Cannes Lions — where the advertising world gets to rub shoulders with movie stars

WE ALL know about the Cannes Film Festival with the beautiful movie stars and prestigious awards. But did you know there’s a whole other Cannes festival?

American actor, Jared Leto attends the Cannes Lions 2014, 61st International Advertising Festival in Cannes, southern France, Wednesday, June 18, 2014. The Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival is a world's meeting place for professionals in the communications industry.(AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau)

WHEN you think of Cannes, you think of film stars walking down red carpets next to the French Riviera.

So you would be forgiven for being confused about why #canneslions keeps popping up in your social media feed. Isn’t it over? Wasn’t the Cannes Film Festival in May?

There’s actually a whole other festival in Cannes every year. No, not THAT festival (more on that later). It’s the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Every year in June, the advertising world descends on Cannes for a week with copious amounts of backslapping about all the ‘innovative’ work they’ve produced in the previous 12 months, before all getting roundly smashed at the Gutter Bar before sunrise.

Patrick Stewart with his enormous social media appeal taught adlanders how to get it right.

Between all the worshipping of chief creative officers, chief marketing officers and a bunch of people who are only really famous in adland is an increasingly impressive list of celebrities dragooned to talk about how their experiences relates to the world of advertising, branding and media.

This year, the creators of Game of Thrones, DB Weiss and David Benioff, was on hand to expound on the “power of story” while Rob Lowe gave his thoughts on authenticity. David Hasselhoff, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jared Leto, Armando Iannucci (Veep and The Thick of It), Ne-Yo, Kanye West, Bono, Patrick Stewart, Ralph Fiennes and Gisele Bündchen all made appearances on stage for the many seminars crammed into the week.

In the past few years, the likes of Bill Clinton, the late Lou Reed, Conan O’Brien, Anderson Cooper and P Diddy have graced the festival.

Bill Clinton was a speaker at Cannes in 2012.

Adland gathers to debate ideas about how to make their work more effective, more attractive and more profitable. Namely, how to get you to watch/listen to/engage with the ads that sometimes don’t even look like ads anymore.

A huge part of the Cannes Lions is the awards. To nab a coveted Lion confers the recipient all attendant bragging rights for the year (and, for some, the decade) to come. If an agency picks up a Lion, it’ll will be on everyone’s email signatures the next day. The awards are hugely expensive to enter, with each entry costing up to $2000 just to be in contention. There were rumours a certain Brazilian ad agency spent $7 million on entries in 2013.

Kanye West talked about, well, Kanye West at Cannes.

The 2013 Cannes is where Australian agency McCann Melbourne came home with 28 Lions, including five Grands Prix for what is now the most awarded ad campaign in history — ‘Dumb Ways to Die’.

Sorry if we just got the ‘Dumb Ways to Die’ ditty in your head.

But more than the awards, the famous faces and the drinking is the networking. When you’ve got the most important brand marketers from all over the world in one little town, who between them controls billions of dollars, you can be sure that there’s a lot of jostling, card-swapping and promises of “you know we can do that launch campaign better for you, let’s do lunch when we get home”. So there are a lot of parties. On expensive yachts. With overflowing alcohol.

Which brings this around to that other, other Cannes festival, the Hot d’Or, otherwise known as the Cannes Porn Festival, complete with its own set of prestigious awards. Sadly, the Hot d’Or shut up shop in 2001, with an one-off resurgence in 2009.