Rajdeepak Das @ Cannes: Of dazed wins and iPad fads

We came, we saw, we got drunk. When we woke up, we had 14 nominations and two Silver Lions. That’s crazy. You take a horse to the water, you can make it drink. Then it turns into a lion. I know I am hallucinating! This can’t be real. We entered Cannes 2011 for the fun of it, and now it’s gotten serious.

Last night some of us, including Sandy and a couple of half drunk friends, walked in to gutter bar promising not to talk about advertising. We met some guys from Colombia, one from Brazil, one from Bangkok, and by the time the clock struck one, we were all talking about advertising... ideas from their countries. Talking about how much time they have spent crafting the work, how tough it was for them to convince the client and all that kind of brotherhood stuff. Everyone was trying to make their story harder than the previous guy. But this morning as I am thinking about the stories, man it felt like the same old story told by different directors. But the good thing is that when I met those boys today, they looked happy. Of course, they got shortlisted and may go on to win too.

One very interesting thing that I noticed at Cannes this year was not the work. Not the number of entries from India. But the iPad. It has replaced cameras. Now that’s funny, people holding huge iPads and clicking pictures, group pictures to pictures of shortlists. The iPad is the new ‘iFad’! I noticed that in one of the seminars there was something interesting on the screen, suddenly lots of people pulled out their iPads and started to click.

That’s enough for today’s blog, I’m going to check on the work of the white collar hippies. Check it out, they are good guys and they offer great adventure holidays!

(Rajdeepak Das is ECD – Mumbai at BBDO India.)