On Sunday, as the Cannes Festival boozed and yachted itself into life, I wrote in my article on Self Promotion that ‘I’m hoping for a few more clever ideas over the next few days.’
Since then, we reviewed two new pieces: Cash For Gold Lions, and The Cannescellation.
I’ve been keeping my eyes open for everything that could be vaguely classed as self promotion, and I’ve got three new schemes to present.
In no particular order:
Can Your Lions
Here’s an interesting and charitable new way for agencies to make a meaningful impact on the world around them. For every Lion which Mullen Lowe Group win, they’re going to donate the replacement cost of the award to the relief effort in Nepal. They reckon it costs $0.50 to feed a person for a day in Nepal; therefore a Grand Prix is worth 5,812 days of food.
“We’re excited to be in Cannes celebrating the best of global creativity, and we’re hopeful that the global creative community will join us in sharing our good fortune in support of this important humanitarian initiative,” says Alex Leikikh, Global Chief Executive Officer of Mullen Lowe Group. TBWA and McCann Worldgroup have joined them in this pledge, having raised at time of publication $92,506.
Check out the microsite: http://canyourlions.com/
Cannes Lionsitters
Mate Nagy – a Creative at VML – put us on to this hilarious idea by Aniko Toth & Adam Erdesz, who “want to meet interesting people while waiting for their turns at the Young Lions Film Competition.”
They write:
Parties go really crazy sometimes, especially after being honoured by a Cannes Lion. Keep the wild celebration for yourself, and don’t force your precious baby cub to live through all of it. Unforgettable forgotten moments? Your Lion never has to be part of them. Hire us and keep safe your darling until the end of the party.
Ani & Adam offer three packages, ideal for the boozed up sleep deprived Cannes-winner, especially as the week draws to an end – Lion Cub, Lioness, and Lion King.
To take them up on their offer, visit: www.canneslionsitters.com
Cannes We Meet
This scheme aims to bring the ad community in Cannes more productively together via a Linkedin meets Tinder type of scenario.
It’s easy to use, apparently (I don’t have a Linkedin account): “As 12,000 people descend on the south of France this week, Virool has built “Cannes We Meet?” a new matchmaking mobile site for people going to the main event. Like Tinder for networking, event attendees simply login with their LinkedIn profile, and start swiping left or right on other attendees in the app. If two people swipe right on each other, a match is made! We connect them via an email that is sent to both parties where they can set up their own meeting.”
Accompanying press materials are suspiciously airy on what the developers, Virool, expect people to use Cannes We Meet for. It is for high level professional meetings, or late night hotel-based affairs?
From the press release:
“At Virool, we are always making connections. In fact, our motto is to connect people to advertainment that they will love,” said Alex Debelov, CEO of Virool. “We wanted to take that same principle to the people at Cannes and so we developed the ‘Cannes We Meet?’ mobile site to help people make connections and do better business. At Cannes Lions Film Festival, we know that clients meet agencies, agencies win business, start-ups win funding and products find buyers. Now we’re helping bridge that gap and propel our industry forward.”
And there I just cynically thought it was a bunch of agency execs pissing the budget up the wall. A budget they could use to pay interns a living wage, or subsidise staff travel, or give people bonuses. How silly of me.
Get connecting Cannes, at: http://canneswemeet.com/
Now here’s where it gets exciting. Those lovely Data Analyst people at Brandwatch have helped crunch the social stats on every piece of Self Publicity in Cannes.
The Twitter conversation revolving around the #CannesLions hashtag has accumulated more than 127,000 mentions (as of 4:15pm EST*). Within the larger Cannes Lion conversation data set, ranked in popularity below (since June 15) are campaigns we’ve been looking at:
Guess the Lions – 136 mentions
Can Your Lions – 107 mentions
Grand Prix Generator – 90 mentions
Lions Arses – 74 mentions
Cannes We Meet – 57 mentions
The Cannescellation – 9 mentions
Cash for Gold Lions – 6 mentions
Cannes Lion Sitters – 6 mentions
And there we have it.
Leaving qualitative analysis aside, Guess the Lions is currently leading the conversation, with Mullen Lowe Group’s charitable Can Your Lions, pulling in a close second.
Will there be more surprises before the festival draws to a close? I expect so.
