TELL YOUR FRIENDS
A flying visit to Cannes Lions taught me about the similarities (the location) and differences (everything else) between the film festival and Lions. (The major takeaway: don’t go to Lions expecting to see movies because you’ll just get adverts which arguably is what cinema audiences try and avoid).
Takeaway two - marketing and advertising has officially changed - no longer are impressively fun flashy ads (who remembers Sony Balls or Cadbury’s Gorilla) occupying the limelight, instead creators and influencers are front and centre of how brands are getting their work seen. Makes sense, right? Sure agencies and stuff, but Lions is really now where the technology companies of the world are converging, each taking a spot on the Croisette and hosting those who wander their sandy beaches in turn decked with, well, decking, and very smart decking at that.
Sport is a thing now, not that it wasn’t a thing before, but sport stars are influencers and have fans and money, and advertising is about fans and money?! Anyway, there was a Sport Beach. But really that’s not surprising. I don’t know if you had to be sporty to go on the sports beach? I didn’t try to get on the sports beach. But I would have been fine if I’d wanted to go.
I was particularly pleased that the Netflix party was the most fun we had. Repping their shows in designed spaces, little secret bars with roulette wheels deciding what drink you got served, some classic bangers from the naughties, merch (to rival the RecDek caps) and some art deco red upside down vibes. This all made sense as place for fans to engage in the content, unsure if there were many fans, maybe more media buyers for Netflix’s ads biz?! Nevertheless it was very fun. And its always tricky to strike a balance of connection and curation of events with the stuff we do for the indie industry at RecDek House and as a fan of film and TV, I just wish this event was at the film festival!
Anyway, with Lions it was clear - the advertising dollar to bring in the media and brands, corporations were going at it to host their clients and new best friends. Its a B2B market with lots of wealthy players, vying for attention for their corporations, who facilitate creators who vie for attention, for themselves, a sort of money cycle with rosé.
For us filmmakers and story execs there are some lessons to take from creators and the attention they provoke… I’d like to summarise it as per the below as if I myself was a Lions style creator.
Create, post about your work, post about the stuff you are loving, what actually really inspires your story? Lean in to building your own audience, don’t rely on an industry that means you are waiting for permission from talent or finance or whatever you feel you need. Creators are building enormous audiences by taking their fans on a journey with the things they care about. We are human and a human’s perspective is interesting to us. The internet is quite big. Chances are there will be an audience for your show.
And! Speaking of shows I want to recommend an old school sports doc this week. Not just because of Sports Beach but also because of the footy world cup and Wimbledon and the cricket, its a rare time when sport seems everywhere we go. Good if you love sport. Indifferent if you don’t.
(It’s coming home).
OUR PICK OF THE WEEK
The three-hour portrait tracks two basketball-obsessed teenagers from rough parts of Chicago - Arthur Agee and William Gates - as they grow from fourteen to nineteen, each hunting a college scholarship and the fuzzy promise of something better waiting on the far side. Maybe even the NBA. James carved it all from a mountain of footage gathered across five years. Roger Ebert threw his full weight behind an Oscar nod.
Arriving amid the cautious optimism of the early Clinton era, it doesn't flinch from poverty, addiction, broken homes or racial friction - sharpest when both lads land places at a smart, mostly white Illinois school built on its basketball reputation. One sequence, inside a bleak dorm set aside for scholarship players who happen to all be black, is genuinely startling.
Yet the picture isn't a treatise on prejudice. No fury, no villainous cops, no soundtrack leaning on hip-hop. It stays grounded while still allowing that these boys might simply build good lives the ordinary way, through education, with sport carrying much of the weight. That flicker of possibility gets under the skin.
James plainly knew he'd struck gold. Both won places at the same school, but Agee's marks fell short and he was pushed out - his relatives suspecting that a stronger showing on court would have made the money problems quietly vanish.
Some details have aged strangely. Those cigar-chomping white pundits sizing up which kid might make it once read as comic; now they seem slightly grubby. Could this film even be made in the Black Lives Matter age? Perhaps James's finest touch is the plain reverence he brings to the game itself, the jump shot, the dunk, brief bursts of something close to grace.
See you soon.
Ed
TELL YOUR FRIENDS
