Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Luka Duboković, Managing Director BBDO Zagreb
Today (Wednesday), the fourth day, was again loaded with events so much that you really don’t know where to go first and what would you rather watch. All sorts of things were happening today: there were Anna Wintour, Will Smith, Usher, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anderson Cooper … I’m only listing the celebrities. And there are all those interesting professionals that you would also like to listen to, but you just can’t. The crowd is swelling more and more. It’s becoming more difficult to get coffee, so thank you to colleagues from OMD in whose tent we regularly find refreshment. Also, thank you for the beautiful yesterday’s hosting of Thomas Friedman, who is the author of several excellent books and a columnist for The New York Times, who in such a simple way recounts and explains the complicated international and domestic (US) geopolitical / economic conditions. Indeed, it was inspirational to listen to him – a nice departure from the marketing jargon which we’ve been listening to for the last four days.
The morning started with Anna Wintour, the artistic director of all the issues of Conde Nast, and still best known to the wider public for her sunglasses, as chief editor of the Vogue, and as an inspiration for the character of the evil boss who terrorizes Ann Hathaway in the film The Devil Wears Prada. Ms. Wintour gave a speech-presentation in which she practically didn’t show a single slide on the screen – a speech so different from what we have become accustomed to at Cannes, but still very interesting. She says that exactly by ignoring the rules of Digital (immediate, short, fast) they created some of the greatest stories ever told in the history of journalism. Just one of the examples is an excellent article (topic) on Scientology, which was published by the New Yorker, and which later served as a template for a great HBO documentary.
Will Smith was incredibly inspiring and fun. A true showman who used his own examples (and wasn’t ashamed to state some of the bad ones) to remind us that in the beginning of every good idea there must be a universally applicable plot. Technology has undressed the products, including the entertainment industry. Example: in the past, you could launch a film on Friday, and by Wednesday no one would know that it’s crap, and by then you’ve already earned a heap of money. Today? Today, after 10 minutes of screening, the whole world knows that your movie stinks. “Cheating is over”, as Will nicely put it.
James Hurman, a former planner at the agency Colenso BBDO Auckland, gave a superb lecture on the relationship between the campaigns for brands, which have won awards for creativity, and market success. His book The Case for Creativity is a reading that you cannot miss if you want the best for your company. With him on stage were Jim Stengl (ex CEO of P&G) and Jonathan Mildenhall, CMO of Airbnb. Jim Stengl is the man most responsible for the transformation of P&G into a global creative company. Jim has a simple recipe for all companies wishing to do business more successfully: come to Cannes, it will pay off!
After James, Adam Grant took the main stage. Grant is a best-selling author of Give and Take, and his last book that was recently published – Originals. By coincidence, I read the Originals shortly before arrival in Cannes, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone. Basically, Originals takes many case studies and examples to demonstrate a number of things for which previously there were no reliable evidence for best practices, ie. it has been shown that brainstorming is actually not a good method to generate ideas. It is good to storm about existing ideas, but not to generate them that way. Who is the best in predicting the success of new ideas in the market? It’s neither the consumers nor managers, but those colleagues who also work on coming up with similar ideas. Why? Because they are too subjective for evaluating their own ideas, but also very objective in assessment of ideas of other people. This means that in the assessment of creative ideas in the advertising agency, the best test for assessing whether something is good or not are neither consumers nor clients, but your creative colleagues.
Finally, at the end there was literally a menage a trois on the stage (not exactly as you might imagine it), and it happened during the lecture on collaboration and generating ideas. The presentation was held in a way that three dudes were lying in a bed together (in pajamas) and collaborated on a lecture on collaboration. All together it was more like a performance, rather than just talk. At the end, about a dozen people from the audience joined them in the bed, and it all turned into a big show that really didn’t have much sense. Form before content? No thanks!
Proof that collaboration can lead to quality solutions came later, at the Shutterstock party. I was telling Damir Ciglar that for the next Days of Communication he simply must bring the crew from the Swedish agency SNASK, who rocked the house first day of the festival with their lecture (my colleague Almir already wrote about them). Later, around one in the morning, Almir told me he saw a guy from SNASK (he is impossible to forget – an Asian guy with long black hair and a Clark Gable mustache). I set out to search for him along with Ciglar and Ackerman. Anyway, long story short, we found him, Ciglar showed him the pictures of Rovinj and Lone, the man said he was coming (with the band) so if an agreement at one in the morning, with a significant dose of alcohol in our bloodstream, can be considered concluded, we’ll see you next year in Rovinj at SNASK, the fun is guaranteed!