Today is the fourth day of the Cannes advertising festival. Just finished listening to a 26-year-old guy who filled three big auditoriums here at the Palais. He is Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.
The first question the anchor asked him was, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” But this 'kid' has built a platform that has 500 million users. Every case study entered here at Cannes uses Facebook as an example to show how successful their campaigns have been on the platform.
While speaking about Facebook’s success, Zuckerberg said: “In the olden times, privacy was good. Today people want to share, people are more open.”
Now, a quick visit to day three at Cannes. Yesterday was a busy day. I spent the whole day inside the Palais. I started with a presentation by Improv Everywhere. Their baseline on the website says it all: “We cause scenes.” One of the most bizarre scenes they created was ‘The No Pants Subway Ride’. It is an annual event staged every January in New York City.
The idea started as a small prank with seven guys and has grown into an international celebration of silliness. The eighth annual No Pants Ride had 1,200 participants in New York and well over 1,000 more in 21 other cities across the globe. They perform many such ‘missions’, as they would like to call them.
After lunch, I watched three independent agencies talking about why, how and what they do. There was Happiness Brussels, who said: “They don’t define who they are, but would only tell you why they are here.” Because who they are would be changing constantly. Smart thinking, I must say.
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Then there was Sid Lee, an agency which doesn’t believe in hierarchies, and the one thing I remember as I write this is, “Collectively, we dump. Individually, we flesh out (the idea). Never one without the other.”
Then, of course, our own Agnello Dias, who was asked why he left a ‘cushy’ job at JWT, and started his own agency, Taproot, along with Santosh Padhi. His answer was simple. Big agencies work like clockwork and clockwork is best left to clocks.
In the evening, I attended the award show for Radio, Outdoor and Media Lions. I sat through restlessly because Outdoor and Media categories are the ones where I have won most of my lions. But I did bring my egoistic hands together to clap for some pretty good work by others. The Grand Prix in the outdoor category was won by Anamoly for their much-talked Diesel's Be Stupid campaign. One ad has a girl flashing in front a CCTV and the line says, “Smart may have brains, but stupid has balls.”
The Grand Prix in Outdoor ambient was won by Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi for their work on the Andes teletransporter. They placed booths in the middle of bars with a sound panel that recreates lots of different everyday environments to get men out of the bar without leaving it. Cheeky.
The Grand Prix in media was won by Leo Burnett, Sydney, for their campaign for Canon. The best way to describe it is, antakshari with pictures. A great, simple idea.
Let's quickly go through India's scorecard: 53 shortlists so far. At last night’s show, three agencies from India picked up medals in Outdoor. Mudra DDB’s campaign for Bangalore Traffic Police won them a Silver Lion. Creativeland Asia earned a silver for its work on Frooti. The team also got a bronze for an outdoor campaign for Medimix soap. Ogilvy & Mather won a bronze for their work on The Economist.
In radio, there were four shortlisted Indian agencies, including Publicis India and Leo Burnett. But it was the latter (Leo Burnett) which bagged a silver at Cannes in the category. Their radio spot was titled, ‘The Pleasure of Mixing’ and is for Bajaj hand blenders.
By the time you read this, the news for design, cyber and press would be out. There are some good contenders from India. People are talking about the work done by Publicis for ‘The Planners Summit’ in design and ‘Conqueror celebrating 10 years in India’ done by Santosh Padhi from Taproot.
Emmanuel Upputuru National Creative Director, Publicis India