Passion's Katie Mackin on the Game-changers at Cannes

As the International Festival of Creativity commences for another year, and the 12,000+ delegates contemplate with whom they’ll share their first magnum of rosé at the Carlton, the water cooler chit chat at Passion Melbourne (because we’re such a serious bunch) has been focused around who’ll take home the gongs in the Innovation classes, particularly the new Creative Data category. 

Digital media is built on gathering, interpreting and utilising data around consumer behaviours and it’s intriguing to see how this is now acting as a creative catalyst in more ‘traditional’ advertising mediums. From the Aus/NZ market, a standout illustration of the clever transposition of data via creativity and technology is Volkswagen ‘Reduce Speed Dial’, from Colenso BBDO and Finch. This campaign is a great example of companies understanding the need to foster world-bettering ideas, which (in addition to bettering the world) have the fortunate side effect of generating countless (or, in fact, in this day and age, very countable) warm fuzzies towards their brands. Consumers are engaging with campaigns across an unprecedented number of touchpoints and this opens up an exciting opportunity to extrapolate an idea in myriad ways. 

And of course, clients love the opportunity afforded them to more precisely than ever before measure ROI (though of course we’d be loathed to go on about something like that - this is a festival of creativity after all).

Closer to home, we’re rapt to have our Wieden + Kennedy collaboration, the Nike ‘Risk Everything’ campaign (their biggest interactive undertaking to date) in the running for a bunch of shiny things this year. It’s not our first foray into the world of real-time puppeteering (having used the technology to enable Aleksandr the Meerkat to interview Arnold Schwarzenegger for the ‘Compare the Market’ campaign, for example) but it’s certainly our most ambitious. During the World Cup, Passion and Wieden + Kennedy Portland created 100 minutes of live, full-CG animated content in 25 days. This capacity to create several minutes of animation in next-to-no time as opposed to the weeks and months it would ordinarily take is certainly a game-changer, and lends itself to pretty limitless iterations in the future. 

Of course, I’d be fibbing if I told you that we weren’t thinking about all of the more superficial questions that this time of year in Cannes presents… like what we’ll be wearing, whose yacht we’ll be swanning about on and which colleague will disappear for several unaccountable days. 

But these things are best left to the gods. I’ll see you for a glass (ahem) of rosé at the Gutter Bar. Don’t forget your sunglasses (or your Solpadeine).