Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Just got out of a seminar where John Battelle was the guy on stage saying the smartest things. The rest of our team is over at the Google Sandbox or maybe looking for the Twitter Beach Lounge. Tomorrow, I scored a ticket to the Facebook reception but our client Say Media is putting on a bigger party with the hot electro dance punk band Friendly Fires.

SXSW? No. Welcome to Cannes Lions 2011 where there are as many people attending from the lands known as Silicon Valley (or Tech City) as from some actual countries.

Invasion of the Attention Snatchers

Of course, this has been going on for a while. As consumers have transformed into users, marketers must follow. As the audience’s attention has wandered far from the telly ad and deep into their iPad, agencies have added talent that know what heat mapping and usability testing mean.

Our own H&K seminar tomorrow features a creative powerhouse with an addiction factor all brands would die for. By bringing Peter Vesterbacka, the Mighty Eagle of Rovio Mobile, to the Debussy Theatre, we hope to share a little of the pixel dust that make Angry Birds such a magically success story. Please join us on 21 Tuesday at 5:30pm in Cannes or via Twitter everywhere.

Never in living memory has there been so much conversation about communication. Marketing and Technology both had plenty of industry conferences in the past. Since they’ve mashed up, it feels like we are all now in the event business. Speaking, attending, following. *Exhausting*. You can even track the trends just by watching the new titles roll out from professional event companies like Haymarket and DMG.

Always on hashtags
But there is a lovely twist to this all you can eat symposium smorgasbord. Several of the more grassrootsy events are true communities rather than trade shows. More Burning Man, than ad:tech.
For most events, the hashtag comes and goes. Twitter search won’t pull up tweets more than a few days old. With serial events like #media140, #140conf, and the aptly named #LikeMinds, the hashtag is always fresh. Not only are they based on a series of conferences, they have meetups, tweetups, and lots of @ing in-between. It’s lovely.

Active attendees
Private, participatory events, like WPP’s Stream, share this belief that the community makes the unconference. Mega events, like the ever more popular SXSW,  take it to the people via their Panel Picker. While SXSW is not until March, the blogosphere is alive with buzz right now as we all canvas for votes from our peers. Me too. More on that next post.

With luck I will see y’all in Texas, but it could be equally inspiring to meetup right here.

Whether or not you are one of the lucky crew swanning off to the Riviera, the global village of marketing will have all eyes on the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival this month.

To get the party started, we are inviting bloggers, media peeps and agency friends to our place to raise a glass of rosé together in toast to the creative spirit. If you follow Cannes, do join us on Wednesday 9 June from 6:00ish – 9:00pm. DM me or email Poppy to request an invite. We’ll have a bit of food, lots of drink and a perhaps a fun debate on why the week is still titled just ‘Advertising’ Festival.

With our global chairman as jury president and a street action seminar with Improv Everwhere to co-create, I must admit the H&K team are pretty psyched. Just don’t make me guess who’s going to win.

It’s Spring. Even in London, where it seems the lion doesn’t ever give way to the lamb. Which is an added reason I am so psyched to be going to the Cannes Lions Festival next month.

Winning a Lion is the holy grail of the annual crusade to Cannes. But creatives and clients alike flock to selected seminars in order to bring back some useful inspiration in addition to rosé colored memories.

For the H&K seminar, we wanted to contribute something that would literally get the delegates up off their seats. So we invited Charlie Todd, founder of Improv Everywhere to help us get interactive IRL. His work has inspired me (and many others) for years. It will be even more amazing to be a part of it.

Are you going to Cannes? We need your help. Please rsvp to our event on Facebook, follow me or H&K on Twitter, or simply show up on Tuesday 22 June at 11am in Debussy where Charlie will prep us for action.

Like any social application that gets better and better the more people use it, our mission in Cannes will need all our friends to make it huge. Having the biggest concentration of creative extroverts in the world mashed up with Charlie’s inventive direction is guaranteed to produce some fun.

For now, here’s a couple of Improv Everywhere classics to hold us until June.

Thanks to fun apps like My Tweet 16, all our fledgling tweets can be uncovered. As the countdown to the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival begins, I was reminded of mine.

With a cosmic bit of serendipity, my first trip to this holy ground was last year when H&K brought Biz Stone to our seminar. We held the first ever Tweetup at Cannes. Biz answered live tweets from the audience and how he describes Twitter is worth reviewing. Here are a couple of clips but the whole seminar is on our YouTube channel. Enjoy and stay tuned as we start to talk about what adventures this year’s seminar will bring.

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The benefits of Twitter to companies