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Design thinkingStorytelling may be dominating the conversation this year, but next year, but next year could see design thinking emerge into the Cannes sunlight. Fuseproject founder, Chief Creative Officer of Jawbone and general genius Yves Béhar gave it a little nudge this morning at Adobe’s session on the new creatives. Designers are trained to identify those problems that can be solved with a new perspective, and their moment is coming. This wasn’t always as obvious as it is today. Steve Jobs gets oodles of credit for awakening a design sensibility simultaneously in the consumer and in the business world, and Béhar joins Jobs’ influence to the invention of great design tools and the internet. That trifecta gave us today’s perspective on design: design as a core business function. Design thinking, beautifully evoked by the work of the late Bill Drentel, has attracted the attention of business scholars, and it is starting to captivate us. Stories are the core of our business, but, as Béhar put it this morning: “design brings storytelling to life.”

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thinkingAfter the gossamer insights of yesterday, Cannes came at us with some hard brand thinking. Google teamed up with TNS and Ogilvy (pardon the self promotion) to showcase some new research that showed us how important purpose is to a brand’s consumers. It seems self-evident, but we don’t seem to get it yet. We need to engage consumers on their passions and interests. Your consumer doesn’t see a line between content and branded content—at least online. If they’ve clicked over to you through social, then it’s likely they didn’t even register the brand—commercial or editorial—that produced the content they just opened. The content is what matters. So does that mean it’s ok to rickroll your consumer? We know the answer, and yet we still think in terms of what we want to tell our “targets” instead of what our “audience” is asking us to say.

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Mobile thinking“The important thing about mobile is that it’s not just a new piece of tech,” says Sony’s Matt Beavis. “It’s a platform of communication.” This is not a searing insight. Neither is this: “If audiences are thinking mobile first, we should too.” But the implications are rather more interesting. It changes the way you tell stories. In an omni-channel world, storytelling is “less broadcasting and more of a dialogue,” according to John Costello, the President of Global Marketing and Innovation for Dunkin’ Brands. They pitch a mobile-first strategy as a way of addressing today’s consumer needs. And when it’s time to make the mobile donuts, they delivered: Dunkin’ is the first brand to produce a Vinevertisment.

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thinkingOk, get your face out of your phone and look around for some real-world inspiration. What’s the first place you think of when you hear “inspiration”? Why, Vegas, of course. The euphemistically-named “gaming industry” has for decades been a (profitable) working lab of human behavior. Ash Bendelow, Managing Director of Brave, thinks we should look to that dessert oasis for cues on how brands can better satisfy consumers. He calls it “divine data” and says, rather opaquely, that we should pay attention to “divine data, not big data, because it reports, analyses, and creates an actionable delivery in real-time, converging the digital world with the physical world.” And what of the aether?

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cont.Maybe this: reframing the problem of climate change from a global bother to a worldwide opportunity to make a better world.

No Thinking—And then the air was filled with stupid things. One would think one could rely on fading celebrities for shitty movies and good copy. Today only one of those things came true. Sarah Jessica Parker came to Cannes with Cosmopolitan Editor in Chief Joanna Coles, and no one learned anything. Spike Jonze is a well-loved writer/director was here today, too, and while the bar for celebrity content was fairly low today, he barely cleared it. We’ll remember him, at least, for this: “Be willing to get fired for a good idea.”

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for a good idea.”Spike Jonze