| Retrospect on the Cannes Lions 2011 |
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Sunday, the 19th of June, 2011. The Cannes Film Festival was over. The celebrities where flown back to Beverly Hills. Their trash was removed, the red carpet was vacuumed and the champagne glasses where cleaned. It was time, for the Advertising Festival.
Roughly 9000 people with jobs in advertising came to Cannes and collected their passes. So did I. After a 20 hour bus drive it was time to get my sleepy face in front of a webcam and have my pass-portrait shot. For the next days, I found myself making notes during seminars, collaborating during workshops, taking masterclasses, walking through the exhibitions, smiling during boattrips, partying at the beach and dinning at expensive restaurants I would normally never come. The luxurious moments where nice, but the thrill of hastily making notes during a seminar, thinking 'damn, this is useful', is unrivaled. One week later, armed with a notebook full of scribbles 'n scrawls, I stepped out of the bus again in Amsterdam, so vigorously enhanced, I can't wait to start working again, coming up with new, fresh ideas. I have just been flooded by a tsunami of experiences and information, and although it's gonna take a while till I have fully digested it, I feel as if I can really take that next step in advertising. A higher level. I'm going to work really hard to be at the Cannes Lions 2012, because this is an adventure I really want to witness again. But for now, I'll leave you with some of the best quotes I heard throughout the festival. I hope you find them just as meaning- and useful as I do. "Cannes Lions is no longer just about advertising, as indeed our industry is no longer simply about advertising." "Without great clients like this one, there is no great work. (Talking about Ikea)." "The only thing in this world that always succeeds is change." "Purpose is the new digital." "Authenticity is just like pornography. You know it when you see it." "Today, 37% of conversations are about brands." "Lady Gaga is her own platform. She already has more than 10 million Twitter followers." "If you know that what you are about to shoot is good, then it probably isn't." "43% of consumers won't buy a product if they can't find the right information online." "An infinite number of people with and infinite number of camera's will eventually make a viral." "If you do what you always did you will get what you always had." "An idea is an idea, even if it's a trip to the zoo." "Search will move from links to likes." "83% of consumers use fewer than 30 sites a month." "Banners are for apes. Content is for humans." "Tablet market is growing from 17 million devices this year to 70 million next year." "There are 6.9 billion people in the world, 600 million broadband internet connections but 4.5 billion text message users. SMS is the largest human network." "Brands do what is good for them. Sometimes it intersects with what is good for us." "In the future, half of the music industry's revenue will come from brands." "Apple and Microsoft are getting it right because they concentrate on servicing people. Where the music industry is getting it wrong is that it still talks about selling records." "At Coca-Cola, we think the mobile phone as the 6th sense of people." "We will move from creative excellence to content excellence." "We, from Angry Birds, don't view ourselves as a game company, we're building a brand." "We build 51 games before getting to Angry Birds. My team knows how to build a hit and also how not to build a hit. This is important." "We talk about fans, not users of consumers." "I'm a better employee because I'm a mum and I'm a better mum because I work." "People don't want something better than a TV. They want a better TV." "Twitter has become my primary news source, but when I hear something has happened, it makes me turn on a TV set." "At Google, with your permission, we use some of your information to make things that are good for you." "Two important values to younger people: significance and achievement." "Not everybody likes games, but everybody likes playing." "Instead of 'How big are we gonna get before we get bad?', the question is: 'How diverse are we gonna get before we get good?'." "More people play Zynga games than Xbox, Wii and PS3 combined." "Youth links their ideas with execution of their ideas. The right and left brains are merging like never before." "Everyone is competing for attention. You just can't be conservative anymore." "Luck isn't about what happens to you. It's about what you do with what happens to you." "Real innovation and creativity often happens within tight constraints." "To clients and agencies: It's not about creating fantasy anymore. It's about creating reality." "Acting then measuring has been replaced by listening and then responding." "We need to move away from 360 degree marketing and towards 365 days a year marketing." "The marketing world is global, but the consumer is local and needs to be engaged and activated locally." |
