Ten Things that Could Improve your Dancing.

Tonight, immediately after teaching the first lindy hop lesson in swing club this semester, someone asked me how to get good at swing dancing. I thought this topic was relevant to other dancers, particularly beginners, and would be help me to layout out my own goals and strategies.

First off, these are all my opinions, I am only semi-qualified to give them, and they are not a recipe for success.

1. You're dancing to have fun, right?

For me, the end goal of dancing is to enjoy myself. Challenging myself to be better, to learn interesting variations, to syncopate my steps, and to connect with a lead/follow are all ways to vary my dance and make it more comfortable.  I think that this will make it more fun.  I don't want to get better so I can be the best. I want to get better so I can have more fun.  All of the following tips are methods to reach this goal.  If you're sacrificing enjoyment to get better you're missing the point.

2. Take a lot of lessons.  

Take the lessons offered in your scene.  Ask questions during the lessons.  Don't be embarrassed by your questions.  I can almost guarantee that they've been asked before and that someone else is wondering the same thing currently. Retake the lessons until you feel comfortable with all/most of the material. Take notes on what you've learned and review on your own later. Once you feel comfortable with the material and have become proficient as either a lead or a follow take them as the other role. I will go into detail on this later.   

3.  Social dance as much as possible.

Go to your scene's social dances and dance with people of all levels. Don't feel embarrassed to ask people who are more experienced than you are to dance.  Don't say no to people, or avoid dancing with people who are not as experienced as you.  Try to enjoy each dance no matter what. You're spending the next three-ish minutes with this person so be present and let them know you're dancing with them! That's why making at least a small amount of eye contact during a dance is good.  Congratulating each other when something cool happens is also encouraging! Lastly, don't apologize, unless you've physically hurt your partner.  Most cool moves happened from mistakes so be confident when you make a mistake. You might've just invented the next big thing.

4. TRAVEL.

I know that some people don't have the time and/or budget to allow for this, but if you have the opportunity and the means to travel, you should.  Dancing with people from other places will help you grow as a dancer.  You don't have to go to an exchange or a workshop (though they are super fun and I highly encourage it); you can just go to a weekly dance.  Each dancer dances a little different and each scene dances a little (or a lot) different. Learning how people from other places dance will force you to lead and/or follow to accommodate these different styles.  You don't have to adopt them, but you might want to consider how they change your dance. 

5.  Try to switch roles.

If you are pretty comfortable as a lead or a follow try doing the other role.  It will break your brain briefly, but it will make you a more informed dancer. Knowing what's happening on both sides is fantastic and will help you understand what your partner is going through when you dance with them. You might even find you like the other role better. There's no way to know unless you try.

6.  Solo dance!

I was at Atlanta Varsity Showdown this past weekend and one of the instructors said something along the lines of "You can't do with a partner what you can't do on your own."  Which made us all giggle in fits, but on a dance related note it's very appropriate.  Get to know how your body moves alone.  Being self aware when you dance will allow you to connect with your partner at a higher level.

7. Actively and passively listen to music you want to dance to.

I know there is a lot of debate on what kinds of music swing dancing should be done to.  I suggest trying to dance to a wide variety of things before deciding what you like.  Then, listen to what you want to be able to dance to in a passive and an active manner.  Listening passively (listening without wondering what's happening in the song) will familiarize you with the songs and the genre.  Listening actively (thinking to yourself what the drums are doing, what the base is doing, etc.) will improve your musicality.

8. Know when you've hit a wall and decide how you want to address it.

I've hit a lot of walls.  I'm improving and improving and improving and BLAM I plateau.  Sometimes I even back track a little.  It's really frustrating when you love dancing and are trying to improve.   There are two ways I have personally addressed this with success, if you can think of more, go for it.  The first thing I've done is danced through the walls.  It takes a lot of force because you feel like you're going nowhere, but you have to trust that eventually you will get through it. The second thing I've done is taken a break.  I'm not talking about a break from dancing entirely. I'm talking about taking a break from situations that pressure you to improve. I took a break from lessons and traveling because both of those things make me feel like I have to improve.  When I returned to these things I was able to absorb more and begin improving again.

