Last night was the first Cannes Lions award ceremony of 2010. It also marked the second year PR Lions were awarded.
Since arriving, I’ve anxiously anticipated this event and the chance to see great PR campaigns from agencies around the world. As I began sifting through the Lions short list in the morning, my excitement was tempered. I found myself asking the question many in the PR industry are now pondering: Why the low number of submissions by PR agencies?
The Cannes Lions committee noted that there was a 32% increase this year in PR entries. Yet many of the PR campaigns were submitted by non-PR agencies. Even more curious: the PR campaign that received the Grand Prix was actually submitted by an ad agency!
Check out my PRWeek blog post to hear more about the awards: http://www.prweekus.com/prweek-insider/section/1255/
Stay tuned for more insider info on Cannes Lions.
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So far, the Cannes Lions Festival has been very exciting! Between the awards ceremonies, seminars, classes, workshops and panel discussions, there’s so much creativity and inspiration all in one place. Being here is also a chance to see old friends in the industry and make new ones.
Speaking of friends, today I attended an interesting “Master Class” titled Five Secrets for Inspiring Your Clients, presented by Mary Beth West, Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer of Kraft Foods, Inc. Mary Beth started her discussion with a bold statement, “I hate being called a client because it’s formal and clinical. I prefer to be thought of as a friend.”
Mary Beth values the power of personal relationships, which are at the heart of the partnerships she can count on. With every relationship, there’s give and take, and here are the five things Mary Beth is looking for from her agencies partners:
1) Teach us something new: Our role at agencies is to be out there, exploring the world and bringing that learning and creativity back into the company.
2) Don’t digitally bug us – talk to us:
Technology is all around us, but you can’t forget that emails don’t inspire, people and their ideas do. Be present!
3) Get to know us without blinders on:
Take the time to get to know who we are and what we do as broadly as possible.
4) Look outside the category for inspiration: Find an analog in a category the brand is aspiring to and get to know it. Mary Beth shared the work Kraft did with Crystal Light — how they looked at it as a health and beauty brand vs. a simple drink which inspired the team to reach outside the usual confines, and spend a day at the Fashion Institute of Technology, tour beauty and fashion retailers and work with a design team that specialized in beauty not beverages. As an agency that specializes in marketing-to-women, BRAVO for getting the Crystal Light brand’s “reinvigoration” so right!
5) Move it forward fast: In today’s marketing world, the need for rapid innovation is ever present. Mary Beth talked about “hot house” ideation sessions that Kraft has held where teams spend two or three days together and run through three steps, Stimulate, Ruminate and Activate, coming out ready to go with an idea.
Who could argue with a CMO wanting these five things from her agency partners? These “secrets” are at the core of building supportive and sustainable relationships with our client partners, and are tenets to live by.
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This week, I’ll be reporting from the Cannes Lions 57th International Advertising Festival. It is one of the most exciting industry events of the year, where corporate and agency leaders come together to learn, debate, celebrate success and consider “what’s next?”
In thinking about how the industry is evolving, nothing makes us happier than CMOs who fully embrace PR as an integral part of holistic brand building – a norm rather than an exception these days. To read more, click here.
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You wondered what kind of a snack you would get on the plane. You laughed with the flight attendants. You felt pretty special. You usually arrived on time. Remember those days?
I’m writing this while on a flight to Chicago. MMC’s director of Media Connections Suzanne Haber, Vice President Jenn Horowitz and I are off to a meeting that we’re really excited about. I’m not sure the friendly skies are as excited as us! We were delayed due to weather. Nothing can be done about that. There wasn’t room for Suzanne’s bag so it was gate checked. I have a feeling we’re going to miss our connecting flight. We’ll probably have to rent a car and drive to our final meeting destination in Wisconsin.
I wouldn’t exactly call this glamorous. But for every cloud – and there are a lot out in the sky tonight – there’s a silver lining.
Being the talkative bunch that we are, we’re using our time wisely. We covered the top media stories this week, the latest pop culture trends (our junior trend watchers at the agency tell us big hair is back and blue for nails is in!), a competitive business issue one of our clients is facing and a big opportunity another client has to drive a leadership story in the marketplace.
You don’t often get quiet time like you do when “stuck” in transit. It reminded me of one of our monthly Strategic Innovations Group meetings and how important it is to put time aside to absorb, think about different perspectives and angles of attack and riff off each other. It was a remote SIG session if you will. Our next slated session is next week. Hopefully, with travel the way it is, I’ll make it back in time for it!
I ride the subway to and from work every day. The commute isn’t always fun or easy, but it is always an opportunity to look into the “window of the world.”
In the past months, with the economy the way it is, my fellow commuters have been a bit sleepier, more agitated and generally less compassionate for the man on the train who is well dressed and begging for money.
The last few weeks have brought the swine flu to NY and some of these same people are wearing face masks – not sure if they’re sick or worried. And, just this morning a man apologized to me after sneezing. Not that I asked, but he politely told me that he has allergies not the flu
this made me stop to think for a minute about how important your health and well-being really is.
Now, as the head of our Well-Being practice, this is something I think about all day on behalf of our clients
from choosing the right hand soap to eating a healthy breakfast to jump start the day to helping women start important conversations about things society has made it difficult to talk about like vaginal care and her sexual satisfaction to using powerful, effective and safe treatments for common issues like sinusitis and allergies (by the way, I told the sneezing man on the subway about this one!) just to name a few.
No matter the stress life brings with money, work, family, friends or, in my case planning a wedding in six months, we all have to remember that your body is not just a temple, but your temple and you must treat it as such.
While we may not be in control of all things health related, you can and should put your well-being at center stage in many of the choices you make. For instance, I choose to make an appointment for my annual check-up today, take an exercise class tomorrow, and am committing to getting eight hours of sleep this Saturday and Sunday. What will you give your body this week?
