Life in the moment at #CannesLions 2013

By
Friday, 28 June 2013

Whether you’re on the Croissette or Main Street, one thing is consistently clear: people are savvier than ever. The attention economy has been turned upside down because the pulse of the planet is at our fingertips — we decide what we want, when we want it, how we want it. Our attention, trust and advocacy are not for sale to brands, and traditional one-way marketing approaches are met with indifference or worse. We’re living through a cultural shift of enormous consequence, and you can miss the signals if you get too caught up in workaday tasks.

That’s why I love the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. For a few days in June, the advertising industry’s attention is focused on the same unfettered innovative spirit that drew me to a career in marketing communications 20 years ago. At Cannes Lions, we celebrate bold marketing, and we engage with the brand and agency visionaries who are reinventing the ways marketers communicate with customers at scale.

Life in the moment at #CannesLions 2013

We are passionate about the creativity the industry has demonstrated on Twitter over the years. This year in particular, the Cannes Lions winners all speak to rise of real-time marketing; the fluidity of great ideas across cultures; and the importance of earned media. With these themes pointing to the future of advertising they also reflect Twitter’s strengths as a public platform for self-expression that connects people and brands to life in the moment.

Twitter was a huge part of uniting people around the event: our friends at Buzz Radar told us that more than 91,000 Tweets used the #CannesLions hashtag during the festival — a 51% increase over last year. Being at Cannes Lions also gave us a chance to celebrate the innovative ways brands and agencies are using our platform to deliver brilliant marketing messages. We were humbled to see Twitter play such a vital supporting role in so many of the Cannes Lions-nominated campaigns.

Of course, we’re intent on keeping the collaborative spirit of Cannes Lions alive throughout the year. To that end, we’ve formed a brand and agency strategy team to help talented advertising and media craftspeople amplify their ideas on Twitter and on emerging platforms like Vine. We aim to support our agency and brand partners in three ways:

  • Inspire – sharing the “what” and the “how” of best-in-class work on Twitter from around the world.
  • Educate – building the foundation for winning on our platform.
  • Partner – collaborating on business challenges and marketing briefs by providing platform expertise and technical support.

Below you’ll find some of the winning Cannes Lions work that pushes the creative boundaries of our platform. We’re not the star of these campaigns; we simply take pride in helping to enable breakthrough communications that simultaneously delight people and move business forward.

Ogilvy Brasil won a Gold Lion for its “Celeb Grammar Cops” campaign on behalf of Red Balloon, a leading English school chain in Brazil. Grammar cops aged 8-13 were deputized to correct celebrity grammar on Twitter and prove their English language prowess.

Havas Worldwide, Amsterdam won a Silver Cyber Lion for their work with Metropole Orkest, a Dutch Orchestra that was struggling to keep its funding. The team created a Tweetphony where people sent in Tweets of music, the best of which were ultimately arranged into a score.

We hope you enjoy these examples, and look forward to helping you grow your business by meaningfully connecting your brand to what’s happening right now in the worlds of our 200 million “monthly” active users.

Posted by

Joel Lunenfeld - @Joell

Vice President, Global Brand Strategy