Guest blog post by Claire Bridges, Founder, Now Go Create

Reading all the tweets, blogs and media around Cannes it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the inspiration and information on offer. Trying to wade through all the big data I offer my ‘small data’ – things I have noticed from some of entries at this year’s PR Lions. Whether you’d go so far as to call them trends or not I don’t know but here are some observations. Creating currency, social experiments, taking a stand, hijacking a moment and of course storytelling were all noticeable in the campaign entries. The storytelling is becoming more and more visual as many of the winning and shortlisted campaigns demonstrated – The Autocomplete Truth for UN Women, Volvo Epic Split and Rice-Code to name a few as well as the adidas and Hair Fest campaigns noted below. The full winners list can be seen here. What I also observed from many of the campaigns is that digital & social makes every good creative campaign global now whether that’s the intention or not and I think that’s interesting for brands because it changes the context of the idea, and for ideas in general as it challenges what is new.

 

Delving deeper into the creating currency theme – this started several years ago with campaigns including Orange’s RockCorps ‘give, get given’ idea – volunteer 4 hours of your time and earn a ticket to a gig. I noted 7 entries from 7 different countries across categories including not for profit, sports and retail and education using this theme and I’m sure there are many more in other categories. Whilst many of the elements are not new the trend abounds. It is about barter, involvement, collaboration and creating value out of elements of your brand or offer.

 

Silver Lions Winners

 

The Silver Lions winner in the event category by TBWA London for adidas D Rose Jump Store asked kids in Hackney to show their basketball skills and jump like NBA player Derrick Rose to receive a pair of new sneakers in a simple and clever execution  Having worked for adidas and Speedo in my career, this also cleverly used the ‘2-hour sports talent window’ that you get for PR in a truly impactful way.

 

A campaign that I personally loved that also won a Silver Lion in Event is the Hair Fest from Ogilvy and Mather Mexico for a cancer charity Casa De La Amistad, using a variation on theme of the Orange Rockcorps, using currency to appeal to a whole new audience for fundraising – heavy metal fans – give at least 25cm of your hair to make a wig for a child with cancer. Now these guys love their hair making the sacrifice for a ticket to a gig even more impactful.

 

Shortlist entries

 

The Exchange was a cashless pop-up store for the Organ Donor Foundation of South Africa where you ‘bought’ an item by becoming an organ donor. In terms of the insight behind the campaign I wonder whether the level of consideration for such a serious issue would have been met by the fashion link and immediacy of the purchase/swap but it is an interesting way to talk about a difficult subject and garnered much attention.

 

The Unicef Tap Project is a challenge – give your time & donate money by not using your mobile phone for 10 minutes at a time via an app. It is the work of the creatively on-fire Droga 5 agency in NY who were also behind the Gold winning Honeymaid This Is Wholesome and Silver If We Made It for Heineken campaigns.

 

Pay Per Laugh for the Teatre Neu Theatre in Spain was a response to the Spanish authorities raising the tax on theatre tickets from 8-21% which heavily impacted sales. The pay per laugh theatre invited theatre-goers to only pay for what they enjoyed using facial recognition technology.

 

The Message Barter Akanksha Foundation campaign for a kids NGO used children in a humorous and cheeky way to engage with high profile influencers and celebrities in India – they publicly declared their support with home-made clips in exchange for social media awareness of their issue to great effect  This also tapped into the theme of experiment which is prevalent this year too.

 

In the Mindrive Social Fuel education campaign from the US the currency is a tweet to get an electric car moving across America to raise awareness and get it to Washington meet with legislators to talk about education. This is not new but was well executed and incorporated new technologies.

 

The Marc Jacobs Daisy Tweet shop was not featured in the short list but is a well-known campaign from this year – pay for handbags with a tweet.

Ways you could apply this to your company or brand would be to play with your audience:

• Challenge me
• Dare me
• Tempt me
• Involve me
• Inspire me

…and think about what you have to offer that you could barter. Call it a trend, call it inspiration, think about how you might collaborate and co-create with your audience.

 

Claire Bridges is the Founder of Creative Consultancy Now Go Create, Judge at this year’s Cannes Lions PR Jury. Claire is an ex-WPP Consumer MD with 20 years PR experience. We demystify creativity & fear of the blank page via creative training courses for business www.nowgocreate.co.uk. Twitter @nowgocreate, claire@nowgocreate.co.uk or link up with Claire at Google+

Claire is also a PRCA trainer, and runs the online “Unleash your inner creative” training webinars for PRCA and ICCO members. 

