Jack Blog
June 25th, 2015 By Jack Morton
Cannes is quite big actually
Cannes Lions is a larger-than-life cycle of heat, sun, opportunity and inspiration (not to mention the occasional Kardashian), where the days quickly begin to blur together. I suspect I’m finding Cannes especially bright and shiny because of my relative tunnel vision over the past many weeks, prepping for my talk in the Lions Lounge. To have finally presented it is both strange and brilliant, and so far I am managing to successfully fill the void with plenty of talks and this strange variant of wine everybody keeps carping on about which is neither red nor white.
On rediscovering the obvious
We probably all have a few bad habits we could do with unlearning, and Cannes is the place to reset. And the most illuminating talks I’ve seen simply had a knack of articulating that which is most obvious, but stubbornly invisible to our bad-habited selves. In a workshop on the future of strategy, Mark Holden of PHD Media talked about how we should stop putting people in boxes with target demographics and start thinking in terms of universal ‘need states’ (ie. the need to be hydrated), which are that much more human and pervasive. And picking up further on remembering that we are dealing with human beings, in a panel discussion on Smart Spaces, Darren David of Stimulant told us that one of the best ways of creating trust and confidence in an interaction with smart glass is to simply change the height of an interface to match the height of the user. Who would have thought it? And something that should come as no surprise to anyone in our industry: in ‘Brands as Interfaces’, Chloe Gottlieb reminded us that brands aren’t just competing with their close competitors, but with the best experiences (the Googles and Apples) around.
I’m looking forward to hunting down the blindingly obvious for the remainder of the week.
Want more insights from the Cannes Lions Festival? Read our white paper Cannes guide to buzzwords: 8 newbies on what’s real and what matters to brand experience to learn about the marketing trends you can’t afford to miss.