by César Vacchiano (@cvacchiano) CANNES, FRANCE: On Cannes Lions Day 2, an emotive roundtable discussion took place with HRH Sarah Zeid (Princess of Jordan), Sir John Hegarty (BBH founder), and Corinne Woods, (UN World Food Programme CMO) to encourage the creative community to use its skills and move the people to understand that there are 130m people dying of hunger in the world.
The UN WFP took food to 91m people last year and Zeid explained what’s happening currently in a country like Burundi, from where she flew to speak at Cannes. All three spoke about the importance of using cinema, the “mother of all screens”, to transmit powerful, emotional messages which will make citizens of the world sit up and take notice. The UN knows how to speak to governments but doesn’t know how to speak to the average citizen and certainly not to millennials. This is where the creative community can help. Hegarty created a touching film to promote the downloading of the app, ShareTheMeal.
Cannes Lions is donating all money received from nearly 400 entries for campaigns for Sustainable Development Goals to charities.
Diversity moves the business needle
Antonio Lucio, HP Global CMO, led yesterday’s panel on Diversity.
Thandie Newton, well-known British actress and Star Wars superstar, spoke about how difficult it was to grow up in Cornwall, an English county, being the daughter of a Zimbabwean woman and an Englishman. She was able to make positive change within the community and raised awareness that a dual-heritage, mixed-race girl isn’t a danger. She changed people’s minds through creativity in dancing. She used her craft to break the walls of ignorance, through being curious and through trying to be included among the other children, showing that differences shouldn’t be seen as threatening.
Edward Enninful, Vogue UK editor, knew that he wasn’t handsome but rather interesting looking, and he wanted to be a model; then he changed his mind and wanted to be an editor. He wants to push diversity of perspective and nurture the new generations.
Tiffany Warren, Omnicom chief diversity officer, wants representation in teams because those teams have an impact on business.
Goodbye Malaria
ACT (Advertising Community Together; act-responsible.org), included in its reel the campaign of Adios Malaria. The malaria pathogen was used in four different stages to create traditional capulana patterns and fabric, with the aim of reducing malaria in Mozambique, the country with most deaths from this mosquito-borne infectious disease in the world. A campaign from TBWA\Hunt Lascaris was screened.
People connecting with brands and how creativity has the power to create an emotional reaction within people Malcolm Poyton, Cheil global ECD, made the audience laugh talking about anatidaephobia, the fear that you are being watched by a duck, to introduce how technology will be the saviour of creativity.
Cheil and Samsung in India have combined the old technology of Morse code with the new technology of smart phones, so that deaf and blind people around the world may communicate and feel what they can’t see or hear. They now have a two-way communication tool. He also presented how they have developed software in Spain to identify dyslexia at early stages.
In South Korea, 1.3m seniors/aged live alone. Cheil created “LifeSavingTV” so that, if the TV isn’t switched or turned off after 24 hours, a social worker may identify that there’s a problem with that person who is living alone.
It only takes two words to do what you want, and those are technology and creativity.
Let’s talk about sex
Sid Lee shared that, even if technology makes starting a relationship easier than in the past, millennials are having less sex than the previous generation and that today there are 6% more virgins than there were in the ’90s.
Marcel, one year later
In one of the most-anticipated seminars this week, Arthur Sadoun, Publicis Groupe GCEO, explained that Publicis Groupe missed all of us at Cannes. It has been a huge sacrifice not to enter awards and it wasn’t for PR reasons as has been reported. The group needed to transform itself and it didn’t have the money, so Publicis needed to make this sacrifice of not entering awards for one year!
Marcel is a connectivity network of 80 000 talented people. It is about four powers: opportunity, connectivity, knowledge and productivity. It is a gamechanger. Nick Law, Publicis Groupe GCCO, explained the two features of Marcel: first, to identify the experts in specific territories, disciplines, clients, brands… and, secondly, the opening of briefs to 80 000 people so that they can work together directly on the app.
To encourage the bonding, every person will receive six cards in the morning and six in the afternoon, specially curated for each person and all done by AI. 80 000 people, 1 200 agencies, 4 000 clients and 5 000 000 000 files, and AI is the connection engine. Extraordinary.
Sadoun commented on a very important fact: that marketers aren’t spending less in marketing — they’re spending more but less with agencies. So, more activity is being created in-house or spent directly with key tech media. He defended Cannes Lions as being crucial for the industry for two reasons: “Our work needs to be judged firstly so that we understand our level and recognise our people; and, secondly, for inspiration, and the festival is bringing this back this year.”
He recognised he owes his career to creativity. When you have good ideas, you always win!
Sadoun, Law and chief strategy officer Carla Serrano responded to 20 questions from 20 global leaders from our industry, and this helped to understand what Marcel is and why the decision was taken. The audience also asked about consultancies; Sadoun responded that, nowadays, Accenture can’t compete with agencies because they don’t have the talent but that Accenture works on business transformation and agencies work on creativity and innovation, and both will converge at the end of the day.
Awards
Notable awards of the evening were:
- IKEA Pee Ad, with pregnancy test included in a print ad
- FCK by Mother London for KFC
- Festival by TBWA\Hunt Lascaris for the Flight Centre Youth & Adventure (Gold in Radio & Audio Script)
- JFK Unsilenced by Accenture Interactive for The Times (the first Gold for Accenture)
- Snaptivity by R/GA London (Gold in Mobile)
- C21, National Down Syndrome Society, by Saatchi & Saatchi NY. A restaurant all run by Down Syndrome people on the National Down Syndrome Day.
- Myline by MullenLowe Bogota and Colombian Ministry of Communications
- Selfiestix by Colenso BBDO for Mars/Pedigree, and
- Of course!! — Soccer Song for Change, Ogilvy Cape Town for Carling Black Label (Grand Prix in Radio & Audio)
Johanna McDowell also contributed to this report.
César Vacchiano (@cvacchiano) is president and CEO of SCOPEN, an independent research company headquartered in Spain. Trained in economics and business with postgraduate degrees in American universities, he is an international speaker and contributor to various publications, specialist in image studies and positioning agencies, advertisers and media. César has been at SCOPEN since 1993 and today is the company’s top executive worldwide.
“Motive” is a by-invitation-only column on MarkLives.com. Contributors are picked by the editors but generally don’t form part of our regular columnist lineup, unless the topic is off-column.
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