• by Catharine P. Taylor , June 18, 2008

I forget what I was doing last year at this time. All I know is that this year, through social media, I am virtually experiencing the Cannes Advertising Festival in a way I haven't experienced since the halcyon days of 2000, when I somehow convinced my-then employer, Organic, to send me there.

Not that the two really resemble one another.

One involved lots of sun and drinking, with a sprinkling of ads. The other is about being able to see the ad business through the portals provided by a number of social media sites, whether it's a post from Adweek's Brian Morrissey about the size of Microsoft's party boat, or the video streams provided by Cannes Fringe. (Given that the monetization model isn't exactly soup yet in social media, this virtual version, too, features only a sprinkling of ads, most of them posts of prospective award winners instead of ad banners.)

The best example of using social media to bring non-attendees to Cannes is JWT's "Cannes to the People" effort, which links together Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube to bring the Festival to JWT people who couldn't go. The shop's YouTube channel features JWT work that's up for awards; Flickr is filled with print ads, Twitter features random observations on the poor air-conditioning at the Carlton, and the low number of entries for the mobile Lions. The Facebook page, which currently has almost 750 fans, serves as the "Cannes to the People" hub-one of the things users can find there is a contest, wherein visitors have to complete the sentence "My boss went to Cannes and all I got was ..."

You may be saying that none of this is rocket science. And you'd be right. In fact, that's my point.

JWT has chosen readily available, entirely free, social media tools to bring its employees the Cannes experience, along with anyone else who wants to subscribe to its feeds--and I'm astounded that more agencies don't do things like this for Cannes and anyother important events. It's obvious these efforts do more than support their immediate mission; they also telegraph to the world--and one would hope, prospective clients--that the agency is a willing experimentalist, rather than holding on desperately to old ways or simply theorizing about digital change.

What other agencies are blogging Cannes? I couldn't find any, except for a little something from Rapp Collins.

I'm passionate about this topic for several reasons, including the fact that in the earliest part of my career, I did corporate public relations for some huge, traditional agencies, including Ogilvy & Mather and, yes, JWT. I've seen social media allow companies to lose their dependence on traditional media channels to get their messages out, and simultaneously, I witnessed the slow pace at which most agencies have embraced digital change, I've wondered how, if I had an agency PR job now, I would go about it.

Rather than spending the bulk of my time pitching reluctant reporters with little time and few print pages on my agency's latest campaign, I'd spend a lot of time on social media channels. As with JWT's Cannes effort, those initiatives would have the immediate goal of promoting a campaign, a marketing idea or an individual within the agency. But they'd also have the long-term goal of proving that the agency was immersed in digital.

The fact that few are doing these very simple things shows just how far most agencies have to go to understand new digital platforms. In the meantime, good job, JWT.