In Cannes with Leo Burnett Solutions Sri Lanka

The Leo Burnett Sri Lanka team are in Cannes and are writing a daily blog for Campaign Brief Asia. Here’s a recap of the earlier part of their week.

Day One: The first day at the much anticipated 60th Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the world’s largest advertising festival kicked off bigger and better than ever before. For 60 years, Cannes Lions has championed the best creative communications persons from around the world, recognising the work that’s changed the industry and driven it forward.

The Leo Burnett team from Sri Lanka includes Ranil, Subhash, Michael, Eraj and myself (winner of the Roger Hatchuel Academy Competition). I arrived on Saturday as the Roger Hatchuel Academy begins a day earlier and the rest of the team joined me on Sunday morning with the other 11,000 delegates from over 92 countries all travelling to Cannes for the weeklong event to celebrate creativity.  Thankfully, the French air traffic strike had no effect on the participants of the festival as we arrived in one piece to collect our entry passes. The atmosphere was filled with excitement and bubbling creative persons to absorb the fresh ideation, the beautiful weather and the amazing food in Cannes!

My first day at the Roger Hatchuel Academy was so much fun and really exciting. We were addressed by Philip Thomas, the CEO Cannes Lions, thereafter we were all told to introduce ourselves and explain the work we are involved in. There is an amazing mix of people from all around the world and doing all kinds of amazing things.

This year saw a record of 35,765 entries from 92 countries submitted to the Cannes Lions 60th International Festival of Creativity and everything that is entered into the Festival is on show around the venue.  Sri Lanka the winner of the coveted Lions are all revealed live on stage at four Awards Ceremonies throughout the Festival week. Tonight we have our first awards ceremony.

We also had some exciting news today! We have been shortlisted in the Media Lions category for the Ada, Unity Paper. This is Sri Lanka’s first shortlist for this year!

It was interesting listening to the judges in the press jury where they noted that print isn’t really evolving like most other mediums. It seems to be pretty static with just a few technological innovations but the freshest work stood out through powerful and sophisticated insights.

The Festival also features seven days of learning with more than 100 sessions from some of the most inspiring speakers and industry experts.  Cannes is a great learning experience and not only do we learn new ways of communications but we also have to unlearn old methods in order to adapt ourselves to the fast changing pace of advertising.

One interesting seminar was the one by DH, LO Creative Consultancy, called ‘Foreigner: No Boundaries for Creativity’.  The seminar looked at who foreigners were, looking at them as ‘the other’: who has another culture. Who speaks another language and, therefore, thinks differently and tell stories differently. They introduced the concept of ‘being a foreigner’ and looked at how it impacts the global communications industry and creativity in particular. The panel discussed how the day-to-day activity of propaganda may be better through the mixing and the convergence of cultures.

For the 60th Cannes Lions, the team has introduced online viewing of one seminar a day for the public, each seminar was decided following an online vote and the most popular seminar each day is to be screened. Today it is a Leo Burnett & Contagious seminar on ‘How Brands Can Embrace Miraculous New Technologies to Create Small Wonders That Will Change Our Daily Lives’ live online.

Cannes is so beautiful, having reunited with the Leo Burnett team on Sunday we were all a little too tired to explore but I know we will tonight and am looking forward to that.

Day Two: The second day at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, as the day commences at the world’s largest advertising festival we deliberate on the days excitements. Yesterday we set out our strategy for the week or as we would call it the big decision making day for our week ahead. We decided on which speakers we would like to see and which parties we were going to attend and yesterday was all about the speakers.

And yes did I mention Sri Lanka won its second Cannes Lion for its idea, the Unity Paper by Ada newspaper, which is part of the Wijeya Group, the metal won was in Media Lions Category and was initiated by Starcom, three cheers for Sri Lanka for being recognised on a global stage.

Throughout the day we had quite a few interesting seminars and workshops. First up was Yahoo speaking about ‘the new world of online content – appealing to the habits of today’s consumer’. We saw the amazing Jack Black who has started a content company that specializes in comedy and is tied up with Yahoo. He started the company in virgin territory, Black went on to say and that there are no rules because you can have a one episode show that is ten minutes long or a multiple episode season with content every day. It entirely depends on the producers speed and if the viewers like what is in front of them. Currently Black’s team have tied up with Yahoo and there is a pending series called ‘Ghost Ghirls’.

The seminar which followed was by Jonathan Mildenhall, Vice President, Global Advertising Strategy and Content Excellence from Coca-Cola, this was a show stopper and very insightful. The company has put creativity at the forefront of its marketing agenda for 127 years and has built one of the world’s most compelling stable of global brands. Coke drew on its rich heritage of work which demonstrated the company’s global commitment to legacy content, shining a spotlight on how its belief in cultural leadership shapes how it’s creatively is driving marketing plans for the future. We were also able to see some outstanding work by the company. One of which, is the ‘Small World Machines’ campaign, conceptualized by Leo Burnett Chicago and Leo Burnett Sydney linking strangers from two nations divided by more than just borders saw itself win a gold lion on the first awards night. The campaign received thunderous applause following a viewing of its video at the Grand Audi which was definitely a moment to remember for the company and the Leo Burnett network.

The big seminar for day one which was streamed live was by Mindshare & McLaren F1 on ‘How to be More Adaptive and Why It’ll Make You More Creative’. We along with the rest of the world got to see Jenson Button and listen to a very interesting session. What Ayrton Senna, Mika Häkkinen and Lewis Hamilton to name a few all had in common was that they were all World Champions. However more importantly, they all had a team behind them that worked as one to get the car over the line ahead of the competition.

