3Recap

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Recap day 3Commander

data If you’ve been to some of the other of this year’s conferences—South by Southwest, Mobile World Congress, or the Consumer Electronics Show, you may have heard that data is so ubiquitous and readily collected that it is a commodity. It is, in IBM’s argot, the world’s next natural resource. What you do with it is the grand challenge, and, as IBM CEO Ginny Rometty said back in March, those who master prescriptive analytics will have competitive advantage. That model works well for technology and business model thinking, but does it fit with creativity as well? Chris Baylis of Iris Worldwide thinks so. He believes that data empowers us to ask more insightful questions and develop more creative solutions, which seems to be the analog companion to sophisticated digital analytics. Imagine how data can juice creativity and idea generation. Sunday’s Latinworks presentation asserted that true, breakthrough creativity is rare. Will that still be the case when a cognitive computer is part of the creative team?

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Recap day 3L i o n sCannes2 0 1 4

brains!

brains!! Considering all the talk of brains today, you’d have thought it was zombie day at Cannes. Well, you’d have thought you’d have thought it, but neuroscientists Beau Lotto and Tarli Sharot, who came for TED@Cannes, made pretty damn clear that everything is an illusion. It was like watching Now You See Me—only shorter and better. They called into question that time-honored tool of the ad biz: consumer research. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies to our brains, too, and we subconsciously shade our answers depending on how we’re being observed. We’re even more delusional than that, as it turns out. We can’t possibly tell the truth about our feelings and motivations even when we try. Fortunately, Nielsen has come to save the day by using neurological assessment tools to pry into what happens in the split second when we make a decision—long before we give some ex post facto rationalization to the nice man asking the questions. It’s comforting to know that the boffins of consumer research—the ones who track our purchasing and viewing habits—have gone from tracking our digital footprints to the precognitive unzipping of our mental trousers. There’s no possible way this could ever backfire.

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yahoo! Kanye is here! Kanye West made another stop on his global ego trip and delivered an hour long prose poem, highlighted by his nuanced exegesis on good taste: “The world as a whole is fucking ugly….Bad taste is vulgar. What is the most distasteful thing you can do? Kill somebody. So good taste is the opposite of that.” Choosing every day to avoid homicide is the epitome of good taste, says Mr. West. It’s good to set yourself a challenge. Marissa Mayer also made Cannes a stopover on her global personality trip, presenting her third underwhelming keynote in a row. Her specialty seems to be shilling Yahoo! products that no one finds especially compelling, and her impassive cheerfulness cracks a little more with each rendition.

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PeaK

CannesWe may have reached Peak Cannes. There’s an air of pre-crash giddiness that has overspread the Croisette this year. People wonder aloud if it’s worth the investment, and it’s not just weary-veteran posturing talking. For the first time, Cannes hosted an Insights with the Jury session so that people could learn from how the juries make their award decisions. There’s always been an element of strategy in winning a Lion, but as this series of sessions makes clear, the creative work itself is now just one element of a winning package. Celebrity culture is another longstanding part of Cannes, but this year the general consensus is that the famous people have been a giant waste of time. On top of that, the wealth of available talks means that it’s become impossible for one person to get a full sense of the festival, leading to a diminished intimacy with the event and contributing to the Roaring 20s vibe. The social sweepstakes (and let’s not name names here, shall we?) have added an extra element of competitiveness to an already fiercely competitive week. What’s next? Who has the biggest cabana?

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