Campaign

One last Cannes observation

Someone recently attacked much award-winning interactive creative for being not all that hot.

They probably have a point. Not having the same familarity with (or obsession with) the 50-year corpus of conventional advertising as their offline counterparts, digital juries are at risk of acclaiming as original some ideas which have already seen lengthy service for ABM in the 1970s.

But whereas interactive work is sometimes less than purely original, it is rarely formulaic. And that's not something you could say of many of the pieces shorlisted for the press and outdoor sections in Cannes.

Walking through this section was a bit like that hall of mirrors scene at the beginning of The Man with the Golden Gun: everywhere you looked it was the same ad. Ranks of oblique visual puns stretching to infinity.

 It was also mentally draining, since many of the ads required an unreasonable degree of Bletchley Park level visual code-breaking on the part of the viewer - all the more unreasonable when the damn thing was to supposed to be a fleeting poster.

As a copywriter, this obsession with the visual pun seems to me a form of textual discrimination. If I, as a writer, were to assume a similar degree of verbal literacy in my audience (peppering body copy with Shakespearean quotations or allusions to the late works of Catullus) I would be laughed out of the room. Yet a bunch of people whose experience of humanity seems confined to their contemporaries at art-school is allowed to presume a ludicrous degree of visual literacy and deconstruction on the part of the everyday public.

This bias seems all the more strange when you consider that The Sun allows itself unbeliveably elarorate wordplay, while keeping its pictures largely direct and large chested.

My other observation is that, when boiled down to the original proposition, much of the work in these categories simply stated the obvious in an oblique way. "Sports cars are fast". "Off road vehicles can drive across bumpy ground." and so forth. How often do agencies really get briefs like that? 

Having said all this, I would just like to add a couple of caveats here. First of all, the work that won metal was for the most part original and mould-breaking. And the Anglo Saxon work (Harvey Nichols and Marmite are both original executions of distinctive strategies) was often spectacularly good.

I know it's an international festival and so forth, but really: the occasional word wouldn't go amiss.

Isn't this all terribly expensive?

If you are challenged on the extravagance of attending Cannes, here is a simple answer.

Realistically, the cost of attending Cannes is going to add up to something approaching three thousand pounds for a single registered individual.

Add the cost of awards entries and other extras, and the cost to agencies seems immense. Especially when, in the manner of all forms of business expenditure, it is viewed all the more critically when there is a danger that it might be enjoyable. (People rarely get quite so exercised when a company spends £50,000 upgrading its lift machinery, for instance.)

A degree of embarrassment surrounds the whole event, too. "What would all the clients say?"..."How can we justify it?"

Very easily.

If you ask any of your clients, you will find they have something called an R&D budget. We don't.

Imperfect thought it is, Cannes is the closest approximation we have to R&D.

In truth, an R&D budget would not be much use in a shareholder-driven advertising agency in 2007; at the first whiff of a income downturn, it would be the first to go. Indeed, as things stand in currrent agencies, you could have a small department on the verge of a cancer cure and people with clipboards would be going round asking why their utilisation rate was so low and complaining that they were messing up the Staff-Cost-to-Revenue Ratio.

So, what we do is Cannes instead. Paid for by a messy assemblage of travel budgets, training budgets, awards budgets and entertainment budgets.

Let's face it, there are lousy management training courses held in West Midlands hotels that charge as much as the registration fee for Cannes. But noone gets moralistic about those.

Perhaps that's the answer - move the whole event to Birmingham National Exhibition Centre? The Baltis would be better, and absolutely nobody would complain.

What would happen if you let the creative department spend the media budget?

This to me is the great unasked question of our age. And I have a fairly good idea what the answer is. But it isn't quite what you expect.

The Cannes Direct Lions shortlist has not yet been published. But, without giving anything away, I can reveal that it contains quite a few entries in which are found lines like this....

"One million downloads"...."garnered PR coverage worth 1.5 times the initial media outlay"... "headed the country's podcast charts for five consective weeks"...."1.5m unique visitors to the site...."

What I am seeing, in short, is ideas now using digital and non-conventional media (ie media which place no strain on the media budget) to attract and maintain audiences at a mass scale.

What I don't see, incidentally, are any entries containing lines such as "in pathetic gratitude for this unexpectedly large free audience, the client gifted the agency an amount equal to the sum they would have paid for those GRPs had the audience been acquired conventionally". 

And I'm not sure I'm going to see those lines any day soon.

