Cannes Lions 2017
My Cannes Lions 2017 started pretty early this year with a big presentation on Sunday morning at the Forum stage. There was a completely packed room and the event managers had to turn people away and to the video stream on the terrace.
Really good feedback on the presentation from the audience and people who saw it online. The presentation was mainly around he LEGO Social Media Journey and how we have build social media from the ground up. More about the presentation on
Fast Company: https://www.fastcompany.com/40432685/the-secret-to-legos-social-media-success-is-in-the-creative-power-of-crowds
Or More about Advertising: http://www.moreaboutadvertising.com/2017/06/how-lego-revived-itself-through-embracing-social-disruption/
Trends from Cannes Lions 2017
Overall the trend is, as last year, that Cannes Lions is turning more and more tech year on year. That of course makes it much more interesting for a guy like me in digital marketing. Last year SnapChat everything was about SnapChat but they had both clearly scaled back their presence, but it also seemed like they've lost a lot of the hype. Very few people cared about their Spectacles and even fewer wore them. Of the big platforms YouTube seemed to attract most of the attention and they also had some very relevant events. But besides that, there was lots of talks on AI and AR. I got a sneak peak on the Project Tango which I think is gonna be amazing. I loved the Google Tilt Brush when that came out a while back and Tango will make it AR available to mainstream consumer)
China and Asia
Secondly, there was also a much bigger presence from Asia in general and China specifically. On the Tuesday there was a full day track on Chinese marketing and creative culture which was very interesting. If you run through the list of sponsors, there are clearly more big Chinese and Asian sponsors like Tencent, Alibaba, Sohu, Blue Focus, Rakuten and several others.
I followed some of the day and it was a bit of hit and miss on the presentation, one of the best
ones was the Chinese Pianist Lang Lang who's been combining classical music with pop culture and he did a very engaging fireside chat on creativity and his journey.
Fake News
Fake news was another really hot topic at Cannes Lions this year. I was lucky to have been invited to a lunch presentation by Jared Cohen who is CEO of Jigsaw which is one of Google's Alphabet companies with a very interesting take on how to combat fake news.
Another very interesting talk on fake news was David Remnick (Editor of the New Yorker). The Guardian has made a good summary of his presentation.
All in all a great year at Cannes Lions!
