I’m working, honestly: Paul Yole’s Cannes diary

Day 6, Friday: Well, one seminar this morning was the best ever.

I’m not really a greenie but after Kofi Annan and Bob Geldof gave their talks today I, and a thousand other ad types, became inspired. They launched a new open source campaign to put pressure on world leaders to deliver at the climate change summit in Copenhagen this December.

As Kofi said, it is about climate justice, not climate change. To understand the full meaning go to www.timeforclimatejustice.org which has the whole story and lots of resources.

Look out for the Beds are Burning Ad Aid style of music video inSeptember and see a preview at the web site. Really inspirationalstuff. If you want to hear more I know someone with a bootleg audiorecording of the speeches.

The session ran over by 15 minutes. Bob is maybe one of the few guyswho could keep Martin Sorrell waiting. Sir Martin led a panel of senioradvertisers talking about how they plan to tackle the recession.

Also today, we had the Future Lions winners presented by AKQA. Reallygreat session with five brilliant winning ideas answering the brief tocome up with an idea that would not have been possible 5 years ago.

Out of 700 entries, two were from our neck of the woods. If you get achance to dig them out, you’ll find it worthwhile. The ideas were forStarbuck’s, IKEA, Expedia, Element Skateboards and Fortum.

MoFilm with Spike Lee was also great, three lovely ideas won. I especially like the ads for Nokia and AT&T.

It was a very big day today, we even had the head of Google, Eric Schmidt, talking to Maurice Levy, head of Publicis.

On the way out for a quick lunch I had two successive bouts of oneupmanship. First a text from Kim Shaw to say he’d had breakfast withSir Martin and others, then I bumped into Gary Shenk, CEO of Corbis,who told me he was just heading for lunch with Kofi Annan.

Sometimes I feel so insignificant.