Blogging for food

Alastair Duncan

The range of content at Cannes next week is extraordinary. Obviously our own event on Tuesday with Facebook, MySpace and Intel will be brilliant, but I wonder whether the industry is about to explode with ‘issues overload’?

Metrics; magic; big ideas; TV obituaries; agency models for the future; new Russian advertising; will the Chinese believe anyone who isn’t Chinese; can a brand really be a friend? Is it all about telling a story? Even the word 'new' qualifies for evaluation.

I originally got into this business because people in it told me that it was full of bright and interesting people who were clever at invention. It still is, but there just aren’t as many of them as there used to be (see Rory Sutherland’s blog passim).  I also discovered that the industry was, in fact, rather more clever at reinvention. That’s why, every other week in Campaign, there’s a “preferred the idea when we did it” letter from some disgruntled wag or other. Cadbury’s Crème Egg is the latest one for me - we dressed Dom Joly up as a Peperami for the 1996 World Cup (Sam and Jason, now of The Red Brick Road fame may remember that campaign). We had great fun making the first Peperami websites - there's an example live here - an early web classic.

It was also genuinely new. Proper 'never been done before' stuff, and a privilege to work on too. I think that of late, so much of what is talked about is reinvented, rather than new. Digital technology is actually driving innovation, and working with imagination to change the way in which people communicate. For example, I'm interested in the social networks right now because they have developed technologies that enable new forms of communication, engagement and participation. We can't recycle ideas that depend on no feedback for success in these environments.

We can try harder to think of new ways to communicate, and challenge ourselves to break the habits of convention in our briefs and business process. I look forward to seeing what the great and the good of our industry have to say about this next week.