Cannes Day four: Beyond the awards

PaulYole, head of strategy at The Brand Agency, has been a delegate inCannes for the past five years. Here’s his ‘beyond the awards’ take onthe fourth day in Cannes…

The Grand Prix for funniest Tweet of the festival has been won by Ashadi Hopper of JWT Sydney, who wrote, during the most cringe worthy presentation in Cannes’ history, “is there a sniper in the house? Take the shot, take the shot.”

The speaker opened up with this remark that sent the Wankometer into overdrive: “In-content communication across multiple touch points delivered at the moment of consideration.” Sadly, it was the most lucid part of his talk and when he eventually finished the applause was more out of relief than admiration.

We saw a couple of great presentations yesterday morning, from Google and MOFILM. Google gave us some insight into the speed at which TV and Internet are converging, and pointed to their belief that feature-led advertising will be the way to go. Post testing campaigns will become a thing of the past as we’ll be doing more pre-testing and real-time evaluation.

The dramatic changes that Google is predicting will take place within the next 12-36 months. If you think back, You Tube is only 5 years old and now has over 3bn views every day. Another interesting You Tube statistic – there are 573,000 videos about Lego, almost all produced by the public.

The MOFILM competition was won by a couple of guys who made an ad for Coke Zero, called ‘Frankencouch’. Check it out here

Back for more this afternoon, and then tomorrow morning the film shortlist is announced.

If you want to see Twitter updates, search for #canneslions and try following @tennyson (that’s me), @ashadihopper or @STWnext (Jessica Stanley).

Alternatively, you could get some work done.