9.  Try teaching. 

If you want to teach and you feel competent, ask if you can teach a beginner class in your local scene. I didn't know what I knew until I had a room of fresh-faced baby swing dancers looking at me for direction.  OMIGOD it is scary the first time. They are dance putty in your not-all-knowing hands.  But act like you have a plan (better yet, have an actual plan) and make sure they have a good time. By then end of the first lesson you will have learned just as much about your dancing as the class did.

10. Remember number 1. 

It's so important I'm bringing it up again.  You're dancing to have fun.  Remember to think about that during all the other steps. If you aren't having fun why the heck are you devoting so much time to it?  Go enjoy yourself.

Lindy Hop Thoughts: Conversational Dancing

I like to think about dancing as a conversation.  I used to feel limited when I followed and sometimes I still do depending on the lead, my mood, or how tired my legs are.  But I am trying, with increasing success, to see leading as an open-ended question and to see following as an appropriate and interesting answer.

If a someone asks me "How are you today?"  and I answer, "I'd like two slices of cheese on that burger," I have answered inappropriately.  The conversation no longer flows because the question asker has to stop and think about what is going on.

If someone leads an inside turn it would be inappropriate for me to force an outside turn.  The lead would have to stop and wonder what happened and why.  It stops the flow of the dance.

However, when someone asks me "How are you today?" there are a number of appropriate responses. I could say "I'm fantastic; I just won a thousand kittens!" or, "Horrible; the world's supply of nutella ran out this morning."  I have answered appropriately in both of these cases and significantly influenced the direction of the conversation.

If someone leads an inside turn I should follow appropriately - with an inside turn. However, there are a number of ways I can contribute to the dance and influence its outcome while doing an inside turn. Maybe I want to do a pop turn. Maybe I'm feeling particularly sassy and I want to shimmy while I'm turning. I could do either of these things, and a number of others, while still following what has been led.

The beauty of looking at a dance like a conversation is that I don't have to feel limited when I am following. I used to struggle with this in almost every dance I had. I love silly dance moves. It used to irk me so much that I wasn't in control of the dance when I followed. All these opportunities for fun and interesting things would fly by while I got led through pretty standard moves.  But I have had a revelation: even though I am following I can be an equal or greater contributor to the dance conversation.  If I do an interesting variation I can inspire the lead.  This allows me to change more than the move, it allows me to change the dance.

This is not about hijacks, or rhythm variations, or styling, though it includes all of them.  This is about the way I view dancing.  This is about feeling empowered when I am following.  This is about two people contributing to one thing to make something greater than the sum of its parts.

Strawberries

This morning I crushed a strawberry into a cup of lemonade (which was delicious, obviously) and it occurred to me how little pressure was needed to mash the strawberry.

I don't know how many of you have had the chance to crush a strawberry at home, but I can tell you that it's no easy task. You have to hold them still and apply a lot of force to make them pulpy.   But these French strawberries sort of collapse on themselves if you apply light pressure with a spoon.

It's noticeable when you eat them as well.  As you bite into them they melt into pulpy messes. At home a strawberry is a more formidable thing - it holds its shape as you go.

I like both of them - the American strawberry for its bright color, plump appearance, and sweetness - and the French strawberry for its delicateness and its less sweet, but more flavorful taste.

I wonder how much the differences have to do with climate, soil content, genetic modification, and selective breeding.  We certainly like things to be bigger and sweeter in the US, so it would make sense if we had bred our strawberries to be larger and more sugary, but it might just be differences that happened by chance.

Either way: delicious.

How I React to Famous Things.

I have this freakish obsession with touching famous things (Not people. That's too creepy even for me).  It's not that I'm going to wander up to a Michelangelo and put my hands all over an incredible sculpture - that would be bad for the sculpture after all - but if I'm in a church, or a palace, or a famous building I'll run my hand along a banister or if none of the security guards are watching too closely I'll give one of the columns a brief hug.

It all started with the Hagia Sophia last summer. There's this thing called a wishing column.  It's a brass section of one of the pillars with an a little indent in the center. You place your thumb in the little spot on the pillar and make a wish as you rotate your hand all the way around.  And for me this offered some connection, quite literally, with the building and the other visitors.  The tactile sensation of the place made a great impact on me.  I remember being surprised at how cold the wishing column was despite all the warm human touch that had graced it. I remember thinking that my wish just went up with thousands of others from around the entire world for thousands of years.

