Math is a text based education program that is helping students in the townships get access to tutoring.
In Kenya, 29% of the economy flows through a mobile-based program called M-Pesa, which has 12 million users. They come in to cities from their farms, visit a Safaricom store and upload money onto their mobile using SMS technology only.
And since the Afghanistan Police started having their wages sent to their accounts by SMS, the skimming of up to 30% of their wages has stopped.
The second speaker, author Tom Chatfield, gave a compelling account of how the ‘always on’ status we all find ourselves in is reducing our effectiveness. Chatfield argues that while being plugged in helps us to research, collaborate and co-ordinate it also prevents us from analysing, debating and deciding. Connection, he says, is meaningless without control so we should all switch off from time to time to allow better balance in our work and our lives.
The TED session finished with two spell binding pieces of poetry from Sarah Key. Storytelling at its very best. As the ovation filled the Debussy Theatre, it was one of those moments when you say to yourself, “now THAT is what we come to Cannes for.”
Tonight is the Opening Gala. And it’s still only Tuesday.