“I’m working, honestly” – A planner in Cannes
PaulYole is a planner with The Brand Agency in Australia. A third-timedelegate in Cannes, Campaign Brief Asia asked him to bring a differentperspective to our coverage of Cannes this year.
Day 2, Monday
First up today was a tour around the finalists in press, outdoor, media, direct, promo and PR. Some stunningly visual work.
Go Viral’s Jimmy Maymann gave us a 40-minute tour of the digital space. By next year, it seems, we will be spending more hours online than watching TV and the fastest growing segment online is video. Indeed, video is expected to represent 64% of all mobile traffic by 2013.
Jimmy showed us an interesting piece for Tampax, which is a series of films relating the story of Zack Johnson, paradoxically a 16 year old boy who ……. well, have a look and see at www.zack16.com Interesting, but with no paid media support they have only had 100,000 views.
It all seems to be about ‘new’ media this year. I crave to hear someonelike Chuck Porter showing us some ads because after all, we still spendabout 80% of our clients’ media budgets offline.
In any case,Universal McCann hosted a good array of speakers from UM, Microsoft andFacebook. (By the way thanks to the commentator who gave the tip aboutposting Twitter and Facebook updates simultaneously. I did know that,but it takes the fun away!)
The theme of their seminar was’Gravitational media’ (the new buzz phrase for 09) and they used lotsof physics analogies to explain how bodies attract bodies and howmomentum is derived from mass x velocity. You knew that, right?
Anyway,Facebook now has 307 million users and still grew by 164% last year. Iguess that equals momentum. Twitter on the other hand grew by 1900% butstill has only 32 million users.
Last up, the co-founder ofTwitter, Biz Stone. Very inspirational even if some of us can’t yet seehow it will monetise and some others “can’t see the point”. Biz got afull house and a standing ovation.
If you don’t know the story,Twitter believes that as a two year old company, they are only “1% intothis journey”. They’ve just turned down an offer of US$500 millionbecause they want to focus on “building a company of enduring value”.They still have only 50 staff.
You have to admire the guy, evenif you are a Twitter cynic. When he turns 30 he will probably do quitewell. Two departing thoughts from Biz:
First, a definition ofTwitter – “for sharing and discovering what’s happening right now”.They broke the story of the last California earthquake 9 minutes beforeany news media.
Second, how do you explain to a company whatTwitter is? Just put their name into search and show what people aretweeting about them. Then the company will want to know how to respond.Simple – sign up and answer the critics.