Yesterday afternoon we were invited to drinks hosted by Omnicom Media Group at the beautiful Carlton hotel. We had the chance to meet Colin Gottlieb, CEO EMEA Omnicom Media Group, and Philippa Brown CEO UK Omnicom Media Group amongst others, and our own Klara KrokPaszkowska even managed to speak to Mainardo de Nardis, CEO OMD Worldwide!

There was a cameo appearance from Sean Combs aka P Diddy, and Jo managed to photobomb a number of shots by accident (of course).

There were even more opportunities to meet lots of industry people at the Young Media Lions party followed by a Spotify party with Seb Fontaine. We somehow ended up meeting the founder of Adweek and saw fantastic views of Cannes from his rooftop terrace!

Today was an early but productive start with Guardian, LinkedIn, McDonald’s and YouTube talks. Highlights were fascinating insights from Sir Allen Parker on working in London Adland in the sixties and a very brave campaign to tackle food quality myths by McDonald’s Canada.

Must dash now – we have a busy afternoon filled with a Twitter talk followed by a farewell party with our good friends at Microsoft with a DJ set from Tiesto – a fitting end to an incredible few days!

See you soon MG OMD!

Jo & Lewis

The awards ceremony was followed by celebratory drinks at the very posh Carlton Hotel followed by the infamous Gutter Bar with John Lewis and our very own board members, Mike Florence and Tim Pearson. We had great fun taking photos with the Lion but god it is heavy!

This morning we saw the Gamechangers exhibition which celebrates winners from the past 60 years. Lewis spent a little longer than necessary staring at the WonderBra “Hello Boys” campaign…

Now we’ve just come out of a talk with Facebook, discussing how media now has to be participatory because “the captive audience is dying”, and in particular there was an interesting analogy of the Queen’s Coronation to describe integrated campaigns.

Now off for Omnicom drinks toast with Mainardo and Daryl Sims – it’s a hard life!

Jo & Lewis

What’s happened this week:

• Google bought user curated mapping service Waze for USD 1.1bn to strengthen its position in mapping and provide social context for geographic data.
• Apple launched iAd Workbench an advertising programme to self-serve on mobile with budgets as low as USD50.
• Facebook announced they are to adopt the #hashtag to enable more public conversations.

What we have learned:

• YouTube now generates over 1bn mobile video views per day.
• What’s App has processed a record 27bn messages in one day.
• 48% of UK adults listen to radio/audio online each week.

Cool stuff:

• AllJoyn is a new open source software framework to connect the internet of things.
• Google want to connect the next two thirds of the world’s population to cheap fast Internet services with balloons that float in the stratosphere.
• Parallax scrolling is an interesting innovation in Digital first design; Diesel’s Home Collection site provides an elegant example.

Where to find more:

• How to get a million likes on Facebook.
  • Scale comes from cascades. Think about how to enable fans’ relationships with their friends and friends’ friends…
  • …to start a cascade we need to generate at least one of these six effects; Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, and Stories
  • Digital technologies are transforming manufacturing to accelerate product innovation. The Nike Flyknit is the world’s first mass produced consumer product using additive manufacturing.
  • The nine questions boards should ask about the impact of technology.

This Creative Effectiveness Gold Lion follows a Grand Prix win last year for our Google Voice Campaign ‘Using the world’s oldest medium like the newest’, and a ‘Best Use of Branded Content’ Gold in 2011 for “GT Academy: Nissan and Sony PlayStation”.

A huge congratulations to all the team involved – we’re so proud that all the hard work over the past three years has been rewarded on such a prestigious international platform.

Now to celebrate!

We arrived at La Croisette last night, the beach strip where the festival sits, and immediately realised we’d over-estimated the dress code! A lot of flip flops and surfer shorts rival our chinos and heels (Jo only – honest). The venue is huge, much bigger than we had anticipated, and the heat unbearable – before you start feeling sorry for us in the dreary UK, we do have the sanctuary of the air con theatres.

Our first event was on the roof of the Palais des Festivals hosted by Adobe, and we even managed to bump into some Manning Gottlieb OMD clients – it’s a small world!

This morning, after a sea dip to blast away the ‘cobwebs’ we collected our young media lions passes and have already squeezed in two seminars. The first was a collaboration with Yahoo, and actor, musician, comedian, producer, and voice artist Jack Black on online content, where we learned about the future of publisher funded online content, and how to be better and bolder creatively “don’t try to make something existing better, try something new”. The second was a smaller talk with Rory Sutherland on “Digital Divas” – the real hardcore digital females, of which the UK has the highest percentage in the world. We also discovered that the country where most women lose sleep due to their mobile addiction is Brazil with the UK actually in last place!

For today we’ll leave you with a quote from Jack Black which he said in reference to writing a comedy song, but pertinent to us in our bid to be more creative “fight the instinct to go to the safe place”

Check back each day this week for more Cannes updates through the eyes of two Cannes virgins, and follow us on Twitter, @obladeoblada and @jojoba85

A bientot!

Lewis and Jo

The Care and Support Alliance (CSA) has 70+ members, mostly charities including Age UK, and it exists to make the case for better social care for the millions of older and disabled people who depend on it every day, collectively representing millions of people in this country.