Then there was the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, again last summer, where I felt like I needed to hug every column and run my hands over every surface.  There was something so alive about it.  It was constructed with such movement that the building looks like it is vibrating. In touching it I felt maybe I could resonate with it, maybe I could become a piece of the marvelous history that went into it.

This summer, the most prominent experience I've had has been at the Pantheon in Rome. I ran my fingertips along the cold marble on the wall, a dirt red stone in particular.  Perfectly smooth and cold.  I did stop to think that it was probably not the original stone being as it's close to the door and at a height where many might touch it, but it doesn't really matter if it is the original or not. More importantly, it is a part of something great and famed whether it was in the original building or added ten years ago.  Touching it connected me to several thousand years of history.  How many people entered that building in awe? How many of them got in an argument with their spouse? How many of them wondered how it was build?  How many of them wept?

What has become increasingly clear as I've touched each great building is that it's not actually the monument that matters, but the people passing through it that do.  The people passing through these famous places make them increasingly famous as their history is put onto a higher and higher pedestal.   While most monuments are breathtaking in their beauty and grandeur, many more beautiful buildings have fallen in fires, in revolutions, or simply in the passing of time.  It is just that these have survived and have been building reputations upon themselves through the passing of time.  They are important because we have declared them so.

For me the physical contact with them brings them back down off the pedestal. Touching a railing reminds me that it's a real place, not a photo in a history book, not the essence of a Roman god, but a real thing that people go in and out of nearly every day.  This simple act reminds me that it's the people who are incredible and amazing, not the building.

Post-Cannes Bloggin'

The study abroad has long ended and my grade has since come in so I now feel free to use this blog for whatever I might.

So welcome to The Factory: Post-Cannes Edition.

What have I been up to since leaving the glittering world of the French Riviera? 

The week following the program I went to Herrang Dance Camp. It is a magical place in Sweden where you do nothing but dance for week long intervals (and fuel yourself almost completely with ice cream). I took a series of lessons in advanced Lindy Hop with a good friend of mine from Atlanta, GA.   It was common place for people to walk down the street singing Gordon Webster pieces or break into a set of Charleston moves. Everyone dressed like people from the 1930s and 40s and tattoos as well as headbands and hair flowers were abundant.  Needless to say it was my heaven - except for the part where I felt like my feet might fall off or my calves might never relax. I'll go more into detail about what I learned in a separate post.

On the last night of the camp I danced until 5AM packed my things and got on a shuttle to the Stockholm airport at 6AM. I spent the rest of the day getting to Amsterdam where my mother was waiting at our hotel. I explored Amsterdam with her for a week which was not nearly enough time to see the city. 

Now, I'm sitting in the stark white Paris apartment my mother and I have rented writing this post with the mercifully reliable internet connection we have.  I've been here for a week so far and I'll be here for another week. Still, I'm not sure we're going to see all the things we'd like to.

A Different Kind of Agency

Sitting in the Debussy, cold and a little tired, I watched David Baldwin explain to me what my future could be.  He didn’t know I was sitting there. He didn’t know he’d told me exactly what I wanted to hear when I hadn’t even known what it was I wanted to hear. I tried to talk to him afterwards, but he got called backstage and I didn’t run into him later at the festival. Of course I’ll email him, but this will be separate, formal, normal, not the ephemeral magic of hearing a version of your perfect future laid out.

David Baldwin is the founder and CEO of Baldwin& an independent agency operating out of Raleigh, North Carolina.  It is a self-described “hybrid branding/digital/advertising/mobile/social media thingy.”  It works for brands such as BMW and Burt’s Bees and was awarded small agency of the year by Advertising Age, a coveted prize in the USA, within a few years of its beginning.

The presentation Baldwin gave somehow managed to be humble even though it was entirely centered on the work of the agency.  It was self-deprecating.  He talked about their work and showed a few case studies, but mostly he talked about their policies. This is what appealed to me most.  He said they didn’t like to define jobs, a common theme at the festival, because it limited only creatives to being creative. The work they do they try not to categorize. It’s a sort of catch-all agency making ads, films, websites, social profiles, outdoor events, art, connections, and communication. 

