Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2012

Tuesday, 19 June 2012 01:07 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

By Sachin Ambekar, Chief Creative Officer – Leo Burnett Solutions Inc. in Cannes Day One: The first day at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the world’s largest advertising festival kicked off better than ever before. The Leo Burnett team from Sri Lanka includes Rameez and Dhanushka (the winners of the Sri Lankan Young Lions Competition) Chrishani and myself. We arrived on Sunday morning with 11,000 delegates from over 90 countries all travelling to Cannes for the weeklong event. There were thousands of people from the creative community from across the global all gathered in one place to celebrate creativity.

It took us a while, but we managed to collect our entry passes without any complications. The atmosphere here is fresh, cheerful and bright! This year there have been more than 34,000 entries from 87 countries entered for the festival. The Asia Pacific region entered a total of 7169 entries with 15 of the entries coming from Sri Lanka.

There is a lot of new talent that is pushing the profession to new heights, with trends escalating year on year. Like they say today’s technology is only good as yesterday; the industry is evolving everyday and this kind of festival exposes us to a whole new dimension of thinking. Digital has and is massively taking over the traditional methods of media and sometimes redefining it and at Cannes as always it is playing an integral part of the festival again this year with many sessions dedicated especially to the digital medium.

For me Cannes has always been a great learning experience and not only do I learn new ways of communications but I also have to unlearn old methods in order to adapt myself to the fast changing pace of advertising.

Yesterday the jury announced the finalist for direct marketing, promotions and activation and public relations; 257 entries were shortlisted for promotions and activations, 227 entries for direct marketing and 134 entries for PR. The work we saw was incredible, it left me amazed to see new dimensions of communications with innovative methods of getting messages across to the target audiences.

One of the most memorable sessions I attended on day one was by the China Advertising Association about Social, Mobile and China: Navigating the Biggest Land-Grab in Advertising History. It was on the way the company is overlaying social graphs into interest graphs and leveraging mobile ad networks to re-position Renren for China’s social-over-mobile revolution in ways that will benefit both media agencies and advertisers. Outstanding is how I would describe it.

This year’s Festival will also feature seven days of learning with more than 100 sessions from some of the most inspiring speakers and industry experts. Some of the speakers include Bill Clinton the first Democratic President in six decades to be elected twice, Arianna Huffington the President and Editor-in-Chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, one of the most widely-read, linked to, and frequently-cited media brands on the Internet and Michael Patrick King the Executive Producer of Sex and the City.

I will be updating you’ll with our experiences at Cannes each day! Including the announcements of the finalists and winners, next up tomorrow is press, outdoor, media!