But some extra money needs to move towards the world of content creation to fund the new role it finds itself playing: not only talking to an audience but actually creating one.

Money needs to be found from what was once "a media budget" to encourage the creation of one of the most priceless commodities any brand can own: Earned Attention.

That is Earned Attention as opposed to Bought Attention.

Because, as the cost of bought attention rises (fragmentation, blah, blah) and the cost of earned attention goes down (online, social media, virality, PR, blah) the latter will start becoming better and better value. It is already better value, in fact - except that the metrics of bought attention still prevail, and with it the ludicrous notion that a pair of bought eyeballs are just as valuable as a pair of earned eyeballs. A little like suggesting that the Band of The Coldstream Guards playing before an FA Cup Final is just as popular as U2, because they are both playing to a packed Wembley Stadium. (It's all about reach, you see.)

Now what would happen - just as an experiment - if you took the whole media budget and gave it to a creative department to spend how they wished?

Unless they were a real extremists, it's likely they would spend some of the money on media - on distributing the content they had created. Would it be 85% of the money? Probably not.

What would they do?

They would probably create a lot more content. They would spend lavishly on PR-ing the content. On seeding it. They might even slip popbitch.com £1000 to mention the Youtube URL.

Some - most - of the content they produced would bomb. But possibly not all of it. And the successes would be amazing.

My final verdict? Three times out of four they would fare worse at spending the media money than the media people. But the fourth time they would do ten times better.

You do the maths.

Or, if you have a media budget out there, it's a challenge I am quite prepared to take up. 

To those attending Cannes for the first time

My view from the jury room at the Palais des Festivals provides concrete - or rather fiberglass - proof of the imperfect correlation between wealth and taste, the wifi signals of incoming boats sporadically interfering with our handheld voting (their networks named after the boats themselves or occasionally "Master Suite").

The typical harbourside scene reveals two 19-year-old Estonian blondes walking the quayside wishing they were on one of the yachts - all the time eyed by an ageing chap on a yacht wishing he were on one of the Estonians.

Sometimes, I am told, the parties manage to arrive at an accommodation.

This scene is replayed daily throughout the summer.  And would be playing out whether you were here or not.

That, quite simply, is the first thing to know about the event. That the town, except in an purely venal sense, gives not a damn for your arrival or your departure. In fact the very intrusion of anything to do with commerce or industry or name-badges sits rather unconfortably with the place - as though you had asked Michel Bras to bring a Nobo board into the dining room.

The town can in any case survive so well on oligarchic and Middle Eastern money that it spurns conference business altogether for the two months of the year during which the Russians pay rack rate.

So your first introduction will be to that peculiar French art of managing to patronise you while simultaneously depriving you of your money. And reminds me of the ageing English aristocrat who, at the age of 83, decided to move his entire household (after 20 years on the French Riviera) forty miles down the coast to Italy. "I prefer to be cheated with a smile", he explained.

All of which said, there is no other place in which such an event could be held. For one simple reason - that on the short stretch of seafront called La Croisette - between the Majestic and the Martinez - you will, if you wait long enough, meet everyone you have even known in the industry. That single topological fact is what makes Cannes work.

Actually two reasons: don't forget that, in the Palais, you get to see an assemblage of the world's best advertising, direct, interactive, promotion and media creativity. Something you simply don't get anywhere else.

I'll leave more discussion of work till later. We're still judging it. Except to say that you should go and view as many shortlists in as many categories as you can: to do so simply recalibrates your brain's idea of what quality work really is. Hence I regard the admission fee to the festival as something to be charged to the training budget, not the awards budget. No other event has this immersive effect. 

So, what tips do I offer you? There is very little shopping to be found here for anyone with a penis or a brain-cell. The kind of irritating retail ecosystem where you'll find three branches of Gianfranco F***ing Ferre but where buying a plug adapter is impossible.

Happily there is a small place between the Carlton and the Martinez which will sell you a packet of fags and a Daily Mail: a beacon of normality. Bring all your own clothes plus several pairs of shoes - as you'll lose one to poodleshit.

Bring plenty of books, too: even its greatest supporters would not call this a literary town.

Do not give a moment's thought to which hotel you stay in, or pay much of a premium for it, as it makes no difference to the quality of your stay.