Then he explained that they only took clients whose goals they supported. The only way they could do their work effectively was if they believed in what the client was doing. They never took business they couldn’t stand behind.  And that was the moment I thought: I could work there. That doesn’t mean I’m going to or even that it’s the right place for me.  But before hearing this I had pretty much crossed agency work off my list for future jobs.  I never want to end up at an agency where I’d have to do work for a company I don’t support. It’s bad enough that I already buy things from brands that aren’t socially sustainable, like Nike and Wal-Mart, I don’t need to help them get even more money than they already have.  I don’t want to wake up in fifty years and realize I dedicated my life selling the next version of the cigarette.  So I’ve been thinking of doing in-house PR work for a non-profit I support (because there are plenty of problems I have with some of those as well).  I’ve been trying out some internships in local non-profits, but it all seems a bit pell-mell, and it’s hard to get people to understand what exactly public relations is and how each department can use it to their advantage.  At least at an agency people have some vague idea that you’re making communication for a series of brands.

Hearing Baldwin say that his agency only takes work it supports was really important to me.  Maybe Baldwin& isn’t the right place for me, maybe the work I support wouldn’t line up with the work they did, but at least I know that some agencies operate like this.   At least I know I can expand where I’m looking in my search for a career that offers a way to make a positive impact on society to include agencies again.

Cannes Day 7 - The Last Day

On this, the last day of the festival, I started the day watching commercials. Luckily they were running through VW ads, which are usually pretty interesting, so it was less mind-numbing than usual.

After that I went to "Creativity Inside-Out: A New Way of Doing Business" put on by an agency called Big Spaceship that operates primarily out of Brooklyn. It focused on changing the nature of workspace to foster informal leaning. It was good, if slightly contradictory. One suggestion they had was not making set strategies of process, but then they were listing out strategies for this process. Otherwise they presented some interesting proposals like doing walking one-on-one meetings, having projects that are for fun rather than clients, and allowing new-comers to the industry to rotate through different projects every six months if they wanted.

Then I saw "Being the Underdog: Building an Identity through Creativity," during which a Hispanic American, a Latvian, Hungarian, and a Guatemalan talked about the ground breaking creative work happening within each community or country. It turns out when you're an underdog you aren't afraid of failing so you can take bigger risks and the pressure of having a smaller budget forces you to be more creative.  This was by far one of my favorite talks the entire week because I didn't know about most of the work in these populations (except the Hispanic American work having seen a number of Hispanic publications and ads in my Texan school district).  

It was also the most angering seminar because they crammed four countries into one session on the last day when most people don't come. It said a lot about how the industry is structured to favor those countries that are already in power. The clips shown at the underdog seminar were no less impressive and innovative than those shown by any other country or agency.  Each county, which were barely mentioned the rest of the festival, got twelve minutes to talk. Yet we already know and are somewhat familiar with the work coming from shops in the USA, the UK, France, and Australia. Brazil has been getting more time in the spotlight this year, and they are sweeping the award ceremonies, but otherwise I've seen a lot of work and seminars from countries I already know something about. The seminar for the underdogs made me aware of just how much is getting left out, particularly in Central America and Africa outside of South Africa.

Now I'm sitting in the theater one last time to watch the final awards ceremony and trying to put any negative feelings behind me, at least for the night.

It's been one hell of a week.

Thank you and good night.

Volkswagen Tall - Tall Girl

Volkswagen Tall is a spunky looking little car with a higher roof." The spot "Tall Girl" showcases a very tall woman going on a variety of outings with men who are about a head shorter than her. At the very end she meets a man whose head does not appear in frame at first.  When he comes up to her he is about the same height that she is. She gets in the Volkswagen Tall and they drive off together over a brightly lit bridge into the city. The tag line "surprising spacious" appears and the spot ends.

There is some implication that the car is like the woman - lovely, but a little quirky. It is charming and shows the theme of the car, a little different, a little special, more than the product itself. This creates a stronger feeling for the car than a number of car ads which show the car going quickly or the tech developments of the car. The ad used emotion rather than logic to sell and with a well know brand like Volkswagen, that has a reputation for being quirky, this ad fit into their larger brand voice well.

However, I was confused at the beginning as to whether she was going on dates with these men or was just going about life being taller than everyone. It was more clear at the end when she met the final man that she was going on dates, but I felt the previous scenes with shorter men should've been more clearly dates. A lot of them were outside or in big ambiguous buildings, had they happened in bars, coffee shops, and restaurants instead it would've been more clear.

