Dylan Harrison’s Cannes Diary – Day One from the Cannes Promo and Activation jury room
Dylan Harrison, ex senior creative at DDB London and now executive creative director of DDB Sydney, is sitting on the Promo & Activation jury. Harrison (far left with jury president and Warren Brown from BMF Sydney) just finished day one of judging and writes exclusively for Campaign Brief. Other jurors will be contributing to the CB Blog over the next 10 days….
What exactly is ‘promo and activation’? Exactly the question I asked myself after I was fortunate enough to be invited to sit on the jury this year. From the first day’s judging, many agencies around the world consider it the ketchup category of Cannes – if you’re going to enter more than one category with a piece of work to hedge your bets, ‘promo and activation’ goes with everything.
2135 entries across 28 categories, up 33% on last year above the mean increase of 19% across the board. I’m certainly looking forward to it, next to integrated I think it’s the place we’ll find the freshest thinking as it transcends all media. More than integrated, it has the added criteria of delivering results.
Our fearless Jury President Warren Brown briefed us this morning with a great metaphorical story. He likened being a passenger on a plane struck by lightning with the ideas we’re looking for. The winning ideas will wake us out of our half slumber and make us feel happy (once we realise we’re not going to die). Anything that feels like turbulence will probably make the short list. The ideas that feel like we’re still on the runway should be left behind.
I wondered if he raised flying because we’re both so jet-lagged after traversing the globe to get here. At least Steve Cochrane had the decency to fly farther than both of us from New Zealand so we wouldn’t feel too sorry for ourselves.
So after the first day, what are the early trends emerging?
The amount of world firsts. The poor old people at the Guinness book of records, they must be very busy given the amount of world records and world firsts being set around the globe in the name of advertising. But just as most jokes don’t get funnier just through repetition, most ideas don’t improve by doing it for longer, for more money or with more people.
Most of the Asian ideas are wonderfully connected through a staggering array of traditional and digital media working in perfect harmony. Unfortunately most of them also use a local celebrity as a substitute for any genuine product or audience insight. It’s borrowed interest on steroids.
Bike powered ideas. Why are there so many bike powered ideas all of a sudden?
Regardless of the origin of entry, or type of idea, some things are consistent across the categories. Like how every entry video which claims the ‘results were amazing’ suddenly sounds less amazing. That regardless of media, the ideas that you would tell your mates or family about rise to the top. And that simple, effective and surprising ideas are still the most impressive, trumping expensive, unnecessarily convoluted, and derivative campaigns at every turn.