Digiday covers the latest from marketing and media at the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. More from the series →
Digiday is making its first foray to the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, aka the Cannes Lions. We’ll interview agency and brand executives, and report on the substance and flavor of the ad world’s largest international gathering. Our coverage is made possible through the sponsorship of Turn, the cloud marketing platform. All posts in the series can be found here.
Google’s “Project Rebrief” Coca-Cola Campaign Picks up Grand Prix
New for 2012, the mobile category Grand Prix was awarded to Grow Interactive Norfolk / Johannes Leonardo New York for their Google entry “Hilltop Re-imagined for Coca-Cola”. The work is featured in a new Google documentary, Project Rebrief, in which classic ad campaigns are reimagined with the help of digital technology. Meanwhile, BBH London took home the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix for their Unilever entry “Axe ‘Excite’ – Returning to Universal Truths to Create Global Hits,” and Manning Gottleib OMD London won the top prize in the Media Lions category for another Google entry, “Google Voice Search”. — Jack Marshall
Facebook Freakout
Facebook exec Paul Adams began his talk on a rough note. About five minutes into the talk, after seemingly losing his place in his presentation, Adams abruptly left the stage, seemingly suffering from a serious bout of stage fright. His brief departure to collect himself was punctuated by a muttered “shit,” which elicited a typical Cannes ovation. Adams quickly returned to the stage to continue his presentation, apologizing for and joking about his “freakout.” — Brian Morrissey
Cannes Goes Social
After arguably dragging its feet for a few years, the ad industry has gotten fully into social media. Cannes is a reflection of that. Just a couple years ago, tweeting from Cannes was rare. Now, however, Cannes is copiously Facebooked, tweeted, Instagrammed, etc. There were over 15,000 social media mentions of the #canneslions hashtag on the first day of the festival, according to BuzzRadar, with 95 percent coming via Twitter. According to Twitter, this means there were as many tweets in one day this year as the entire week a year ago. — Brian Morrissey
Measuring Social Isn’t Essential for Coke
Social media has played a starring role at this year’s festival so far, alongside questions about the ability for brands and agencies to successfully analyze the success of their activity in the channel. But according to Joseph Tripodi, The Coca-Cola Company’s chief marketing and commercial officer, brands shouldn’t get too hung up on measuring social and instead have a little faith. Speaking at a press event yesterday Tripoldi said, “All marketers are concerned about how you value things like Facebook likes. We’re working through that as an industry, but I think we’re a year or two away from coming up with a concrete way to measure social. We take a long-term brand-building perspective with social; if we can get 40 million fans talking about our brand on Facebook, we think that’s a good thing for us. If we can’t measure it all, or tie it directly to sales then so be it.” — Jack Marshall
Tweet of the day: Madman on the Riviera
Stephen Goldblatt, partner and executive Creative Director of Evolution Bureau bumped into Don Draper himself, aka Jonn Hamm.
@Goldblartsky: This just happened. #canneslions #evb #madmen @ Cannes Lions 2012 – International Festival of Creativity instagr.am/p/MBgNjjthzJ/
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