Cannes seminar highlight – Day Five

Paul Yole, Head of Strategy at The Brand Agency and a regular contributor during the Cannes week highlights the best seminar from each day of the Festival.

There were a couple of stand out sessions on Thursday.

Amir Kassaei, the newly appointed Worldwide Chief Creative Officer of DDB, gave an impassioned plea for us to “create relevance, not awareness”, talked about avoiding “PowerPoint Karaoke” and asked us to treat people as friends, not as target groups.

Amir also showed some neat work, including a very funny campaign for Mexican Internet portal, Terra. It involved dogs and WiFi and you can see it here.

The best talk for me was from the acclaimed philosopher and writer Alain de Botton, who was brought to Cannes by Ogilvy & Mather. He drew parallels between advertising and art, which he describes as “the sensory presentation of an idea.”

Alain suggested that much of advertising works at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid and that we need to find a way to work at the top by appealing more to real needs than to desires. Those needs could address one or more of Epicurus’ three key ingredients for happiness – friends, freedom and thoughtfulness/reflection.

He also talked a lot about the fear of failure, which impedes our creativity, but reassured us that no creativity can occur without that fear and that nobody can be successful at everything.

Oh, Bill Clinton talked on Thursday too.