Marie Kondo! In case you’ve been living under a fynbos hedge for the last year (or a stately home full of clutter) and don’t know, here is Urban Dictionary on Marie Kondo: “The Japanese sensation of tidying and decluttering that’s sweeping the world. To Mariekondo is to lay everything out, thanking items for their service, discarding most of the stuff and then organizing the remaining ones. Eg. I finally made my boyfriend mariekondo his junk in my bedroom!”

Marie Kondo is a tiny Japanese woman whose philosophy regarding possessions, and the hold they have over us, is sweeping the world. One of her principle tenets is to discard anything that doesn’t “spark joy.” It does make me wonder whether the obsession with Marie Kondo is simply another symptom of our search for secular gods. But that’s a very deep question and it’s wine o’ clock right now as I write this. All I will say is that she is a person with an astonishing personal presence. And that her method of using self-knowledge and self-awareness to figure out why you’re holding on to stuff is a very good approach to solving the problem of why we have too much stuff, instead of just addressing it cosmetically.

After Marie Kondo, I went to watch the Innovation Lions presentations.

What must it feel like to be a “normal” tourist in Cannes this week? You arrive, kids in tow, innocently expecting a nice quiet beach holiday, only to find the place overrun with bleary-eyed people wearing lanyards, most of the beaches taken over by corporate sponsors, and the usually serene Boulevard De La Croisette littered with frankly bizarre promotional stands like this one.

There is water dripping from the roof above the suspended umbrella. You can stand under the umbrella and someone will take your photograph, which you can then presumably send to your family and friends so they can see what you look like standing under an umbrella.
There’s a lot of this kind of stuff: ad tech companies and media owners putting up stalls to promote their wares and covering the 2 kilometres of beachfront with posters and billboards. They’re typically all quite terrible too (like, in-your-face punny), which is deeply ironic given that we’re at a festival that celebrates great creativity.

There’s also a frankly astonishing number of adults riding on scooters, without any apparent sense of embarrassment. Which means that even once you’ve mastered the art of crossing the street and remembering that the oncoming traffic is coming at you from a different direction than it does in South Africa, you still stand a strong chance of getting run over on the pavement.

Anyway, I digress. Let’s get back to Lions. Yesterday’s hot ticket was the interview with David Droga and Brian Whipple, CEO of Accenture Interactive. In April this year the announcement that Droga Five was being acquired by Accenture Interactive sent shock waves through the industry. One of the most awarded creative agencies in the world selling to a consultancy? Surely, this was the beginning of the end of advertising. So I was expecting there to be a fair amount of interest. Gentle reader, this was the queue to get in.

It went all the way back up two flights of stairs, almost to the top level of the Palais. Two months into the most controversial deal of the year, everybody wanted to hear why Droga did it and how it was all working out. And to be honest, the way Droga and Whipple spoke about it, it seemed the most self-evidently sensible thing to do. (Of course it did. Let’s not forget that David Droga is one of the best people in the world at selling things.) Cynicism aside though, on paper the move makes sense. As Droga puts it “It makes my canvas five times bigger.”  He says he no longer just wants to be a storyteller: “We’ve celebrated the storytelling part but there’s so much more.” Increasingly, brands are being built through customer experience and for Droga, there’s a chance to take creativity “all the way through.” Consultancies like Accenture Interactive have relationships that ad agencies don’t have – like direct access to the CEO and the chief decision-makers within an organisation. They also have the kinds of deep tech skillsets that ad agencies typically have battled to attract or retain. Which means they have the power to realise, to make real, ideas that might otherwise perhaps have only had a brief existence as stunts or PR exercises. Advertising awards shows are full of those – brilliant ideas to solve cancer or hunger or domestic violence, that often have a lifespan of a couple of months or maybe a year, because ad agencies are great at ideas but not at building real-world solutions. But if an ad agency merged with the kind of people who CAN make those things and DO have the kind of influence to sell them in at the highest level.. well. That might just change everything. The naysayers are saying “The cultures are too different. This marriage will never work” but I say, let’s give it time and see what kind of kids they have.

That’s all for now. It is time for me to head to the Palais and grab a copy of the Cannes Daily, to have a look at the shortlists. You can hear the blood pumping in your ears as you scan the tiny print, desperately looking to see if your work made it through, but trying not to look desperate, obviously. Semper Fi, Marines. Over and out.

They set themselves up on a boat in front of a row of some of the busiest restaurants in Cannes last night and gave an impromptu concert. They were pretty good. Turns out they’re music producers and all the songs they were performing were original pieces that have all been bombed by clients. (Except, presumably, for “What the World Needs Now is Love, Sweet Love” which they performed twice). It was a lot of fun, even if at times they did have to compete against the Europop being pumped out of the far more expensive speakers of the yacht moored four bays down. War is hell.

Back to the work: the Entertainment Lions Grand Prix this year was won by a film called “5B.”

It’s a documentary about the very early days of AIDS in San Francisco. Back when AIDS was new and no-one knew yet what caused it, patients were being kept in what amounted to isolation wards, treated by doctors and nurses who were practically wearing Hazmat suits. A team of courageous doctors and nurses set up a ward called 5B, where they broke all the rules in order to treat these ostracized patients humanely. They refused to wear gloves or masks, allowed visits from pets and spouses and made a point of making physical contact with patients – hugging them, brushing their hair. I watched this film when I was doing my online judging and it was riveting. I think I gave it my highest mark and I remember hoping it would do well. Find it and watch it. That is an order, maggots.

I finished my day yesterday with a seminar from Rory Sutherland, who’s a behavioural economist, Chairman of Ogilvy UK and a raconteur of note.

