Cannes 2013: Diary - Pratap Bose: ‘Almost every Gold Lion in PR was a stroke of genius’

It’s Thursday morning and its mid-week at the Cannes Creative festival. This is when things start to hot up with the big guns speaking today and tomorrow.

Three successive days of award ceremonies are also done with, and the jubilation in the Indian camp is extremely nice to see.

What a year it's been for India - certainly our best year ever!

32 metals so far, with Saturday still till to go, and we are walking the streets of Cannes with a cockiness that's well deserved.

What's remarkable for me is the 30 per cent conversion rate from shortlist to metal and 10 Golds to boot as well (another first for India).

What really did the trick was a few great pieces of work in the Print and Design categories. These two categories alone fetched India 23 metals.

Right now, Lou Reed is putting me to sleep as I write this piece.

I know a lot of the audience worships him, but I can't for the life of me understand how songwriting skills and being a great musician helps anyone in the auditorium in any way.

Dame Vivienne Westwood at least was enchanting, inspirational and provocative and not afraid to speak from the heart. From inventing the anarchy sign and starting the anti-establishment movement, through to her current championing on cultural and climate change, she stirred the soul if not anything else.

The Twitter session yesterday was undoubtedly the one that took the cake for me.

Getting their Chief Media Scientist Deb Roy to speak this year was a master stroke and one, which worked far better than bringing the CMO types... as they have done during the past two years.

Deb Roy was absolutely brilliant. The Twitter data visualisations were WOW and the delivery of his presentation was well rehearsed, and perfectly delivered. I won’t tell you what I learnt, since that would be too long to document in this blog, but I can certainly give you some great advice... Do whatever you can, and get hold of an AV of his talk.

I attended all the three award nights earlier in the week, and what surprised me most was the creative ingenuity in the PR Category. Almost every Gold was a stroke of genius and this was clearly the most exciting category for me, followed by the Promo Category.

The new Innovation Lions category was another eye-opener and all the winners were directions in which the future of communication is headed. I would earnestly implore you all to take a look at these winners and be as regaled as I was.

As an observation…  I know Samsung is giving Apple a run for its money in the smart phone category, but in Cannes the advertising and marketing community clearly negates that trend.

Apple : Samsung = 10:1 …which isn't surprising given the genre of loyalists here.

Having said that, I am sure that the Lee Clow session tomorrow morning is going to be an absolute sell out given his iconic status and fan following. I will probably have to be in the queue by 8 AM and given that today is the India party followed by the Shots party… that is not a very nice thought.

A little pain to see the genius himself is what it will have to take, but I can’t complain, can I?

Pratap Bose is COO at DDB Mudra Group. The views expressed are the author's independent views as an ad professional and do not reflect the organisation's viewpoint.