Sophie Woods’ Cannes Diary: Day Five

Sophie Woods is a producer for The OTTO Empire and is attending her first Cannes Lions, attending as a ‘Young Lion’ delegate. She reports exclusively for Campaign Brief.

I won last night! Can’t believe it, thanks to all of my supporters! Vesuvio at 3am is all a girl could ever dream of. (Props to Dan Stonehouse for the award design!)

BUZZWORDS AT LIONS INNOVATION

SPYING ON JAMES PACKER’S YACHT

DAVID GUETTA TURNS OUT TO BE A DREAMBOAT

Less saving the world today and more indulgence to be quite honest.

I started my day at the Lions Innovation Festival which is a new arm of the Cannes Lions, whose aim is to blow people’s minds and confuse production company producers I’m pretty sure. I went for the talk about brands supporting startups and stayed for the free coffee. The session i went to had 4 amazing business people on stage talking about investing in startups and it made me want to watch Shark Tank SO bad. In all seriousness, their model makes sense; build brands and use your connections to scale, seems pretty straightforward. Bad news is I have to call my boyfriend and tell him his Shark Tank pitch is already being developed (wearable/domestic health monitoring systems). Oh also one of the ladies said she’s excited about developing Artificial Intelligence *gulp* when will we learn?

There was an installation in the middle of the festival hub which had about 5 zillion (maybe less) smart phones with the screens illuminated and tracking the tweets of cannes. This thing uses an algorithm to assess every single tweet here on its emotional content and shows in colours whether people are tweeting negative, positive, or neutral sentiments. Wot.

Today I took time out from my rigorous reporting duties to live in absolute luxury at Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc for lunch. James Packer’s boat was parked out front and Kim Kardashian was staying in the hotel and I kept waiting for someone to figure out I wasn’t supposed to be there and throw me out. But I got through it, don’t think I embarrassed myself, and had an amazing lunch with Jojo and Eric Quennoy (Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam). Our other guests got stranded in Cannes because of the untimely taxi strike and I feel so bad for their loss – look at this view.

This afternoon I went back to the Palais for some more learning, and after much hesitation, went into a session with David Guetta. ‘Making the Brand: Authenticity and Influence Through Celebrity Endorsements’ turned out to be one of my favourite sessions yet. Guetta is actually a baller; he’s fearless and honest and also a massive sweetheart. He told a room full of agency people and media buyers that no one watches TV anymore HAR HAR SORRY EVERYONE! He also told a story about being laughed out for being French when he used to hand out promo flyers in Ibiza, but that Daft Punk opened the way and made French people kind of cool. He was so unashamed of promoting the relationship of co-branding and made the point that often artists need the help financially, and if done right it can be so mutually successful.

I’m having such a dreamy time. I keep pinching myself too, I feel so lucky to be here leaning and meeting so many people. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep but I am definitely having a moment of real gratitude. #namaste

Oh ps… I was in the bathroom of our 5th floor apartment a couple of nights ago at about 2am getting ready for bed when I heard some distressing sounds from the courtyard below. Distressing for me. It was a couple having extremely loud…I’m too nervous to go into detail here but…you can guess. Anyway, after 15 minutes the male counterpart needed to expel the contents of his stomach, again quite loudly, before proceeding to do the deed again 5 minutes later. I just…feel like I’m too innocent for this. Sorry Mum. Sigh. #namaste #CannesLions.

Find Woods at hellootto.com.au.