Cannes, France
Mission Title: A World of Ads – Interview with Julian Boulding
Mission By: Gaia Danieli, Alessandro Spreafico
Mission Finished on Date: 19-06-2008
SCRIPT
- Go to Cannes and check out the Cannes Lions 2008.
- Capture the festival's atmosphere, the ad screenings and the official ceremonies. What are the best spots and what makes them fascinating? Is it technical accuracy is the ability to create a poetic imaginary to service business?
- Taping the festival events, focus especially on the galas and the informal situations when people can interact in a more relaxed way.
- Interview Julian Boulding and ask him about his work. How does his business model work? What makes it different and what makes it better than other solutions?
TRAVEL BAG
How does a creative industry create new networking models?
What about ads? We zap through them on the TV, take a glance of the big ones covering the city walls when we stop at a red light, we passively learn to ignore them while surfing the internet. But we also sing their jingles under the shower, email our friends the funniest ones, learn their codes, question their morality. Matching very strict rules with ground-breaking (or very updated) creative standards, advertising makes a 30 second short a product in itself. Spots and campaigns squeeze pop culture together, gathering in esteemed directors, sport icons and divas in the same business, and are celebrated by part-fair, part-gala events like the Cannes Lions festival, where the creative guild gives away awards and creates new networking connections.
To get people interested in things, advertisers have been crashing one media barrier after another and, being money the most effective medium – and more transnational than ideas – some smart creative entrepreneurs have been able to create interesting business models to work by. Julian Boulding, founder of thenetworkone Management Ltd., prefers networking to absorbing: instead of pumping companies inside a growing multinational corporate colossus, he works with independent, owner-run agencies from all over the world. This way, small companies get to network and work with big clients in an almost direct way, and the costs go down without hurting the business. For Boulding, occasions like the Cannes Lions are not just for getting drunk under the moonlight, but also a chance to dig through the most interesting emerging international companies.
Mission Report
The video records Cannes’ transformation during the days of the advertising festival, which witnesses the city turning from a quiet – or almost so – town of Southern France, typically provençal, into a destination for business and public relations, where market and advertising make you forget about its original nature. So the local market of antiques and the port make room for the Croisette and the Palais, for a week hosting film shows, press campaigns, interactive projects and everything dealing with communication.
The parties on the hills just outside Cannes or taking place in luxurious hotels provide the event with a special setting, so much so that many advertising agents decide not to enter the Palais (are maybe the ticket too expensive?), only doing PR, jumping from one party to the other, until they get to the Martinez very late at night.
Having reached its 55th edition, Cannes hosted a pretty chaotic festival, which for the first time has seen two absolute winners: Halo 3, a work that raised various controversies because of its warmongering character, and Cadbury, a commercial based on a concept that goes beyond product promotion and back to an entertainment form close to the carosello.
Gaia Danieli, Alessandro Spreafico
