Paul Yole’s Monday Cannes Festival of Creativity review – fake news and transient hypofrontality

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Cannes Day1_P1040073-thumb-520x390-256435.jpgPaul Yole (pictured far left) has written for Campaign Brief at the last eleven Cannes Lions. This year he is looking out for what’s new and what’s recurring.

A guy from MIT was going to be talking about neuroscience so I thought it was worth a shot.

The title was intriguing – “The biology of a Creative Idea”.

Adam Horowitz looks about 13 years old but he uses very big words, so this modern day Doogie Howser, MD may have lost some of his audience.

What I did glean though was that the idea of transient hypofrontality (you know what that means, right?) is the zone we want to get into when we need to be creative.

You can induce this state by meditation, exercise, day dreaming or in fact anything that does not involve directly focussing on the problem you are trying to solve.

Which is what Jon Steel has been telling us for years so there you go, MIT has proven that, once again, Jon is right.

Advertising creatives will be delighted to hear that alcohol is another technique that can be used. I guess if it was good enough for Hemingway it should be good enough for the rest of us.

The MIT session was an interesting but contrasting precursor to a talk by the Pulitzer prize-winning editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick.

Remnick spoke brilliantly and eloquently about his fears for journalism in this age of fake news.

These days, he told us, “you can tell and sell any story at all” and then he went on to call out the purveyors of lies and bullshit.

Take Donald Trump, for example. Please, someone take him.

The author Harry Frankfurt (“On Bullshit”) says “there are liars and there are bullshitters”.

Donald Trump, as Remnick assured us, capably straddles the realms of both. Politifact asserts that in his Presidential campaign 70% of Trump’s statements were false. Scarily for the rest of the world, he doesn’t seem to care.

Social media is to blame of course, because it has become a platform for deception, powered by speed and ubiquity.

While David Remnick is keenly interested to see what Facebook will do next to address this issue in the interests of honest journalism, I think our industry also has a major consideration to deal with.

If people can’t trust what brands are telling them, programmatic buying will only amplify the problem. What on earth would David Ogilvy have thought about all of this?

Thankfully, some of our industry leaders are onto the case. In fact, two senior CCOs have both mentioned the same thing to me completely independently.

In a recent CB Asia story concerning his agency’s work for the NUJ in the Philippines, BBDO Guerrero Creative Chairman, David Guerrero, said: “False information spread through social networks is one of the defining problems of our age. This tool (Fakeblok) aims to provide journalists themselves the means to warn people against aggravating the problem by further spreading it in their networks.”

After such a heavy day, I think I will just go and listen to a couple of celebrities tomorrow. Or maybe Kelly Clarkson.