Like my complaint about the Axe ad having really forgettable music I think that this commercial could've benefitted from some better music. The music was just background noise even though there was no speaking in the ad. When there is no dialogue to hear there is a great chance to hit the message home with an appropriate song. I wish a something a little quirky or a song about a search had been played during the ad.

Cannes Day 6

Today I went to the forum “Selling Sustainability – Are we there yet?” hosted by Y&R and Wunderman.  They discussed a consumer group they called the aspirationals – a group composed mainly of millennials, the generation I am part of. Aspirationals enjoy consumption and convenience, but they also take sustainability of a brand, either socially or environmentally, into account. If they are offered two products of similar cost they will, without a doubt, pick the sustainable brand, and they will be proud of it. The talk went on to say that “sustainability needs to be a force, not a fad” and that brands should promote the sustainable efforts they make.  As the media tends to only pick up on negative practices of brands they should try to be transparent and show the sustainable efforts they are making. 

At the end a very relevant question was asked: Will sustainability ever be more important than price?  They said it should be and would be because if a product is sustainable it’s actually worth more in the long run so it should be valued at a higher price.  There are a number of problems with this theory – primarily that the cheaper thing will often win out anyways because the majority of the world doesn’t have that extra money to spare.  Sustainable products have to be developed in way that they can be sold cheaply. Otherwise, they will only be used by the upper class. Sustainability has to be cheap or it will in fact just be a fad among wealthy consumers. Large brands with a lot of leverage should work to make sustainable products cheap enough to be priced competitively to regular products.

After this I got sucked into the screening room for the film ads again.  I love it and I hate it. When I watch a recorded TV I will usually watch one of the commercial breaks.  But watching ad, after ad, after ad is really enough to make me tear my hair out. Perhaps it’s because they’re so short, but I think it may be because they’re all so intense.  It made me reevaluate what I like in an ad. A calmer ad might actually work more effectively because it is a break from the stream of fast consumption.

After that I went to a seminar hosted by Burberry and Google where they showcased and compared the work they did that they felt pushed the creative bracket. It was interesting to see how both of these brands try to mesh the digital with the physical world.

Axe - Young and Mature

Axe is known for having racy ads trying to appeal to teenage boys and young men. The axe "Young an Mature" ad made by Ponce Buenos Aires. It was an ad for the movie theater - you needed 3D glasses to view it.

It starts with an average looking man in his early twenties moving into a new apartment complex. As he walks in a young woman (looking to be in her early twenties) walks by and catches his eye. As soon as she has turned around and gone in an older woman (looking to be about thirty) catches his eye as she leaves to go on a jog. Then an animated image pops up and explains that from here forward you can choose whether you want to watch the storyline progress with the older woman or the younger woman. If you close one eye you see images of only the young girl and if you close the other eye you see only the older woman. Then the story-line continues with the boy developing relationships with scenes of painting his new apartment, them bringing him cookies, watching a movie, kissing in an elevator, having sex in his room, and then the morning after in which the older woman leaves before be wakes and the younger woman stays with him.

I thought this was an exceedingly clever way to use the 3D medium. It actually makes a film ad interactive, giving the viewer a choice in what they will see without disrupting the experience for other viewers. This also communicates something about the brand and product - that Axe is so effective at getting women that you can choose which girl you want. 

The production involved filming one building and three characters. There was one part explaining how to use the glasses that used simple cartoon animation - it had one image and some text.  The only production bit that was difficult was overlaying the scenes of each women so they synced up well.

The music choice could've been stronger. There was no speaking, as there were two story-lines happening simultaneously, so the music needed to be strong. It was a song called Higher & Higher, which had a good intensity, but seemed irrelevant. A stronger song choice would've complimented it really well and if it was about having your choice in women it would've pushed the message through in an even more.

I also wondered why the end of the older woman's story involved her leaving and the end of the younger woman's story involved her staying. Is that supposed to link hook up versus long term relationship to old versus young? Is it encouraging relationships between people of similar age, but only hook ups with people of different ages. I don't know that this was intentional on the part of axe; I suspect not. Maybe it signified the ability of users to choose whether they want the situation to end as hook up of something longer term.  I felt that the ad was already complex enough without different endings that imply different things about the nature of Axe. Using one ending would've improved the ad because it would simplify the ad. 

