This is interesting. Turkish Airlines set up a sort of online treasure hunt in order to find a digital agency for their next project. A number of Turkish agencies received a 2 page “treasure map,” which looked like a simple mind map with the keyword “thybrief” at the center and the most important social media sites linked around. They then had to go to the sites to put the clues together and then work on their pitches for the client. I'm interested to see how this story progresses. More info is here.

I'm allergic to anything with fur - including those so called hypo-allergenic dogs. So although I can not personally relate to these ads for the San Francisco SPCA, I love the message and I love that they used famous comic book animals. Scooped from Communication Arts. Agency is Glass McClure.

Sorry I have not updated for a few days - I'm been decompressing from Cannes in Cotignac, France. I very small town 1.5 hours drive north east of Cannes. A friend is house sitting a villa so I jumped on the opportunity to join him for a few days. Ahhhh. I promise to update again soon.

Goodby, Silverstein & Partners Partner/CD Jamie Barrett and Biscuit Filmworks director Noam Murro did their seminar yesterday in Cannes. The seminar was based on their relationship and how the work together to make great advertising. They opened their seminar with this this hilarious film. These two have amazing creative chemistry and it was great to see them talk about a few of their greatest works.

I always look forward to attending the Saatchi & Saatchi New Director's Showcase in Cannes. They always line up a great collection of amazing work. Today's showcase featured 23 works from directors from all over the world. I had seen many of the spots before - like Dvein's Offf opening sequence, James Frost's House of Cards for Radiohead, Nick Hooker's Grace Jone's video (so creepy), Aaron Duffy's knitted short, Eran Creevy's SonnyJ video and Christopher Hutsul's Airforce One. I had never seen the amazing short by Roman Kaelin & Florian Wittmann - and you won't be able to see it as it's not allowed to be posted online at this time (WTF?). I also really enjoyed the fluidity of this spot by Oren Lavie/Yuval & Merav Nathan and this piece by Keith Loutit who, I'm told, creates works for architectural models (neat). Check out the showcase's YouTube Channel for more. On a side note, I was able to gage how less busy Cannes is this year by attendance at this screening. Normally you have to arrive at least a half hour early and wait in a big queue to get into this screening. That was not the case today. I arrived 15 minutes early to no line and there were empty seats. Thought I'd mention.

Psyop's workshop took place yesterday afternoon in Cannes. A great group of people from all over the world were there. My favourite moment was when the delegates were divided into groups, given a music track, posterboard, some markers and a range of interesting visuals and had ten minutes to come up with a concept or story inspired by the music. The song was "Thank You for Being a Friend" (which was also the theme song for TV's Golden Girls). The delegates came up with some amazing ideas - one team even using a camera to create a stop-motion piece. Some pics from the workshop are posted here. Thanks to everyone who came out.