Eric Schmidt Talks Revolution + Consumer-Driven Innovation

Yesterday afternoon at the Lions, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt sat with VP-Google Creative Lab Andy Berndt to discuss innovation, imagination and the internet.

Schmidt kicked off the discussion by pointing out the internet is a special kind of business because it is highly Moore's Law-driven: "If you take a country that's got 40% internet penetration, and you see it in the next five years, broadband penetration will be up to 80%." Your business just doubled and you didn't have to do anything -- this doesn't happen in any other industry.

The idea that your business can be expanded as a function of users broadening your market, as opposed to you taking steps to expand in the traditional sense, is something we are still grappling with.

"The implications for this consumer-driven phenomena are not well-understood," Schmidt said, pointing out that the Middle East's current ongoing social media-driven struggles for democracy are a good example of the unexpected fruit such phenomena yields. This is just the beginning of users' muscle-flexing.

Read the rest of this nummy num-num on Yahoo! Scene, for which I'm doing Cannes Lions coverage this year.

'Transparency' Used to Hide Truths, Says Terry Gilliam

We had a treat on Tuesday night. Fast Company's Le Rooftop party played host to a short evening panel featuring American Express, Arcade Fire and Terry Gilliam, best known for his Monty Python work (and maybe also for Lost in La Mancha, because that was bloody magnificent).

Gilliam didn't speak much, but when he did it was with a kind but long-suffering smile -- the sort you give when you're tired of a topic but understand others' persistent curiosity. Of the things he said that one can easily scale from advertising to life, he half-jokingly observed that "transparency is a word used to cover the truth in most instances."

Read the rest of this nummy num-num on Yahoo! Scene, for which I'm doing Cannes Lions coverage this year.

The Cannes Lions Midweek Existential Crisis

It's hard to describe the state of you in Cannes by the middle of the week. By Wednesday night, it's likely you haven't slept in four days. The drinking starts around noon, and you're constantly being blindsided by huge vacuums of people who want to chat about their creative ideas, which seesaw between brilliant and horrific, depending on what fluid you just swallowed.

One guy spent a night regaling Ask Wappling and me about his "sublime" comic strip idea, in which men and women have short, terse exchanges -- sort of like XKCD but stupid. (Man: "Hi!" Woman: "I shaved my legs for this?") The men are always smiling penises, and the women are squiggles in the shape of their pubic hair. Squiggles can vary by size and type.

Be careful when you've been chosen for a creative revelation like this. The less convinced you look, the more insistent the person gets about his genius.

But the trauma I felt, watching those banal prattling penises and vaginas appear in front of me, is only a distant memory. It was Monday around 5 AM.

Read the rest of this nummy num-num on Yahoo! Scene.

Bob Garfield on Creativity + the Ad that First Inspired Him

Creatives young and old have had a love/hate relationship with Bob Garfield, who for the last 25 years has produced his "Ad Review" segment on Advertising Age. (His position on this? On a scale of one to five, few ads are total zeros and few ads are prize fives. Over his whole career the average ad has received about a 3.4, significantly higher than the average true quality of industry television advertising output at large.)

Ad bloggers, whether or not they agree with his arguments, arguably see him as the person who began what they continue today. He's also the author of The Chaos Scenario and co-hosts National Public Radio's "On the Media."

I ran into Bob at the Carlton this weekend, then later Monday in front of the Palais, sporting a decidedly cannois summer hat. (I didn't know at the time, but it was also his birthday.) He thoughtfully agreed to sit and talk at a nearby beach side restaurant -- which we only later discovered is probably the loudest atmospheres in all the land.

Read the rest of this nummy num-num on Yahoo! Scene, for which I'm doing Cannes Lions coverage this year.

SapientNitro: Anatomy of a Culture Cult

Some moments after I sat down with SapientNitro’s Worldwide Chief Creative Director Gaston Legorburu and Creative Director John McHale, I got a hard sense of what our time together would be about.

“Our secret weapon is our culture,” Gaston said. And the culture is bred and nourished with conscious attention.

They reflected that they've never actually discussed this with the press before, and maybe because of that, they sat and outlined the entire blueprint.

Read the rest of this (EPIC!) nummy num-num on Yahoo! Scene, for which I'm doing Cannes Lions coverage this year.

Jonah Lehrer at Cannes Lions: The Science of Creativity is Instinctive

Author and Wired editor Jonah Lehrer joined DraftFCB's Director of Strategic Planning Matthew Willcox to discuss the science of creativity, specifically what triggers it and whether it can be honed.

One major problem we have with creativity reveals itself in linguistics: we talk like it's singular, but it's plural. Our job is to think creatively the right way at the right time, applying the appropriate mental tools to the task at hand.

Relaxation Breeds Insight

To understand the different facets of creativity, it helps to know what precedes a moment of insight: alpha waves, closely associated with states of relaxation. Walking to the beach, taking a shower, daydreaming -- doing something you really like doing, in other words -- is what makes it possible for your mind to arrive at what we traditionally understand to be creative epiphanies.

The logic is simple. When we're not relaxed, we're too focused, producing both physical and mental tensions. Tension only restricts and builds upon itself, stifling any semblance of insight before it can even be born.

This is the first key: We assume productivity means we're at our desks, staring at a computer screen. But when you need huge conceptual breakthroughs, get away and bury your toes in the sand, or take a warm shower. Do whatever you must to release your mind from the manacles of the problem.

Read the rest of this nummy num-num at Yahoo! Scene, for which I'm doing Cannes Lions coverage this year.

Find Us At Cannes. In PowerPuff Girl Outfits.*

With a little help from Cake Group, Yahoo's launched Yahoo Scene, a magnificent little destination that aspires to give you your industry conference + nightlife fix in the unhappy event that you can't dance on the kegs yourself.

Beginning next week, I join Steve Hall of Adrants and Ask Wappling of Adland in covering the Cannes Lions for Scene. It's going to be entirely too much awesome; what's more, Ask has already promised the whole internet we'll be coming as PowerPuff Girls. (I will be the angry one, Steve will be bubbly blue, and Ask, of course, will be Blossom.)



If you miss our coverage, you will die of sadness. But if long-form bloggage isn't your style, catch our up-to-the-moment tweets on who's where, who won what and desperate cries for attention: @adland @adrants @luckthelady.

Do not miss! Also, for a feel of the ... feel, catch my wrapup from last year, and this reflection on seaside smoking, and this interview with Richard Gorodecky whom I love more than highly productive anthills.

We are so going to rock your ad shit for seven whole days.

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*Actually, not really unless Ask pushes hard for them.