Overall, it was pretty effective and a little more mature of a story than Axe usually uses.

Cannes Day 5

We started out the day talking to the woman who runs the agency MOXIE, Suzy Deering. She offered a good perspective on being a woman in the business and how she struggled not to sell herself short.

Then I went to a workshop with GolinHarris about creating and maintaining brand voice. At the end of which, I'm proud to say, I won a competition to create a fake tweet for a brand with a silly voice. My pun was some iteration of "I lost my glasses this morning and made a huge spectacle of myself." So thanks for the bad joke training, Dad.

Then I watched ad submissions in the screening room. I think my brain just about melted and poured out my ears.  I thought, since this is an international festival of creativity, that the ads submitted would be better. Don't get me wrong, they weren't horrible, but most of them were moderately clever and that's about it. Since you pay to submit entries I assumed agencies would only spend money on their best work, but watching the real go by I realized that clients probably pressured agencies to submit works for their brands or paid for them to be entered. It really made me question the merit of the festival prizes. Brands shouldn't be motivating the festival submissions, it should be about creativity, not trying to desperately beg for a Lion; it devalues the award.

I finished up the day attending a seminar hosted by Cirque de Soleil, which was actually pretty boring. The ads for it and the flexible characters they had walking around handing out flyers were more impressive than the talk itself.

Analyzing the Ads - Play Station - Cubs Win Advert

This ad shows the aftermath of the World Series where the Cubs win. It is absolutely mad. You see the entire city go out to celebrate and everyone, from a priest to an elderly man, is going crazy.  People pour into the streets, bars erupt with shouts of happiness, the stadium looks like it will burst.  Then the image goes to the field and it slowly changes to CGI. The camera zooms out to reveal it is a video game and a Cubs fan is watching the created victory with one tear dripping down his face.

I think the ad did a great job showing the connection sports fans have to their teams and how Xbox allows them to channel their obsession, their love, into an alternate reality in which their team can win.  It's a very emotional way to sell a video game and while it's funny and clever it goes a little deeper and  resonates on an emotional tie that fans have with their team. 

The major production cost would've been getting enough people to participate, there were literally hundreds of people in the some of the scenes, and getting all of the spaces because they used so many different bars, restaurants, homes, streets, and what looked to be the actual stadium.  I think that the medium of live action film, which communicated the feeling of being in a crowd of fans, and the CGI shot of the actual video game, to show how that medium connects you to the real life of sports fans was a strong choice that played into the message.  

I only saw one submission of this type, but I think the message could be used effectively for other avid sports teams as well as other sports.  My overall advice is to expand the campaign to include similar spots. Otherwise, I think it hit the nail on the head for connecting extreme fandom to playing a sports video game.

Cannes Day 4

To set the stage for today I left my festival badge at the apartment and had to ride the train a few stops back to get it. Normally, I'm a pretty prepared person so I arrived at the festival feeling young, flustered, and rather silly. 

Then I saw a seminar in which Anderson Cooper interviewed Conan O' Brien about how he uses comedy to connect and communicate with people. 

Then the UGA program was lucky enough to have a private talk with Conan. He told us some about his career and we asked him a handful of questions. He tried to pass on some advice about authenticity, which in his case is conveyed through comedy, and about trusting yourself and being confident. 

After that I went to a DigitasLBI workshop about constant content for brands on YouTube.  Comedian Katherine Ryan helped out and after that UGA students again got a private session to ask her questions. She also told us we should be authentic by "finding our voice." She illustrated this with experiences from her life.

Now I'm watching Than Khai Meng, worldwide creative director of Oglivy & Mather (a large ad agency), talk about some of his work. At the beginning he asked the room why we were all here and the winning answers were so we can creat culture, so we can change, and so we can get better.

So today I've heard a lot of advice from experts in varying fields and levels about how to change. It was nice to see some successful people and be somewhat convinced that they aren't as brilliant as they are cracked up to be; they're just people. It takes a little bit of glitter out of the future for my generation and places it within reach. 

It's interesting walking around a bunch of performers and creative people and communicators and realizing they all want the same thing - attention.  The entire communication industry can be summed up as the attempt to share an idea, whether it be funny, profound, or ingenious, with people.

