Winners Day at TV2: Cannes Lions – without Cannes

Wrapping up a perfect week I had the pleasure of attending TV2s Winners Day at Teglholmen, and was to give a short speech on the learnings on competing in the Young Media Lions category in Cannes. So before heading to meetings in the afternoon I had the pleasure of hearing a lot of inspiring people. Most of the cases were well known, but nice to see them presented by the real people involved. I was there with Katrine Riis Andersen from DIST who also joined me in the Cannes Lions competition. 

First Steve Latham, Content Director from the Cannes Lions presented the concepts of Cannes and how it is developing and this development especially driven by the content richness of the program. Steve also has the Young Lions dear at heart, so we spoke to him a few times down at the competition, and it was really nice seeing him again. He is really a nice guy and feels so passionate about continuously improving the Cannes Lions offer. Later on he was asked a quite relevant question from Jesper von Wieding from Scandinavian DesignLab about the challenges within the naming of the festival as an advertising festival, traditional advertising having a declining role to play at the festival, suggesting Creative festival to perhaps being a more appropriate name. Steve earlier noted that the traditional categories still takes the heavy load of the entries, but welcomed the discussion.     

Then Lars Bastholm, Co-Chief Creative Officer, AKQA made a presentation about the Halo 3 case

and then spoke on the Future Lions program, and showed cases on how incredible talent this program reveals. A case on ideas for a MagLite campaign was incredible – both the ideas and the bold presentation. Lars commented that farfar already took the talented guys in. Which I’m happy to hear, knowing that fresh creative blood is the once again added to our family..

Last Michael Lebowitz, founder and CEO, Big Spaceship talked on the HBO Voyeur Campaign which I will not comment on since it is earlier covered in this blog. But interesting was that the audience being asked about awareness on the campaign, almost nobody did know it. That was really kind of sad, the audience being a really good agency crowd. Asking Michael about the conflicts on creating the actual center-piece of the campaign and BBDO being rewarded the credits, Michael talked briefly on this emerging conflict in the market being which agencies to be lead on projects. I think this is a very interesting discussion.   

After this the danish jury talked on learnings and then Katrine and I talked on learnings from the young lions competition. The day ended with guided tours in the exhibition.

Spectacular HBO Voyeur

For those people who didn’t get to Cannes or were to drunk to see anything, these cases were the most talked about – the once you shouldn’t miss.

First the interesting and beautifully implemented HBO Voyeur Campaign which won Outdoor, Promo, Film (incl. other screen), cyber, integrated and even more. This is beautiful trans media story-telling

Here’s the teaser..

and here’s more

and here’s the Cannes case with info – if you just want to give this post 3 minutes view this

and here’s the campaign site for HBO Voyeur

more cases to come….

Why is social media on web 2.0 different?

As Daria Rasmussen (my lovely co-worker) and me stressed several times under a conference on social media we hosted in march this year, social media is in its basic nature not so much different than 20 years ago. We now use last/Pandora or ilike to express our identity through public playlists, we make profiles on social networks as we  spend ours fillig out friendship-books and passing them  through our social networks 20 years ago (Personally I always had a problem filling out the “My future”- box, because my outer self wanted to be a hip journalist writing about politics and media, but deep inside I still had a little girl really wanting to be an indian princess – but I ever wrote that, in case some of the boys from the 6th grade would see the book)

The things going on in the media users heads and in their social interaction is not so much different. But the huge gap is in the speed in which these things go on. The adaptation rate is sky rocketting and I get dizzy just by thinking about the reach of our messages.

So there’s nothing new on social media – the news is in the broadband acces…

This is a good recent example copied with pride from Dan Calladine (love your newsletter, Dan!)

iLike popularity jumps due to Facebook widget?
“In true Internet fashion, iLike has gone through a year’s worth of
growth in a little over a week. As I wrote here last week, the company
went from having just 1,200 users to having more than 400,000 in a
little over a day — which taxed its resources to the point where it
doubled the number of servers it was running five times and still didn’t
have enough capacity. Eventually, the company had to plead with its
Silicon Valley friends and neighbours to provide extra servers for it to
use. And where is it now? It has quintupled in size again, and has more
than 2.2 million users.”

Read the whole article on Ingram 2.0 here