Today, the CSA is writing a special letter to Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, asking him to ‘Invest in Care’, which not only makes an incredible difference to millions, but also helps to relieve NHS resource.

You can get behind the petition by showing your support on Twitter with the hashtag #investincare.

For more information on the campaign please see the Care and Support Alliance tumblr here.

What’s happened this week:

• Channel 4 announced the 4Now app a dedicated channel wide second screen app for multiple shows.
• E3 kicks of this week early announcements from Microsoft and Sony include
  • A November launch date and GBP 429 price point for the Xbox One.
  • Our first glimpse of the PS4 console, at a lower price with many gamer friendly options.
  • The Gran Turismo 6 concept video gives us a taste of what is to come.
• Apple have announced a new look in iOS7 incorporating a flatter look, iTunes Radio and deep in car integration.

What we have learned:

• USD 37.9bn income makes Google the world’s largest media owner, they are a ‘CBS Corporation’ ahead of the next largest, DirecTV.
• Digital Media will account for 37% of global ad revenues by 2017 according to the PwC Global Entertainment Media Outlook report.
• Flurry expect there to be over 2bn connected smartphones and tablets worldwide by 2014.

Cool stuff:

• Unbelievably, the monster dreamer 3d prints creatures based on a child’s brainwaves.
• Cutting edge retail stores in New York and London are bringing the best of the digital experience, personalisation, home delivery and social sharing to the in-store experience.
• Your Wi-Fi can ‘see’ you move allowing control of gadgets with gestures in any room.

Where to find more:

• Why we need to look to today’s emerging behaviours for tomorrow’s startups and media innovations.
• Why Memes matter, connecting diverse ideas (including brands) is a joyful experience we all appreciate.
• How fans are remixing TV shows to re-define the narrative.

What’s happened this week:

• CNN and buzzfeed announced a major investment in video news content on the YouTube platform. It is a sign of the kind of ‘old and new’ media tie up we can expect to see much more of.
• The annual All Things Digital conference saw the technology elite discuss the impending near future of wearable computing and the impact of billions of sensors on every sector.
• A new KPCB Internet trends deck from Mary Meeker was released at  the ATD conference including observations such as;
  • Over half a billion photos are shared each day online.
  • 11 hours of audio is uploaded to soundcloud each minute.
  • 24% of the world’s online population shares everything or most things online.

What we have learned:

• Global IP traffic will triple by 2017 according to  Cisco’s visual web index driven by 3.6bn users using 19 billion devices.
• The European online advertising market was worth Euro 24.3bn in 2012, growing 115.% over 2011.
• The geography of tweets provides a geographical perspective of the ‘Twittersphere’.

Cool stuff:

• *#Dream40 is Shakespeare seen through the eyes of the Internet, a fascinating experiment in Digital performance art from the RSC and Google.
• Companies are increasingly using open government data to drive their services, from the social impact of products to reliability of cars.
• Fanhattan is a new set top box  that integrates all of our diverse TV sources into one universal EPG.

Where to find more:

• Jaron Lanier believes that personal data is the key to a new wave of economic growth.
• McKinsey believe that big data customer journey analysis can drive far better results when led by expert hypothesis.
• The fundamentals of the web for non-developers or ‘everything you wanted to know about technical web jargon but were afraid to ask’.

Huge thanks to our amazing teachers Yina, Amy O’Malley, Tom Cocker, Sneha Nagesh, Clare Walsh, and Gemma Zirfas, for sharing their talents with us. We’re now multi-lingual, super stylish, cooking sports stars…

What’s happened this week:

• The final major console of the eighth generation, the  Xbox One, was announced by Microsoft with a focus on integrated living room entertainment rather than core gaming.
• A tie up with the NFL illustrates future plans for sports coverage with a game layer on top of the live game feed.
• Quantum Break is both a TV drama and a video game that mutually interact.
• Nielsen has tied up with IBM’s Watson supercomputer to develop machine learning for media planning and measurement.
• Amazon announced a fan fiction store for Kindle in which fans can sell licensed works based on favorite TV shows.

What we have learned:

• The installed base of smartphones worldwide will be over 3bn by 2017, 3x the volume of 2012 from Enders Analysis: Mobile is eating the World.
• Google has discovered over 30 trillion unique addresses on the web and deals with over 3bn queries per day.
• Tablets are now driving over 10% of ecommerce traffic and smart devices in total over 20%.

Cool stuff:

• Top Charts is a new way to look at real time search trends from Google.
• Quantum Dot displays are only one step away from full commercialisation bringing a huge leap forward in colour in all kinds of screens.
• Whilst colour is coming to e-ink displays via Qualcomm’s Mirasol.
• Record your favourite TV show with a tweet, an elegant piece of branded utility from a Brazilian broadcast platform.

Where to find more:

• McKinsey forecast that 12 emerging technologies will provide USD 14-33 trillion of annual economic value by 2025, Mobile Internet, Knowledge Automation and the Internet of Things head the list.
• TV content is evolving fast, as on-demand viewing scales, to become hyper-serialised.
• The Venture Capital community sees machine learning and wearable computing as the most impactful technology trends of the next few years.