Warren Brown’s 2011 Cannes Diary – Day Two from the Cannes Promo and Activation jury room

Great ideas hit us like a bolt of lightning and if they don’t kill us with envy they’ll charge us with enthusiasm to do better.

I regard Promo and Activation as creativity that is let off the leash and runs amok in our society creating an immediate impact but over the course of the past couple of days of judging some themes have emerged.

The words challenge, solution and results are punctuated by words like world’s first, awesome, incredible, outstanding, impossible goals, best ever, unbelievable, amazing, inspiring humanity, most talked about ever, never before in the history of marketing, in our wildest dreams etc, you get the picture.

Such superlatives lose their potency when you hear them every few minutes for a couple of days.

What continually amazes me is how easy it is to attract an enormous level of interest with benign, bland and puerile activity. The world’s apparent thirst for content of any sort seemingly knows no bounds.

And don’t get me started on the subject of stating the bleeding obvious and trying to pass it off as a searing insight.

To think people get paid big bucks to do this is hilarious, anyway it only helps to elevate those who have dug deep enough to unearth something truly original and interesting to say.

At the end of day two and judging by the majority of entries it makes me wonder how on earth we ever managed to sell anything to anyone in the past without the help of blogs, apps, facebook, youtube or twitter.