After the competition was over we had a few days to enjoy the spirit of Cannes. We spend a lot of time in the interactive case kiosks which was cool, attending seminars and building networks all over the world.
One thing which was really cool was that Aegis Media had a beach house where you could bring guests, press and interesting people. And with high speed internet this was the perfect spot to hang out.
And it was really really nice..
After an hour of sleep we dressed up for the first time in our Cannes experience. We went to the Media/Outdoor and Radio Ceremony and it was a very good experience.
The fun thing was actually that Radio Lions kind of surpriced me. Talking to people about chosing media vehicles I ormally have a slight problem when it comes to radio, because of the horrible quality of radio commercials in Denmark. Therefor Radio kind of has gotten a difficult position in my head. It is an interesting media, but often it fades away due to a lack of creativity in the solutions.
Hearing the Gold and silver spots I was amazed about how much inspiration I got and how it instantly started letting Radio re-enter my communication landscape.
This was fun! And then we went out for dinner and the to the Aegis Media Party on the beach. This was really nice. Exclusive party with not to many people. More about this tomorrow…
Damn it. Even though we found the brief hard and knew that we didn’t have much time, we wanted to do our best.
Do or don’t do. There is no try!
So of cause we wanted to win. But we didn’t! Damn it.
But the press conference was fun and very nice to see the Japanese girls who won for best separate idea crying and screaming in happiness. They were so nice and they really got happy…
But still; a shame, but we didn’t expect it, so we were actually able to be happy for the winning teams who were two really nice people from Italy.
And alway a pleasure speaking to the press afterwards.. “Wy didn’t you guys win??????????” (no answer) “Hmm?” “bla bla bla bla bla” (aka of cause we don’t know – we wanted to win but obvious the judges liked the Italian solution better) . You can’t really ask people about that. We just really wanted to see what the others teams had made – but it wasn’t available yet, so no chance of knowing which truck hit us 
Wunderman was great! Perfect seminar – perfect speaker – great slides with insights and surprice. The theme was how to start conversation instead of just advertising, and most of the presentation was really great.
Of cause you can’t expect everything to be new when you spend a lot of time tracking what’s going on in the industry, but this really did a good job at continuing offering inspiration.
Especially the “always in beta” point on how ads are o longer a finish product but an ongoing process was underlines perfect by the “Double-click to edit”-slide which I loved so much that I dedicated the title of this post to it.
Then Katrine and me went to see screening of the Titanium category. It was great! Integration is the way to press fast forward now a days.
I will come back to specific cases later on. But Titanium Rocks!
For numeral reasons I’m soo glad I went to this masterclass in the Young LIons Zone.
1. It was 1 minute after our presentation so a reason for sitting thinking and no-one asking “hoooow did it goooo in a screaming tone-of-voice”
2. I love the filosophy of Naked and Paul Woolmington is a wonderful speaker. My heartbeat after have the most stressed 5 minutes of my career fell down listening to his calm, confident and clear voice.
3. I get the change for tagging this blog “Naked” which will give our little Cannes blog so much more google-juice. (Perhaps it wont be the most relevant hits, but giving the facts that googling porn and still end up clicking on a communications planning blog, proofs that marketing people also surfs for porn as well as everybody else.)
This post was actually dedicated to an ode for Naked, but sometimes things do not end up as we thought. Thank god for that.
But still two words about the masterclass:
It was great! Basic intro of the heart of independency.
I was very interested in how to sell ideas and how to make so many external partners work together. But this was more inspiration and cases of how the solutions will look if thinking concepts over “were do we make money”.
And once again – go see Noah Briers Brand Tag feature… I commented on it on my own blog channel8000 a while ago – it is really interesting.
Thanks to Paul for setting my mind free…
Early next morning we got our 5 minutes to present the assignment. This was really tough. We really looked at the competition brief to find out how to solve it, but little did it help. It said that we needed to present insights, strategy and solution – with everything explained why chosen. This was really a hard job – and we didn’t really succeed with this part. In the after light we perhaps shouldn´t have focussed so much on was we were told to explain but focused on explaining out ideas instead. We had only 5 minutes but we reached the ideas at 4.30 which was horrible because we didn´t feel at all that we had time to explain what, how and why… and we didn’t even have time to present it all.
So it was really a hard and learning experience…
This really felt like bad sex. Great expectation, too short time and a strange unfulfilled feeling afterwards.
But bad sex is better than none, so after an hour or so we started smiling a bit again And we were still satisfied with the work – but would have died for 17 minutes instead of 5.
Afterwards we went down to the Croisettes where we were going to dinner with TV2, press and the other Young Lions competitors. I was actually really ready to go home, but we really wanted to show up, so we took a deep breath and took out in the cannes evening.. And it ended up being so cosy. We had a wonderful meal and everybody were so nice and fun at the dinner. We meet so many nice people and the evening was one of the best on the whole trip.
Thanks to TV2 for a perfect evening!
At 8 am the doors opened for the competion area downstairs the palais. Small boxes with a huge mac and a password for gettyimages. Then GO!
12 hours of laughs, coffee, near-death experiences and so much stress.
But it was fun and very challenging. But thanks god we’re are ot working like this on a regular basis. It was really a tough job.
The last 4 hours flew – we didn’t really manage to do all the nice things we planned late in the past evening. But we finished the presentation (almost) and pressed save just 2 minutes till 8 pm were we got kicked out.
Our solution were a network strategy with focus on activating the network around the very wealthy and get their attention through personal recommendations. The campaign idea was called Backstage due to the duality in War Child’s engagement in music and the need from the target group to be able to see the outcome of their donations. The lack of transparency in the charity landscape gave a possible positioning for war child due to the small, engaged culture. So we wanted to take the connection backstage to exclusivity, music, transparency and networks.
The key idea was parted in two: What money can’t buy and track your money. First we had The War Child secret gigs with huge bands playing for only the network at a backstage concert and a lot of PR and network activities evolving around those. And second we offered a wide range of digital connection tolls to engage the network with desktop apps, widgets and private member zones, to make it possible to customize the communication in the network. This was off cause a tool to face the discussion about the problems in charities and make War Child stand out as the personal, transparent and engaged charity having an attitude towards making everything and every penny count in a tracking of results.
We used contextual print and online ads as well as personal placed outdoor facings, and a direct marketing postcard with a private message from the saved children targeted very strongly on these networks of wealth, to crate awareness and public attention.
This was just a short description of some of the things we came up with and why.
At 20pm we left the palais – exhausted but with a big smile.
