Cannes Lions ends on high note

Monday, 24 June 2013 00:04 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

The last two days at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the world’s largest advertising festival, was sensational! With over 11,000 delegates and 35,765 entries from all over the world, the festival in its 60th year was bigger and better than ever before. One of the biggest highlights was that our two young Sri Lankans, Hiruni and Lakshita in the Young Marketers category swept away the competition. For the first time in 60 years, Sri Lanka stood on that stage and collected Gold. To say we are proud would be an understatement.

It has been very inspiring to be here. It is so good and gratifying to see Sri Lanka stay on the charts at Cannes but what has been even better is that our performance is getting better with each year. Everything is also a lot more global and it was evidently seen this year with countries that were never-in-the-charts-before scooping awards. With the curtains drawn on the 60th International Festival of Creativity, Sri Lanka can look back with pride as we made it with a finalist, a metal and a gold Young Marketer award! As always the learning has been impeccable. We have had world class speakers with us this week, some of the most memorable being Jenson Button, Vivienne Westwood and Sean Combs! For certain this year, the seminars have made it very clear that advertising is now all about data. One of the interesting sessions was the one done by Saatchi & Saatchi on ‘New Directors Showcase’ at which we got to find out who was among the hottest new directing talent in a session that draws a full house at Cannes every year. There was also an attention-grabbing session by YouTube on ‘Why be the 30 second spot, when you can be the whole show?’ We got to understand that we are living in a fan-led world where consumers are no longer audiences, they are participants. The driving force now is passionate fans who decide who and what will be the next big thing. No longer limited to a 30 second spot, brands are taking advantage of this expanded creative canvas to engage and entertain global audiences. Brands are now embracing the fan-led world and are increasingly creating unmissable moments to embracing the zeitgeist. On our last day of Cannes we were able to listen to a very enlightening seminar by Rokkan on ‘The branded way: How to make content marketing work for you in the digital age (and have fun doing it)’ The easiest and simplest way to put down what we learnt is that, especially in today’s very digital world ‘Content is king’. Rokkan took us through ideas on how best to concept, create, deliver and measure the most important form of content in the marketing mix today. It is essential for us as agencies and marketers to understand how we got here, the process behind the development and management of successful content to be able to apply some of these tactics in our everyday roles as creative professionals and we’ll just have some fun doing it.

It’s time to finally say “au revoir” to the 60th Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. We take home with us, gold, a bronze Lion and a finalist. What a week! We have had an absolutely amazing time here, enjoying the creativity and the festival while learning and interacting with the best in the communications industry. Cannes Lions is truly unique and it left us all feeling energised and inspired.