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Some of it will be tagged and uploaded and some of it will be spilled out on to their therapists' chairs.....in sometime now. Why? Because there are moments when you are absolutely struck by the beauty and power of the human mind. And, this glorious enduring drug called creativity.
In this week when our work and our business gets its fair share of the French Riviera sun, I'll try and keep this personal.
Because from what I gathered today, personal is in. Intimacy is more in demand than style. Moments are more precious than budgets. And laughter can get you more market share than dark and twisty cynicism. Hope is our business's favourite four-letter word. This year it is even more magical than digital.
My day started pretty early on the ground floor of the Palais, the venue of the festival, where the promotion and activation work was displayed. It felt good to see one of my favourite pieces of work, for Unilever's Dove, titled Real Beauty Sketches, done by Ogilvy, Brazil, being displayed on the floor that dealt with the insight that women don't really think of themselves as beautiful. Hence, the way women describe themselves to a forensic artist is not flattering to say the least, resulting in portraitures that are pretty plain. But when the same woman is described by a stranger to the same portrait artist, the results are dramatically different. What is the idea? That there is hope and Dove for all of us women - simple, universal and so true. Since its debut this April, the Real Beauty Sketches ad has been amongst the most viewed commercials on the web. I am not surprised why. It touches a chord and tells you a thing or two of how women perceive themselves.
The other idea that totally got me is the one done for organ donation by Ogilvy, Germany. In a country where everybody hates waiting, be it at a station or for a burger or a call, the agency put a 27-year-old dialysis patient, waiting for a kidney for the last 7 years, on a busy train station. The entire experience of commuters colliding into him created a very powerful social media campaign. Again a simple, but effective message about organ donation without being overtly preachy.
While I am not much of a sports buff, there was one idea that stayed in my head. Again from Ogilvy, Brazil called Immortal Fans. The agency called it the first organ donor card for a football team. And, hence...how your lungs, heart and eyes can still continue to cheer for your sports club long after your death. Simple and universal.
By noon, the main auditorium was spilling like the Eid release of a new Salman Khan film, where Jonathan Mildenhall, who is vice-president, global advertising strategy and creative excellence at Coca-Cola, was talking about 'How What Unites Us is Greater than What Divides Us'. He made an excellent presentation about how Coke has always found a creative way to sell hope and happiness to people, in whatever age, under whatever circumstance. How the first non-white woman in any American ad was a lady named Mary Alexander, who featured in a Coke ad way back in 1955. Or how the first time a black boy and a white boy sat together on a park bench, practically reliving Martin Luther King's philosophy, was in a Coke ad. All these campaigns don't have huge budgets or millions spent on creative execution. It is just pure human emotion that drives them reflecting simple truths.
In this age we are often at a loss on how to connect with this big bad world. How do we cure the visual disengagement that our young have with TV ads? Emotions for some reason still works. It is fundamentally the most important bit of any story. While everything has changed around us, only this is the true constant. The best video games and virals are truly great because they make you feel the same electronically. Losing a game on the field or on a screen is equally gut-wrenching for your seven-year-old. As creators of content we need to respect that. So keeping the user first and the message second..is one advice that I'd take back home for sure.
In the end, there is no such thing as Chinese rage or Arab love or American jealousy or Korean hope. If we all feel the same, then we must be same. This day at Cannes just validates this thing that we all know, but are scared to apply to our brands and consumers in the boardroom. Intimacy is the true algorithm of creativity.
(The author is national creative director - JWT India)
