Maybe it’s the heat, but some recent commentary has got a bit carried away when interpreting what certain wins at Cannes portend for TV. The successes of the fantastic Obama campaign and Tribal DDB’s brilliant ‘Carousel’ - an online film for Philips TVs – have got some a little over-excited. There is...
It must be seriously bad out there. It’s normal for our camera to be literally licked at several points during the Cannes week, as shy and retiring ad folk keenly show a Campaign audience just how refreshed they are by a week of seminar-going. But this year, several have turned positively coy, asking...
Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive, was sounding pessimistic in Cannes yesterday and warned publishers that there was going to be no bounce back and that the global advertising economy had reset for good. Ballmer argued that traditional print media will have to plan business models around a...
Aha! I spied a Russian. I couldn't miss him really (see below) I only know anything very much about one Russian agency, IQ Marketing, run by the amazing Natalia Stepanuk. So I was extremely keen to grab Stas Zhitsky (as he turned out to be) for a quick chat. It's his first time in Cannes and...
As some in the advertising industry pack their ice bucket and Bollinger and head to Cannes International Ad Festival I can't remember a year when going has mattered less. It's like Big Brother this year, but even less important than that. Of course, this year it has become very fashion to rubbish...
Well, I've started the week in true Cannes style - I caught two and a half hours' sleep last night. Sadly, it wasn't due to partying but a part-functioning air-con system whose spluttering on and off caught me each time I dared to drift off. This is Campaign doing Cannes as never before....
Methinks all this talk of cancelled parties and an empty Croisette may turn out to be a case of agencies which doth protest too much. In a year of mass redundancies, most have been keen to show that they are acting with sobriety and cutting back on the expense of jetting a whole load of people out to...
Today the London Business School reports marketers 'must focus on consumers looking for bargains in a new era of austerity'. For agencies, austerity is truly biting hard. Waves of redundancies have generated a miserable atmosphere, and inevitably damaged morale. And lots of very good people gone...
It's Thursday Morning. Garry and Robert sit in the Electric on the Portobello reading Campaign. The Electric is our unofficial office. We think Nick Jones should give us shares. It's two weeks since Campaign fired the starting gun. We are very much still in Beta. What have we achieved so far...
This weekend Robert's judging at the Valencia Media festival. It is amazing how this festival has arrived out of nowhere, and now how big it is. The world's media buyers, planners, media owners, and some pretty major clients have gathered to discuss the present, and to carve up the future. Robert's...
