Around 15,000 marketers descend this week on the French Riviera for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. And everyone else will feel like we’re there.
As Agency SOS Founder John Kovacevich wrote a few years ago:
“Prepare yourselves. Your (highly-placed, senior-level, expense-account-having) advertising friends are about to flood your feed with yacht and rosé photos. Later this week, when they start handing out the hardware, LinkedIn will become an unbearable stream of Palais award photos and not-so humblebrags.”
Claude will be working overtime this week to help craft social media posts that achieve the right balance of “humble” and “brag.”
I enjoyed my one visit to the Cannes Lions a couple years ago, drawing cartoons about it all first-hand. It can be inspiring to see some of the most creative work from our industry. Work now spans an ever-growing 30+ different categories (and hundreds of sub-categories).
But anytime marketers like us get together, we’re in danger of breathing our own exhaust. And taking ourselves a bit too seriously. As inspiring as ad festivals like the Cannes Lions can be, they also risk making us out of touch.
A few years ago, I drew a cartoon with a couple marketers walking down the famous Croisette. One says to the other:
“It’s so important to leave our offices once in a while and get out like this in the real world. Which yacht party are we going to again?”
Ten years ago, Mark Ritson published a Marketing Week article titled “My Comprehensive Guide to What Marketers Can Learn At Cannes.” In the print edition, what followed was a completely blank page. In the online article, he posted a video of a single tumbleweed crossing a highway.
Tellingly, Mark has been a featured speaker at Cannes the last three years. As much as the Cannes Lions are fun to mock, for this one week, the festival is the center of the marketing universe.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