In this session we learnt how to be more adaptive and got to see how this could boost creativity. F1 is the embodiment of adaptive behaviour with different skills coming together, interpreting, augmenting and creatively iterating to succeed in a changing environment. We learnt how the principles of adaptive behaviour can be applied to our own industry and experience. Whether you are ‘dunking in the dark’ or simply optimizing a global campaign on a local level, the ability to collaborate to be creative in strategy, execution and implementation, and to continually adapt based on new data, is now essential for agencies. A quote by Bruce McLaren, From the Cockpit, 1964 stayed with us: ‘To do something well is so worthwhile that to die trying to do it better cannot be foolhardy’.

Tomorrow we also see the Young Lions teams get their brief. We saw the young teams from the Sri Lankan agencies; JWT and Phoenix Ogilvy get ready to fa
ce the competition. We are all wishing them the best of luck. It is always great to see a Sri Lankan presence here at Cannes. Again our shortlist yesterday made it to the big wins today, happiness for us as the Ada Unity newspaper will bring home the second Bronze Cannes Lion in the Media Lions Category for Sri Lanka, for the work done for Ada to address and unity in our country which has gone through a 30 year conflict. 

News just in is that we have again been shortlisted for Advertising Typography in the Design Lion Category for the Ada Unity paper, another hurrah for Sri Lanka. It was very interesting to see some work coming out of the countries we have never heard about as creative greats, I am happy we can proudly say that Sri Lanka now falls into that category.

Then there was the first award ceremony in the evening. It was all very exciting, no matter how many award ceremonies one has been to, the anticipation and excitement of them is undeniable. Australia took the biggest haul at the first round of the Cannes 2013 awarding taking away a total of 23, including two Grand Prix Lions (PR, Direct) and four Golds for the endearing ‘Dumb Ways to Die’ campaign by McCann Melbourne. The Grand Prix for Promo & Activation went to Ogilvy Brazil for Sport Club Recife ‘Immortal Fans’.

Day Three: The third day at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the world’s largest advertising festival was one of the most memorable ones to date!  We were able to secure a metal for Sri Lanka in the Media Lions Category for the Unity Paper which is a real boost for our creative industry.  The competition gets tougher every year, we were all ecstatic when we heard Sri Lanka being announced at the awards ceremony!

I think this is just the beginning of Sri Lanka’s creative career, as we know there will be more creativity and award winning pieces coming from Sri Lanka in these global award shows. Our fate in our second shortlist in the Design Lions category will be decided on Thursday when they announce the winners, we shall cross our fingers and hope for the best for Sri Lanka.

This year we have a stellar line up of influential speakers, there was a seminar from Google on ‘Taking Moonshots, Telling Stories’. Moonshots are seemingly impossible to obtain obviously and yet the impossibility is important for ideas that in turn enable us to evolve through science, technology and creativity and all this can be brought to reality by being daring and overcoming fear. Simply speaking a moonshot is a powerful idea that can solve a very big and important problem in the world. It is called a moonshot because when we sent people to the moon in 1966 it made people believe that anything is possible. That is why moonshot is now becoming very important to progress in the world. The theory revolves around two things. Firstly what is the problem and how can we solve it exponentially (it is not about making a car go 30km more on a liter of fuel but how can you make a car that runs 500km on a liter of fuel. The second and bigger thing is how you create a story about the value to the human race. So in the future, when we want really solve big problems for clients we will ignite a moonshot!

One of my favorites for the day was a seminar by SapientNitro on ‘Stories are more than a narrative. And fashion is more than design’. We got to see the inimitable and enduring Queen of British Fashion, Dame Vivienne Westwood, and listen to an engaging discussion and exploration on how revolutionary stories are told in every space, from fashion to business and how they become global movements. Following which the day concluded with the live seminar from our network, Leo Burnett & Contagious on ‘How brands can embrace miraculous new technologies to create small wonders that will change our daily lives’.

In the year that Cannes celebrates its 60th anniversary, the Wildfire seminar looked 60 months into the future giving us delegates a head-start on the most significant technological innovations that they believe will redefine how brands connect with people. The seminar explored how technology can be applied to the natural cadence of our daily lives in order to make routine activities and behaviors more streamlined, meaningful or entertaining.  It was a future where brands are ideally positioned to create the kinds of small and vital wonders that we soon won’t imagine being able to live without.

Yesterday was also Cannes very first China Day! The advertising sector is one of the fastest growing industries in China; as is evident in the last few years, which we can now see in the advertising spend in China which has ranked at number two in the world at $53 billion. In the last few years we have also seen China flex its muscles in terms of creativity, winning numerous Lions at Cannes including a Press Lions Grand Prix in 2011 and an Outdoor Lions Grand Prix in 2012. The potential of the market is huge, and the need to understand the market is significant. Cannes Lions bought China Day to the Festival this year which gave us the opportunity to see how some of China’s leading thinkers, thought leaders and experts in creativity, the internet, cultural understanding, and marketing put together in a series of sessions which we got to attend, amazing how a country has evolved. It was interesting to see what was really happening in this vast country. 

At the end of an eventful day there was the awards show for media, outdoor and effectiveness. Once again the big players took home the major awards but this year yet again there have been more surprises by countries that have never been up on that stage before picking up gold and grand prix! DM9 JaymeSyfu rewrote the record books for Philippine creativity by winning the country’s first ever Grand Prix in Mobile, huge congratulations to the team, I think anything is possible!

Following on there was the opening gala party which went on till late. We had a ball of a time with the delegates here!