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….

The Aegis Beach House

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..

 

Double-click to edit this

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.

Screening of Titanium

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!

Living Naked

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…

   

The Presentation

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.

 

 

Dinner with TV2

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!

 

12 hours of work

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. 

Three key take-out’s

According to Katrines post earlier I just wanted to comment on this Cheil seminar too.

Three things that I found interesting was the cultural insight on eastern behavior where decisions are made, not by the individual, but a decision made collectively in the herds of the young people. 

Then I found the insight, as Katrine also commented on, on girls as technology drivers very interesting. When technology no longer is the goal for the fascination, but the technology as a mean to enter a social process the girls, who are far more social creatures than boys, tends to drive the technology. I actually extended this discussion to a social event where I meet Claus Moseholm from GoViral with whom I talked about how the nature of Viral campaigns in Europe right now seems driven by a masculine humour and the nature of girls, linked up to networking and sharing of information/stories/gossip, aren’t adressed in viral campaigns although their nature would be a perfect catalyst for spreading a message if it is possible to use in their social deeds.  

Third I LOVED the discussion of branded services. Let get down to business. All this talk about brand channels, viral, product placement and so on. The real key to the mayor potential would be in making services, that are so relevant to the brand, so appealing to the target group and so well carried out that the consumer sees it as a service. A little help in their life.

So these are my key take-out’s from this seminar.  

Can Brands Be Friends?

A seminar called ‘Can We Be Friends’ with reference to the possibilities of Facebook, Myspace, Bebo and the likes was on the programme tuesday after we finished our oral presentation. I work exclusively with the young target group in the Aegis Media agency DIST, so I though this must be something for me. However, I must say I was disappointed. I don’t know if it was the moderator or the fact that the market is so competitive that the speakers were holding all their interesting thoughts back. But this seminar never got under the surface of social networking sites and their challenges and possibilities for advertisers.   

Clients often come to me and want to do ’something on Facebook’. This ’something’ is often undefined and bound in a wish to follow the hype, which I totally understand. When it comes to the young target group, I always advice my clients to meet them on their ‘home ground’ instead of using a lot of money and energy driving them to a place, where they don’t come naturally. However, as Paul Woolimington from Naked said at his Young Lions masterclass, with reference to Facebook; ‘Don’t chase shiny objects’. I couldn’t agree more. There are thousands and thousands of groups and applications on Facebook that do not serve any other purpose than promoting a brand. They are developed by agencies who don’t really know the mechanisms behind social networking sites or in turn don’t really care as long as they make money. But guess what, this is not in the interest of their clients.

Blake Chandler from Facebook spoke about utility as the key driver of Facebook. This is interesting when you look at the current phase, that Facebook is in. But perhaps it says something about how Facebook aims to develop in the future. Power back to the users! 

The only thing that I got out of this seminar was a confirmation of the fact that the only way to succeed commercially on social networking sites is by acknowleding that they are all about utility. Identify how you add value by giving something back to the community. This is the key behind succeeding commercially on social networks.