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.