bon voyage
I spent all of Friday in the villa mostly sleeping and popping Advil. My goal was to rally for the Bacon party. Laying alone illing in a villa in the South of France I began to consider the Cannes experience. Before sharing those initial thoughts, I want to finish out my travelogue...
The Epoch crew returned from their day. As the time to leave for the Bacon party grew near no one had eaten. The Danes are renown for their culinary expertise but it was a good bet they weren't serving any pass around hor dourves. John and I took it upon ourselves to find food. We came across a pizza place not to far from the villa. The pizza was unmemorable but the boxes they came in were not. On top of the pizza box was a picture of man cooking pizza who is a dead ringer for George Clooney. Strange. Maybe the owner is a big fan of "Good Night and Good Luck".
After eating our mediocre pizza we hopped in our pre-ordered and on time taxis and headed to the Bacon Party. The Bacon Party at Cannes is legendary. It's rumored to be excessive even by Cannes standards. When we arrived I snapped this picture of Christian's t-shirt. It set the tone for the evening.
The first person I saw was Bacon co-Founder Martin Werner. I told him I was a little ill. He told me the best thing to do was to drink even more heavily. Remember to never seek out Martin for medical advice. I won't go into the details of the Bacon party. I try to keep this a family blog. I'll only share a couple of highlights.
When I entered the Villa I walked into the kitchen. Strewn across the counter were pizza boxes with half eaten pies. On the cover of the boxes were the same pictures of Clooney making pizzas. I guess in the French Riviera these pizza boxes are standard like in the ones in the US that say "Oven Fresh". I began to wonder if Clooney knows about this. Call CAA on Monday.
My other highlight is that I was offered MDMA...twice. I left early to ensure I'd get a cab down the hill. A car was picking me up in 10 hours to take me to the airport. I didn't want to be late.
In the morning, I awoke again with a fever. Packed, showered, took more Advil, chatted with Brent all the while praying my car would show. It did. Off to the airport. Patti McConnell was on my plane from Nice to London. I didn't find out until the end of the flight. We got to spend a few moments in Heathrow Terminal 5. It was a treat albeit way too short. My flight back took off late and a mere 15 hours later I was home with my wife, kids and dog swearing never to return.
Now some Cannes randomness.
I went to the official Cannes Lion hash tag on Twitter. For all the hoopla around social media and it's impact on the advertising industry it's remarkable how few are active. During my entire four days here, I never saw Cannes Lions trend once. Maybe as an industry we are more voyeurs than participants but if we want to understand it better maybe we should be more of both....
Believe it or not, there is some cool and meaningful stuff going on at Cannes. Being a vendor whose sole purpose it is to entertain the people we service in exchange for access and hope of a future project, I didn't experience any of the value with the exception of Fisher's panel I sneaked into. Thanks to the world wide web and Twitter, I was able to witness it virtually....
Patti Smith performed. I got it on Youtube. To date, 92 views.
At the show, they recognized the best slides. One thing advertising does arguably better than any other business in the world is create presentations. You don't have to get far to in this slide show to see why. Slide 5 says simply, "ROI is NOT Purpose. Best Brands weren't born to be the most profitable, but to make life better". Worth the scroll through.
If you go the Cannes Lions website you can see the videos. For some reason they won't let me embed. Not very social of them. No wonder there are no comments. Well, after all, they are French. There is some good stuff though. Martha Stewart. Ken Robinson. And, many captains of industry.
I won't spend time reviewing the award winners. I've never been a big fan of any awards. Recognition is nice but generally I find awards pretty silly. Case and point. When I turned on the British Airways in flight video system, it asked me to participate in a customer award voting for top airline entertainment system. They gave me the web address to cast my ballot for BA. Two negatives and one positive with this.
There is no wi-fi on the plane so I couldn't vote in the moment even if I wanted to. My system broke down in the middle of my movie. It took 15 minutes to reboot and I had to fast forward to where I left off. Then it broke again. Hardly a compelling case to go home, log on and cast my ballot. Those are the negatives. The positive. It only confirms my feelings about awards....
I bid Cannes adieu, au revoir and adios. I'm not sure I've ever missed LA this much.
Jerry Solomon is the managing partner of 
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