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Cannes Lions Advertising

The diary of a 40-year-old Cannes virgin

By Joe Braithwaite, Managing director

June 23, 2018 | 5 min read

Earlier this year, I went to a Mark Ritson talk. Our industry, he said, often takes far too much pleasure in declaring everything ‘dead’. By all accounts, TV is dead, Facebook is dead, radio is definitely dead. And as for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity? Well, visiting it must be like a stroll through a rather picturesque cemetery.

nighthawks

So I’m happy to report that, in my humble opinion, rumours of the deaths of both Cannes and creativity have been greatly exaggerated.

Having spent more than a decade based in Singapore with BBDO, success at Cannes was the mission and winning Lions the KPI. The event itself, however, was a 14-hour flight beyond my grasp. After relocating back to London with Proximity this year, though, I find myself attending the festival for the first time – and with a level of wide-eyed expectation normally reserved for an eight-year-old on his way to Alton Towers.

At my age, there are precious few ‘first times’ left. I’m married, I have a child, I’ve even bungee-jumped. So I found myself both excited and nervous as I boarded my easyJet flight to Nice, surrounded by the easily identifiable dual tribes of a) flashy power suits wearing Apple Watches to show they’re in touch with tech and b) hipster creative types sporting man buns who, to quote Nathan Barley, are ‘blissfully unaware of the conformity of their non-conformity'.

After a slightly bad-tempered exchange with a testy Uber driver about where on earth the D3 pick-up zone was located (in a parallel dimension, by my observations), we were on our way to Cannes.

On the walk down the hill from my glamorous Airbnb accommodation, I felt a little like Luke Skywalker on his first trip into Mos Eisley spaceport.

I needn’t have worried. My first impressions were overwhelmingly positive. The festival attendees really did feel like a truly diverse global bunch – I overheard conversations in Mandarin, Yoruba, Russian and even a couple of Liverpudlian or Mancunian accents thrown in for good measure.

The rest of my first day highlighted some of the extremes that the Cannes experience has to offer.

I started by meeting some of the Proximity folks at a drinks event hosted by Spotify. Here free-flowing drinks were exchanged for someone asking me how I plan to use a sophisticated music AI in our next big campaign. I was then invited by clients to a secluded luxury villa in the hills to watch England’s opening game on a giant screen, with finger-food provided by ‘the Gordon Ramsey’ of French cuisine. Finally, there was the inevitable descent to the Gutter Bar: surprisingly hygienic, given its name, but no less hectic than expected.

The next day or two were spent observing the great and the good of global marketing engage in the perennial debate of creativity vs technology. Much like Republicans vs Democrats and Brexiteers vs Remainers, there are the two camps of loyalists. Unlike its political equivalents, in this battle most people are now able to sit in the middle and see the benefits of blending both.

I was particularly impressed with Marc Pritchard’s talk at Cannes Beach. He said that he uses AI, tech and data to drive personalisation and relevance at scale, but the way he judges creativity is still through ‘the tingle test’. As in whether the idea gives him goose bumps. My own view is that the leaders, brands and agencies of the future will be fluent in both creativity and technology, so they will complement one another other beautifully.

To finish on a high, the award for the most bizarre invitation of the week was to board a luxury yacht to hear Akon talk about his views on Blockchain and the launch of his cryptocurrency AKoin, surely an event so random in its inception that it’s worthy of inclusion in HBO’s Silicon Valley.

For all the naysaying around Cannes, then, it still feels essential for anyone grappling with the new world order of marketing. It's very much alive. And while the seductive and shiny power of big tech (and their big budgets) is omnipresent, for me it’s a veneer that sits over the core of Cannes’ true purpose: to celebrate truly inspirational creative work.

To end with a quote from Arnold: I’ll be back…

Joe Braithwaite is managing director, Proximity London

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