CANNES: Hitting the wall

Fri, 25 June 2010 0 Comments

Many athletes through out history have spoken of hitting “the wall” in their sport. It happens to runners, swimmers, long distance cyclists. The moment you reach a threshold, where every fibre of your being begs you to stop but your iron will declares “No, we must push forward!”. 

Well, here in the south of France, it’s called Wednesday. 

Yes, after days of drinking, eating, award show meet and greets, beach parties, and very little sleep, the first signs of losing your shit begins. Last night at different points at a restaurant, both Tom and I fell asleep at the table. In mid-sentence. At possibly the only fusion restaurant of Italian, French and Asian in Cannes, we began to crash in a terrible fashion. And try explaining falling asleep in mid-conversation to a dude across the table as he’s explaining the importance of having the right director on a TVC.  But let us make our excuses here and now.

You see, it’s been a big couple of days.  Committed to actually attending seminars this year, (there are seminars here, not just bars… who knew?) we actually went and saw what the festival has had to offer. The best by far was Contagious magazine and their explanation of creating and owning the conversation with consumers. They showed awesome case studies. Our agreed favourite – I Love Josi. A high end  t-shirt brand that wanted to release a low end version of it’s product, without diminishing it’s brand equity. The solution: Rip itself off. They created a fake ripped off brand version of themselves called “I Luv Josi” and pretended it was made in China. Only after the “Luv” version was established (2 years) then they revealed the truth. Now the rip off has become the cheaper and accepted diffusion line. Brilliant marketing strategy.

The worst by a country mile however was, surprisingly, Ben Stiller and Jeff Goodby. You would think that’s impossible right? But just because you have a prime piece of steak, doesn’t mean you can’t burn the shit out of it. They spoke awkwardly, were flat, looked bored and completely embarrassed Yahoo, by basically sitting there and literally saying “Why are we here again?”. The highlight being when the Yahoo rep asked Stiller what he liked about the internet and he responded “the porn… and the Yahoo Porn is the best, really high quality.” It’s a pretty good analogy for using celebrities in ads really. Don’t use them without reason. 

And of course we went to the radio, media and outdoor awards. Australia had done well enough (respect to Leos for their Media Lion - a GRAND PRIX no less - and we’ll be testing our luggage limits with a bit of metal of our own for Clems) to warrant some drinking. It was also the opening gala of whole entire shebang was on and the rest of our agency contingent had finally arrived from the motherland. These were the ingredients of a big night. When the awards started the first thing we noticed was that Mr International was not hosting. “What the fuck..” I whispered into Tom’s ear and then proceeded to stare intensely and hatefully at this blonde Irish pretender who dared to announce who won what for the night. I could tell that despite the fact we surrounded by three thousand other people in a dimly lit auditorium, it was completely throwing her off her game.  For us, it’s Mr International or no one. 

Anyway, Australia smashed the night again, proving that we seem to completely dominate the new categories – promo, direct, media, and have seemingly almost abandoned some of the more traditional ones like press and outdoor. We then hit the gala and then the notorious gutter bar for the next eight hours. For those of you who’ve never been to Cannes, gutter bar isn’t a name, it’s a very accurate description of the location of where your feet stand and where many Aussies end up lying down.

More later.