Reactive Sydney CD Tim Buesing at the Cannes Seminars – who needs advertising anyway?

Tim Buesing, creative director at Reactive offers his take on the Cannes Seminars running throughout the week, exclusive to CB.

Admittedly, this line might not the be the best strategy for making friends at Cannes. But amidst all the inspiration and rosé flowing through Cannes right now, it’s good to occasionally listen to some clever ‘agents provocateurs’.

Stuart Eccles and Guthrie Dolin in their talk showed how incredibly personal brand relationships become when they ‘get mobile’. After all we grab and look at our phones about 150 times a day. Or 10,000 times when you are in Cannes, trying to find the next junket while perusing a shortlist. Mobile jury president Rei Inamoto wowed the audience last night by making us flash our phone screens and then taking a picture of it. Which we all received instantly via Twitter. A great way to show the power of mobile.

Stuart freely admits to his one goal: make brands spend less on marketing and more on the customer experience. Or as Guthrie put it, have brands be awesome all the time. And when we look at the winners of cyber, mobile and innovation we see that many of the gongs go to work that doesn’t feel like marketing, is highly useful and truly innovative, reaching far into creative product development.

So let’s just take more care of a great customer experience and communicate it brilliantly. After all we don’t want to put an axe to all the other Cannes categories – they are way too much fun.

Guthrie Dolin (Nurun) Stuart Eccles (Made by Many) Drew Ungvarsky (Grow) and Wesely ter Haar (Media Monks) all appeared as part of the SoDA – Society of Digital Agencies panel “Welcome to the Connected Age”.