13 May 2016 – If the stars align (my schedule permits), I make two trips to Cannes each year: for the film festival, and for Cannes Lions – the latter being “The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity” which is a global event for those working in the creative communications, advertising and related fields.
The Cannes Film Festival and (more importantly) the film market are the highlights of the film calendar each year, with an epic number of events, screenings, parties and meetings crammed into a (very) little French town over the course of eleven days.
A major reason … maybe THE major reason … professionals attend the Cannes market is to sell distribution rights for their films. These rights are bought by a small number of attendees (1,800+ in 2015) who have the official “Buyer” classifications, usually illustrated via a purple stripe on their market pass. As time in Cannes is short, producers and sales agents do all they can to reach buyers. And the data suggests … oh, there are gigabytes of data analyzing this event .. that one thing they can do is ensure that they’re attending right from the opening of the market at 9am on Wednesday 11th May, when the ratio of buyers to attendees is at its most favorable.
I attend because I got lucky (well, and threw in a lot of uncharged legal time). One of my long-time IP clients is Akamai Technologies. They are a leading cloud platform for enterprises and they provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, pretty much anywhere. They provide online video coverage of the film festival to all mobile-connected attendees and also to official Cannes International Film Festival website visitors. And they provide trailers and related on-demand content to iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry devices across the Akamai “Intelligent Platform” HD Network.
Oh, and I only go for two days, and as a “staffer”. I do see a lot of movies. But I surely won’t be hobnobbing with George and Amal. Or Woody. Most likely dinner in the IT tent with Rene (an HD cameraman).
I have spent a lot of time over the last few years focusing on content delivery to mobile and tablet devices, and how Akamai allows festival directors .. and even beginning filmmakers through cool workshops … define their digital strategy WITHOUT having to master every element of digital distribution technology. That technology is forbidding stuff. And Akamai’s relationship with Cannes stretches waaaaaaay back over many years so there is a very helpful “arc of technology” … from the year 2000 as I recall … on how Internet media content and distribution developed.
Today, it is very cool to see how a cloud-based technology platform for live and on-demand video streaming scales to such a high on-demand level to support the largest online events by managing millions of simultaneous streams. And it is rich, high-definition quality mobile video. To any device at broadcast-size audiences. Amazing stuff. And for my e-discovery readers, it is why I am ROTFL when an EDD vendor’s software crashes because it cannot support a ramp up of document reviewers, or handle multiple simultaneous uses, and crashes. And it is not a rich, high-definition, high-quality content environment. Oh, pul-leeeze.
And I try to come back for Cannes Lions. Somewhat like the International Journalism Festival I attend in Perugia, the Cannes Lions event was where I learned new approaches to storytelling in the digital age, including innovative technologies and methods being used to source stories and new formats being used to visualize the stories being told.