Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

Brief, expressionistic outlines of some of the things that struck me when judging at Cannes this year. I'll write some more about them all soon, including in Campaign next week.

Everything is direct

We live in a world where every communication seems to want to start a dialogue with customers or prospects. It doesn't matter if it's Old Spice Guy answering questions on YouTube, or Tesco opening virtual shops on the Seoul underground, everybody's talking to everybody. And all their interlocutors are answering back.

Direct is everything

All advertisers are trying to find ways to measure the response their work is generating: some of them are selling stuff, some of them are soliciting donations, some of them are sending people on an amazing journey. All of them are counting, analysing, learning, improving.

ECRM isn't very creative

No one has found a way to make HTML e-mails lovely. We should.

Loyalty programmes are ugly

Ditto.

Get the category right

Not everyone understands that all the categories at Cannes are different. So if you enter some work for more than one, then you'll need to do more than one entry form. 

Tell it with pictures

Every winning entry had an audio visual presentation in the form of a film. It stands to reason, with as many as three quarters of the judges not having English as their first language. Slightly too much stop motion.