I never miss an opportunity to hear Rory speak and neither should you. I’ve never seen him use notes – ever. He just pulls all this wonderful knowledge and these great stories from out of his prodigious brain. He argues that we have plenty of rational arguments for creativity. There is a wealth of data that shows that great creativity works. Somehow, though, it’s still difficult to convince clients to do something original and brave creatively. He argues, therefore, that we need an emotional argument for creativity. And that we shouldn’t conflate efficiency with effectiveness. “In everything that’s distinctive,” he says, “there’s something absurd.” It’s why most people choose to make their marriage vows in the most inefficient way possible – in front of loads of people, in a ceremony that costs both time and money, when in fact just signing the legal document in court is a far more efficient way of getting the same job done. “It’s the stuff people do that they don’t have to do that conveys meaning”. In most businesses, efficiency and effectiveness are the same thing. But not when it comes to anything involving people. “In messaging,” he says, “you have to deliberately do something weird,” because people don’t operate rationally, the way economists always thought we did.

I’ll leave you with this magnificent Rory quote:

It’s the cause of the inherent bias in business, and why businesses so often default to the expected. Worth mulling over. Oh, and go and read everything Rory’s ever written. He writes a column in The Spectator and he’s also written a book called The Wiki Man, which I think is a free downloadable .pdf

I’m off to the Palais to see the Saatchi Young Directors’ Showreel (now called the Young Creator’s Showcase, apparently). It’s my must-see in Cannes.

Yesterday I watched the Saatchi and Saatchi New Creators Showcase, which is a must-see for me. It used to be called the Saatchi and Saatchi Young Directors’ Showcase, which is basically what it is. It’s a curated reel of some of the hottest young talent working in film. They changed the name this year to reflect the fact that storytelling has changed and everyone is always on their phones, or something. Or because millennials. It wasn’t terribly clear to be honest, but at least two of the films played out on phone screens, so there you have it. I also noted that the new name doesn’t include an apostrophe, possibly because storytelling is now storydoing, or post-storydoing. It doesn’t matter what they call it, it’s always worth seeing, although it’s also a bit of an onslaught. The films tend towards the avant-garde, the surreal and the frankly bizarre, and I did find myself thinking “Doesn’t anyone do comedy anymore?”

Later on I met Rahul Sabnis from IHeartMedia, who’d just taken part in R/GA’s Innovation Exchange Showcase. This is an event where female-led startups are connected with global business, tech and marketing leaders who can give them guidance on how to market and grow their businesses. He said it had been the most inspiring part of the Festival for him so far. There’s a lot of emphasis on female leadership and on growing female-led businesses. I may sometimes miss the old days where the Lions were simpler somehow, and more focussed on advertising, and I may make facetious comments about unnecessary name changes that seem to reflect more of a concern for being “relevant” than being accurate (and don’t have apostrophes) but there are some great initiatives happening and the Lions are giving young creatives (and old ones) more access to an array of inspiring people. Earlier in the week I went to a Young Lions Week seminar, where five female creative leaders shared frank and often very funny stories about their experiences of growing into leadership in an industry that’s traditionally been male-dominated. Everyone spoke about imposter syndrome – that feeling of deep-seated doubt in your own ability and the consequent fear that you’ll suddenly get found out and exposed as a fraud. (So it’s not just me, then?)

On to last night’s ceremony, where the Innovation Grand Prix was won by a software start-up founded by hearing-impaired people.

This was for the idea I spoke about earlier in the week, where they’ve created a listening device for the homes of the hearing-impaired and taught it to recognise and classify different sounds so it can send a text alert to the owner if it hears water running, or the sound of glass breaking, for example. This is a very practical example of how AI and machine learning can be used for good. They literally fed the device thousands of hours of Youtube videos until it learnt the difference between a child yelling with happiness and a child yelling because it fell over.

Artificial Intelligence was a bit of a theme in last night’s ceremony because Burger King won Gold for a radio campaign written by an AI. This campaign was a cheerful antidote to the tech worship you sometimes find in Cannes, featuring lines of sublimely tortured dialogue like “Greetings, Friend Two. What do you have near your mouth?” and finishing with the payoff line “Burger King. Have it Norway.”

The highlight of the evening for me was South Africa taking home a Gold Lion for Radio for Town Lodge’s ‘The Real Cost / Nothing for Mahala‘.

It’s always good to see our flag on the stage. Well done TBWA Hunt Lascaris and Produce Sound. The camapaign’s in English and in Zulu and I think it would have been fantastic to hear one of the Zulu ads played as the team went up on stage (just for the thrill of having a massive Zulu voice dominating the Lions stage) but apparently although the jury argued strongly for the Zulu being played, they were overruled because it’s Cannes and English is the lingua franca, or something. Or because millennials and storydoing, and apostrophes. Still, it’s a great campaign and a great win. And here, you can listen to all the ads: English / Zulu.

I’m now going to the Palais to judge the Young Lions Film. These young teams got a brief on Tuesday or something and they’ve had 48 hours to come up with an idea and shoot an ad. So just another normal day in advertising then. You know, LOL.

One last ceremony to go: Film and Titanium. The Titanium Lion was invented by Dan Wieden in about 2002 to honour work that “breaks new ground in branded communications; that is, provocative, boundary-busting, envy-inspiring work that marks a new direction for the industry and moves it forward.” It’s arguably the most coveted Lion to win these days. It’s fitting that the Jury President this year is BBDO’s David Lubars, who was the first ever winner of a Titanium Lion for BMW Films in 2002.

Before I go and start queueing to get into the ceremony (this is the one EVERYONE wants to attend), I’m going to leave you with two things. One is a picture of the team who won the Young Lions Film competition I judged earlier. This is them hearing that they’ve just won. And secondly, a pic of the best T-shirt I saw all week. It’s the Cannes Shirtlist and it sums this year up perfectly. Adios. You’ve been a wonderful audience.