The principal value of staying at an expensive hotel is that your hotel appears on the delegates' list. But why not lie, and say you are staying on the 7th floor suite at the Carlton - as telling the truth will only mean you are flashmobbed by jobhunting creatives at 1am in any case? WPP staffers know from long experience to register late, thus not appearing on the delegates' list at all, since Sir Martin Sorrell is rumoured to scan it with a gimlet eye - no doubt clicking one of those counters they use to tot up the passengers on easyJet.

I would, incidentally, travel here on easyJet. This will at least give you a defensive line when your finance director discovers your dry-cleaning bill has hit four figures.  You can unashamedly take a helicopter from Nice to Cannes, too: it is cheaper than a sole-use taxi.

Any other tips? I still have no idea what is the appeal of the Gutter Bar. Surely one of the more clear-cut advantages of reaching the pinnacle of the industry is that one no longer needs to drink on the street?

The agency world now needs to embrace unnovation.

We spend an immense amount of time wrestling with the importance of creating the new. But we also need to spend a little time reinventing the old.

I used the phrase Unnovation a year ago in reaction to the technological excesses of the digital world which risks becoming unhealthily obsessed with the bleeding edge. People are now so preoccupied with the opportunities presented by the Next Big Thing (Joost, Mobile TV) they barely pause long enough to consider the many overlooked possibilities of the last one. It's why I am a great fan of BT's CTO Matt Bross and his passion for "Innovation at the speed of life."

For instance, if we pause for a moment, we'll find there are still a thousand new services you could create using little more complex than SMS. Twitter would be a perfect example of this. Something that, in a way, is all the more brilliant because of its lack of technical ambition.

And it is surprising how often the most interesting examples of progress often occur through someone first taking a step back: what the French call reculer pour mieux sauter. It is, after all, how the fashion and design industries seem effortlessly to move forward by drawing inspiration from the past.  

Yet the area most in need of this approach may not lie in the digital field at all. I am thinking of press advertising - a discipline which seems to have painted itself into a corner whence further progress seems almost impossible: either the work is simply repurposed posters (in which case you squander almost all the engagement value of the medium) or else is excessively strange or mundane.

If a little more time were spent mining the work of Howard Luck Gossage (or just 1970s CDP, for that matter) some real progress could be made. And, maybe, just maybe, we might end up with the occasional advertisement which seeks - through reasoned, sensible, logical prose - to persuade us of the virtues of a product and why we should buy it, rather than endlessly seeking to solve every marketing problem through oblique visual reference.

Strangely we need this clarity and logic far more now than in the golden age of long copy advertising. Brand and product opinion is now so ubiquitous - in magazine journalism, online and on TV - that the signal-to-noise ratio has become absurd. The occasional reasoned piece of prose in a press advertisement might provide a welcome note of calm good sense.

With a business plan like that, Betty Blue never stood a chance

One popular school of film criticism believes in appraising films through a Marxist lens, judging each by how well the auteur identifies with the struggle of the working class. More fun by far is my own school of Thatcherite film criticism...

The Thatcherite critic simply views the actions of the protagonist through the eyes of a mildly autistic management consultant. It is not an approach likely to make you many friends in the pub afterwards -  indeed there are people who have barely spoken to me since I pointed out that Betty Blue's suicide was the result of the couple's naive assumption that the catchment area of a small French provincial town could possibly be sufficient to sustain a high-end piano shop.  "They should have diversified" I explained, helpfully.

As you can imagine, the Thatcherite critic in me was not a great fan of Field of Dreams either. This film seemed to rely on the fanciful assumption that a baseball diamond in the middle of an obscure field could somehow mature into a viable business. 

But this film also annoyed me in other ways by giving rise to a phrase which became a catchphrase of the internet era: "If you build it, they will come." Along with "content is king" and "TV didn't kill cinema" it became one of the mantras trotted out at every conference, the idea being that if you said it enough it might somehow become more true.

The general learning from the last ten years is that "If you build it, they might come - but they'll probably start playing football instead." For, when you look at the great digital successes, people rarely use a new technology for the purpose the builder intended.

SMS was intended for engineers as a signalling device. Flickr was originally a gambling company. Facebook was intended for universities. Youtube was originally intended to enhance eBay. eBay (though this may be mythical) began as an aid to Pez collectors.

Which leads me to my next question. What will people end up using Joost for? I have no doubt the technology is important - but I don't see the need to watch mainsteam TV on my laptop as I have a device already that is already fit for this purpose - called, by amazing coincidence, a TV. 

Suggestions please.....