Well, no, probably not. He’s just an American ad agency guy who is in Cannes filming himself doing anything – anything – the internet tells him to, with all the results pumped out live online.
The FT first encountered David Perez – or David On Demand as he has become this week – on the Croisette on Tuesday evening, as the gentlefolk of Cannes headed to the opening-night party, having his hair shaved. “The internet has been really mean to me today,” he wailed. The Leo Burnett planner from Chicago has also had the Twitter fail whale tattooed onto his arm.
David is a walking definition of “earned media” – the phrase agencies use to describe social-network chatter, as opposed to bought media (advertising) or owned media (companies’ own websites). And online at least, he is the talk of Cannes.
PR agency Porter Novelli, which is monitoring the top Cannes-related “trending topics” on Twitter, says that more people talked about David yesterday than Mark Zuckerberg, as the Facebook founder made his first appearance at the advertising festival. The previous day, tweets about David made up a quarter of all discussion at the event.
Sure, it’s a gimmick and a stunt, and we probably shouldn’t encourage him by writing about it. But gimmicks and stunts seem to be doing well in the awards at Cannes this year.
The first big winner was Gatorade’s “Reunion”, which saw Pepsico’s sports drink bring together the 30-something members of two high-school football teams who drew the final key game when they last played in 1993. The online documentary was picked up by several news networks and its makers claim it generated $3.4m worth of earned media, from $225,000 of paid investement, winning two Grand Prix (in two different categories) for agency TBWA\Chiat\Day.
In Italy, Heineken fooled a theatre-full of football fans, who had been persuaded by their bosses and girlfriends to go to an evening of poetry and chamber music the same night as a big match. Soon after the string quartet began, a big screen appeared showing the Madrid-Milan game, rewarding the audience’s loyalty and agency JWT with a Gold Lion.
Also winning a Grand Prix, Cannes’ top accolade, was Andes Beer’s “Teletransporter” by Del Campo/NAZCA Saatchi & Saatchi. A soundproofed phone booth was put into Argentinian bars, playing a range of background noises – from office work to crying babies – that would give guys a plausible cover for staying out drinking when ringing their girlfriends to apologise for standing them up.
All are great, funny ideas that cost less than traditional advertising and got people talking. The fact that they are talking about them online only serves to amplify the message.
Photograph via Flickr by Microsoft Advertising