Guest blog post by David Gallagher, ICCO President & CEO EMEA, Ketchum

One of the best lines I heard this week in Cannes, where the 2014 International Festival of Creativity still rages on, was a comparison between winning campaigns and haute couture fashion shows: what takes gold is like a new season’s line-up . . . sometimes impractical, often flamboyant but inevitably influential on mainstream tastes and trends.

How apt.

What happens at Cannes, matters. More so, I’d argue, than any other event on the global PR calendar (partly because there really isn’t a global PR calendar), and more each year, as clients and agencies of all kinds flock to the South of France in ever greater numbers.

And it’s not just the awards competition that counts. Trends are established, deals are done, ideas are shared and careers are launched/advanced in ways that no other event or awards competition can yet offer the industry.

That’s why ICCO, the global body of forward-leading PR consultancies from around the world, put so much energy into ensuring a meaningful role in this year’s festival. We simply cannot afford to be left out of the conversation at Cannes, cacophonous as it may be, if we want to be relevant in the wider world of marketing and creativity.

ICCO wasn’t first among the PR community to land at Cannes. Agencies like my own (Ketchum) and other global leaders like Weber Shandwick have enjoyed success for years in the main PR competition, and now Edelman has taken an elusive Grand Prix home for the PR industry in partnership with CAA (following Fleishman Hillard’s success in 2010).

But ICCO was first to recognise the opportunity for the wider PR community at Cannes, and to make possible a presence and contribution beyond the reach of individual agencies or winning campaigns. This came in several forms this year, but perhaps most powerfully in organising a new Young PR Lions competition, inspiring teams of young agency professionals from around the world to demonstrate in real time the power of PR to do big thing.

(Congrats, by the way, to winning team from Japan, and to the silver and bronze winners from the UK and Austria.  Thanks to leading agencies Ketchum, Ogilvy, Golin and H+K Strategies for walking the talk with their sponsorship support, too.  And thanks to the PRCA for overcoming a tight deadline to organize the UK competition, a move greatly appreciated by British agencies and a nice connection to a whole new generation of creative talent).

Our debut was a success. The crowd roared for our Young Lions, festival participants learned about ICCO and PR through our team on a dedicated stand in the main hall, and there were literally dozens of PR-related workshops, seminars and panels that ICCO helped promote and, importantly, we now have a voice and credibility we plan on putting to good use in the future.

We’re now in a position to work with the festival organizers to refine their awards criteria, share ideas on promoting PR and continue our efforts to make a career in our industry attractive to creative young stars.

And shining at Cannes was only the beginning.  From here we can take a little of the glamour and inspiration from the festival to help promote PR in our member’s countries, and help differentiate their agencies from those who are not as forward-looking or part of their national associations.

As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback – and hope to see you on the catwalk next year at Cannes.

 

As a Senior Partner and CEO of Ketchum’s European operations and chairman of the UK agency, David Gallagher brings more than 20 years of public relations experience, both as a client and as a senior agency adviser, to some of the world’s leading brands and companies.

David Gallagher oversees Ketchum’s nine European agencies and their specialist services, which include consumer public relations, healthcare communications, corporate affairs and social responsibility, public affairs, change management, and clinical trial recruitment.

