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.