All I really want from my life is to find ideas that are wonderful and convey them to people successfully. 

So, by god, give me some attention. Someday I might deserve it.

Cannes Day 3

I got myself to the Palais early this morning to attend a workshop that was supposed to give you some tools to cope with conflicts arising between creatively wired and non-creatively wired people. I would've benefitted more if I'd worked in the industry before as they talked about client meetings and briefs, things I've only read about, not experienced.  Despite feeling unexperienced, at the end of it I felt I learned some valuable communication tools for breaking down a creative idea into its pieces so others can understand. It was one of my favorite things at the festival so far.

Then I went to a master class, a rather contradictory master class.  Mother Collective tried to tell us "How to Avoid being a Douche in the Business."  What they actually talked about was how you need to figure out what kind of job environment will make you happy and to stop thinking about labels so much. I thought framing it through a douchiocity lens was a little silly. They tried to say that people are douches when they are missing happiness, that they try to make up for it with fancy cars and cool clothes and pretending to look happy when they aren't. But this model didn't hold up well because they only explained it at the beginning and after that they just talked about all the great work they did and how it made them happy. I think sitting on a stage and talking about how nice and good you are is actually a little douche-like. I wish they hadn't framed it from the douche standpoint and had just said - "this is how we found happiness, maybe it will work for you."

Then I went to a seminar (trying to cover all my bases on how I'm intaking information) put on by Innocean: Art and Design - East meets West. It was formatted like a conversation between a car designer and an artist. I had a lot of trouble paying attention because no one was addressing the audience, only the other person. It was also not organized much, it flowed like a conversation, because it was, but it was a conversation I could not participate in. I had trouble relating it to my life because I'm neither a professional artist nor a car designer.

Then I went to the forum Liquid Creativity: IAB Secrets of the Mobile Superstars. Before it started nearly every head in the room was bent down to their smartphone or tablet. It was interesting to hear about all of it, though I wish they hadn't used so much lingo.  All in all though, I enjoyed learning about the ability to tailor campaigns or programs to individuals using mobile. 

Now I'm off to play with some Legos at another workshop!

Cannes Day 2

I started out day two looking through about a hundred short-listed entries to the public relations categories. Overall I was impressed the campaigns seemed integrated across every medium, a little catchier, sillier, and simpler than a lot of the other work I've seen in seminars. I suppose this shows how quickly the field is evolving.

Then I went to google beach, complete with a real-life red dropped pin at the entrance, to do yoga. It was reassuring to see people from different agencies around the world fussing with their skinny jeans and ray bans while trying to stretch themselves into funny positions.

Then I went to see a Coca-Cola presentation. It seemed like they were just patting themselves on the back. It was a seminar, but I didn't learn much except about how forward thinking Coca-Cola thinks it is. In 1955 they used the first black model for Coca-Cola, showing them to be, "as American as apple pie." But does that make them innovative or does that make them a responder to what's already happening? The speakers actually said the brand was reading the pulse of pop culture and responding to it. But later they contradicted themselves, positing that they were both shaping and responding to culture. All the ads they showed seemed to be more of a response. I don't think Coca-Cola can claim to have a great influence on the beginning of social movements, just the response to them.

Then I watched a seminar about Networkone, a company connecting small independent agencies to international partners. Apparently last year 49% of Cannes winners were independent agencies and 83% of the Grand Prix winners were independent last year. The take away messages were: you can't categorize this work because boundaries are becoming less relevant, the counted work ($) was still an important indicator, and close client agency relationships are really important for making good work. This seminar left the biggest impact on me as I would like to work in a small agency or an in-house team as public relations practitioner. I only want to do work for companies that I can stand behind ethically.

Then I went to the master class "Glitch not Glitz: What the Future Looks Like."  They discussed a number of trends such as "the struggle to find a new aesthetic that's separate from past perceptions," creating something truly new.  It was interesting, but all the trends were focused on fashion and art. Another point for culture driving advertising rather than advertising driving culture. 

My take away message from the day seems to be that advertising follows culture closely so it can be relevant, not that it is creating the culture itself. I do think that companies adopting pop-culture in their ads are reinforcing it, but I don't think they themselves are creating it.