He is president of the International Communications Consultancy Organization (ICCO), the global umbrella network of 30 national PR agency trade associations, and a fellow and past chairman of the UK Public Relations Consultants Association.  He chairs the World Economic Forum’s global agenda council on the future of media, and was the 2014 PR jury president for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Guest blog post by Pascal Beucler, SVP & Chief Strategy Officer of MSL Group So the question is back again, as the Cannes Lions Festival has started: why is it that the PR industry is not “more creative” – if creative at all? With 60% of PR professionals and 69% of clients believing that “the PR industry lacks big ideas” (according to the Holmes Report’s 2013 Creativity in PR study), it looks like the answer is not very encouraging…. In my humble opinion, there could be some sort of misleading-ness here and a quite unfortunate semantic misunderstanding. When you hear people telling you that PR professionals are not good at putting forward and driving “big ideas”, what these people actually refer to, and “come from”, is the traditional mindset of advertising: for them, a “big idea” is still what organizes a 30 second commercial, and is eventually carried through collateral material. No need to say that this vision is a bit outdated. Let’s look at figures: three years ago, TV commercials still represented 55% of cases. In 2013, digital channels, and particularly social media, jumped to 85% of the cases, “making it by far the most-used channel in the competition” (See “Why Creativity Sells” in Sunday, June-15-2014 Lions Daily News 2014). I would argue that, in 2014, the only valid criteria when it comes to judging creativity is today’s Engagement environment. A creative campaign is above all a campaign, which creates a high level of engagement with people and communities. (The rest is literature, or food for endless debates in ADs’ clubs) Having been one of the three judges, together with Marnie Kontovraki, Global Heineken Consumer PR Officer, and Michael Frohlich, Managing Director UK and EAME Consumer Marketing Practice for Ogilvy PR, for the inaugural Young PR Lions competition at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, I lived a vibrant and very insightful experience with 14 teams from 14 countries, with each team comprising two young agency PR professionals, all Millennials born after 1985 – an experience which brutally challenges the current doxa on what creativity is about. It’s so inspirational to see the hunger and passion with which these young professionals are taking up Citizenship challenges – but then that shouldn’t surprise us: as a global survey MSLGROUP ran last month in 16 countries underlined, Millennials today consider themselves empowered to help businesses and organizations change the world. As our survey reveals it, Millennials really are « Game Changers », with a « fresh » vision on business and Citizenship. (http://blog.mslgroup.com/why-and-how-businesses-need-to-partner-with-millennials-to-better-manage-resilience-relevance-resonance-in-troubled-times/) My colleagues and I at the jury saw a lot of genuine enthusiasm and strategic clarity in the vision the 14 teams developed, a true maturity from a creative standpoint and a lot of agility in the execution : these Asian, African, European, Latin American Millennials are global, boundless minds and really bold folks – their future is bright, and so is the future of our industry. They definitely don’t see big ideas the good old way, but as powerful 360° weapons which actually transform and reinvent PR the way we used to do it. And no need to say that it’s all digital and social, therefore effective and costless. Many insights provided by the teams were about Millennials’ commitment to make the world a better place. « Rouse the Millennial Army ! »,  « We can change the world ! », like one of the awarded teams said ! Yes, they love to be part of the change they want to see, and that’s terrific. Self-expression, storytelling, sharing, crowdfunding – all the key ingredients of what creates succes today in the world of PR (People Relations) are here, and it’s an amazingly refreshing and rewarding lesson. The Millennials are passionate about many things, global issues and causes, and they expect businesses, organisations and PR agencies to tap into their passion. We should agree that the age of conversation is very different from the age of advertising, with its vertical “big ideas”. It’s now all aboutbig data and smart ideas, which is pretty different, in many ways:

• the ideation and very often the content are largely “people generated”: tools like Spike, Trendsboard or Topsypro help gather “People’s insights” to deliver successful “People’s inside” campaigns
• the tempo of guerilla marketing is real-time, with daily messages if needed, whether a viral video, a social game, an event etc.
• the interaction between brands, agencies, people and communities is permanent, and fruitful

  Over the past few years, we thus moved from mass propaganda, with its heavy bombardment of “big” and simplistic top-down messages, to multifaceted engagement strategies. Advertisers are good at bombardment, we – experts in PR, for People Relations – are far better at the latter. Our PR “agency of the future” model should indeed derive business intelligence and data analytics to build creative content, nurture shareable conversations, and engage people and communities.   MSLGROUP’s Chief Strategy Officer, Pascal Beucler holds BAs in History and Language Sciences, a master’s degree in Linguistics and a post graduate degree in Semio-Linguistics. In 1987 he joined Intelligences, a subsidiary of Publicis, and in 1992 he became Managing Director. In 1994 he was promoted to Partner at Publicis Consultants, and then to General Manager of Carré Noir in 2001. Pascal is an Associate Professor at CELSA (Paris IV Sorbonne) and a visiting professor at HEC – one of France’s top business colleges. He has conducted research and published articles on various topics and in particular on the relationship between text and image. In 2005 Pascal was named Vice-President of Publicis Consultants | Worldwide, in charge of Brand Strategy and development of its international network.втб кредитка