Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Luka Duboković, Managing Director BBDO Zagreb
If the highlights of yesterday were Swedish rock, health and illusion, today, the second day of Cannes, is not nearly as exciting as the title might suggest. It’s obvious that they have tuned the program so that the first day they give you strong bait to get you hooked, and then the next day they somewhat defuse the situation…
The second day of the festival we also realized something utterly unbelievable for us Croats. There is only one (!?) café for a couple thousand people in the whole complex. We simply cannot grasp how these people endure the whole day without having to sit down for a coffee at least six times a day. We also figured out that the crème café is closest to our coffee with milk, and is what you should order if you want to get a coffee at least approximate to what you drink in bars at home. (Just be warned, they brew it so hot that you shouldn’t go anywhere near it for the next hour. If you see someone walking around with a coffee in their hands, run for your life, because if it gets spilled over you, you’re guaranteed 3rd degree burns).
But let’s get back to the lectures and content. What is particularly interesting to us is the way in which the lectures are promoted within the complex itself. In fact, all the important lectures have excellently designed posters (see the image) which are plastered all around the complex (even in the toilets). The reason is actually very simple: you have so much content that it’s almost impossible to work out which lecture to attend, so this is the way the lecturers themselves fight for their audiences. You have a minimum of practically five things to listen to at the same time, and at least three of those always sound very interesting.
Given how we fared today, I don’t think we made the wisest choice, but we are trying to console ourselves by saying that the other ones we sacrificed probably weren’t any more interesting either. The day – as far as the main stage is concerned – was marked by the Chinese, their lecturers and cases. I’ll highlight some interesting points from these lectures.
Wechat: Chinese social network, with 900 million users, 90% of whom visit it at least 10 times a day. This is not just a social network, it is practically the only app you need for most of the things you do online. It’s like Facebook, Paypal, Whatsap and Amazon all rolled into one – something completely inconceivable for western markets.
Agency Beta: Interesting management experiment coming from one of China’s largest advertising agencies, which is trying in extraordinary ways to solve the problem of the agency’s entry into its ‘mature’ phase; ie as an organization grows old and becomes bigger, so it becomes more sluggish and less inventive. They found a solution to this by launching smaller Beta agencies, which are actually experimental agency models never before seen on the market. The agency is so big that it can afford such experimental models which don’t have the imperative to succeed, but serve the purpose of testing and finding innovative future models.
What seems common to the Chinese speakers is that they all have very interesting topics, but their presentations are not quite up to the task, mainly thanks to their poor English, which sounds like it comes from the worst Hong Kong films of the 70s. The best illustration of this is the example of one presentation where the English was so bad that it had to be subtitled in English, so we could understand the ‘English’ being used in the presentation.
The morning began with the theme Image vs. Perception and nothing had hinted at the fact that the lecture would turn into a philosophical discussion about how new technologies affect the perception of reality. Some very interesting hypotheses were presented, but it just isn’t the thing for 10 in the morning. It’s more of a subject for 10 at night, after a few glasses of wine at the bar. What can I say, the lecture mentioned Heisenberg and Schrodinger (quantum physicists). It simply wasn’t a palatable story for the couple of thousand people who attended the lecture. The main lecturer is otherwise an artist who through his work questions the notion of the real and the virtual, and the fact that it is image, not facts, that make up reality. “Image is the product” he concluded, and of course, we agree!
The last lecturer we listened to was Professor Bryon Sharp, a man whose book How Brands Grow turned everything we believed true in marketing upside down. If you haven’t read this book, be sure to do so! Today’s lecture dealt with the hypothesis of how the facts contained in the book can be applied to the digital world, especially in the domain of digital campaigns. Bryon’s conclusion is that there is no difference between online and offline, because the principles are the same, regardless of which categories and media these principles apply to. Creativity and a smart choice of media is the key to getting light buyers who make up the bulk of the sales volume of your products. Bryon says his research is one of the reasons why Facebook and YouTube have turned into a massive advertising mediums, because only by reaching out to the growing base of potential customers will you have a chance on the mass market. There are no niche products. It’s just a euphemism telling you that you are small.
Conclusion: stop telling the same thing to the same people. Expand your stories and your audience. As far as I’m concerned, I feel that I’ve already talked enough. It’s time to punch out and go explore the world outside the Palais center. I hope that there will be something more exciting out there than there was in here today.