On the last evening of the 2024 Cannes Lions festival, the Lion of St. Mark was – much deservedly – awarded to the legend that is Jacques Séguéla, who delivered one of the most memorable speeches ever given at the Palais. His talk had several nuggets of brilliant wisdom, including the accurate insight that ideas are like spermatozoa: you might have millions, but one will stick.
Amidst all that he said was something I am certain will stay with me; in fact it is now forever enshrined on a Post-it note on my desk: “Every ad is a shot at eternity.”
In what is arguably one of the most beautiful opening scenes in film history, ‘Contact’ shows the audience what happens to radio waves that travel seemingly forever in space (radio waves, after all, are light waves).
Amongst the various groundbreaking phrases uttered by humankind on radio that you encounter as you drift through outer space farther away from Earth, ranging from Roosevelt’s emphatic 1941 address to Congress, to the profound ‘Wannabe’ by the Spice Girls, is the 1977 commercial jingle for Almond Joy: “Sometimes you feel like a nut.”
Joey Levine would be delighted to know that the waves for this track are probably passing the planet Kepler-22b right now, many light years away.
When Francis Ford Coppola sat down at Caffè Trieste in San Francisco to write the screenplay for The Godfather, little did he realize that what he was creating is going to be probably viewed as long as there
are humans.
Mary Shelley whipped out Frankenstein due to a bet that Lord Byron placed while on vacation, and transformed the horror literacy genre with work that will be published forever. And who can deny the cube that Ernő Rubik gave the world? All examples of eternal creativity.
Art director William Bernbach was no different. As long as there is advertising – or creative communications for that matter – his work will be discussed. The Volkswagen ads are eternal. As are the BMW Films, which reinvented the branded content era and set us all on a new path, while winning the first Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes Lions.
That’s what most of the Titanium or Grand Prix-winning work at Cannes feels like: creativity that is transformative at an eternal scale. Stuff that you’d look at fifty years from today and still say, “Huh, that’s pretty brilliant.”
If there is one lesson to take away from Cannes Lions this year, it is that. Approach an advertising brief the same way Coppola approached his Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter: to create work that feels eternal.
Create work that, when seen, will elicit an eternal roar much like Jacques Séguéla himself put it:
“Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.”
By Ali Rez, Chief Creative Officer, Impact BBDO
