Case study: Covering Cannes Lions 2013 for Lürzer's Archive
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the world’s largest annual awards festival for creative communications professionals. Each year creatives from around the globe travel to the French Riviera for discussions, seminars, and to display their work.
For a magazine like Lürzer’s Archive, which showcases the best campaigns in print, TV and digital, Cannes Lions is a major event in their calendar.
This year our website editor, Rhiah Chohan, went to Cannes to provide coverage of the festival on the Lürzer's website and social media channels.
It gave us a tremendous opportunity to use the most visual elements our different social media platforms and the main website. Here’s how we pulled it all together.
We currently have upwards of 43K followers on the Lürzer’s Archive Facebook page, and with it being such a visual platform it was the perfect place to share photos and give people behind-the-scenes insights.
We saw a lot of activity, with plenty of likes, comments and shares and general enthusiasm. It's important not to overdo it though; we have a very global following and it can get a bit much to hear too much about an event that you have no chance of attending!
So our focus was on sharing quality content rather than increasing the frequency of updates too much.
With a solid following on Facebook this was a great opportunity to give the Twitter and Instagram accounts a boost.
On Twitter we maintained a constant stream of interaction with creatives at the event and leading agencies such as Ogilvy and TBWA. We live tweeted high profile seminars, sharing controversial comment from Vivienne Westwood, which was the talk of the festival. Mentioning how we bumped into P Diddy and his entourage also went down well!
Image-sharing platform Instagram was an excellent tool to use at Cannes because it’s so popular with the creative community. It allowed us to offer a spontaneous and interesting stream of high quality content.
As ever, hashtagging content on Instagram is a great way to be found by other users, so we used #CannesLions throughout and as many other relevant tags to describe the images.
We then reposted our Cannes pictures from Instagram onto our board Cannes Lions 2013, and picked out other great images that people at the festival were sharing.
The Lürzer’s Archive website
On the Lürzer’s website we have a new feature every day, covering Audiovisual, Campaigns, Who's Who and Digital plus the Editor’s Blog.
Rhia took over that week's blog from Editor-in-Chief Michael Weinzettl and produced a great report on the highlights from Cannes Lions 2013, such as Vivienne Westwood, Richard Dawkins and Annie Liebovitz. This roundup post generated more than 13,000 page views.
We also produced other Cannes Lions-related features for the website such as the New Directors' Showcase by Saatchi and Saatchi, we showcased the award-winning work and took an in-depth look at the Cannes Lions 2013 film category.
While there we interviewed some of the famous faces visiting the festival, collecting content to use on the website at a later date, for example TBWA founder, Lee Clow.
