Breakfast with Barbara: Saturday, June 26

In her last video postcard from Cannes, our critic Barbara Lippert sums up the ad festival—a week of celebrities, cyborgs, cross-platform campaigns and social media. Video after the jump.

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Published on June 26, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Breakfast with Barbara: Friday, June 25

In her latest dispatch from the south of France, our fearless critic stares down zombies and revels in typefaces—evidence of the rise of the handmade in our age of super-technology. Video after the jump.

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Published on June 25, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Breakfast with Barbara: Thursday, June 24

In today's dispatch, our critic-about-Cannes talks about yesterday's pesky Press Lions controversy and the 2010 festival's obsession with happiness—from Volkswagen's "The Fun Theory" to Stefan Sagmeister's personal happiness project to the gold-Lion-winning "Quitting Calendar" in Design. Video after the jump.

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Published on June 24, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Breakfast with Barbara: Wednesday, June 23

In her daily video postcard, our critic Barbara Lippert talks about Leo Burnett Sydney's Grand Prix-winning Media work for Canon, and the yearning for humanity and interactivity expressed at the Mark Zuckerberg, Ben Stiller and Spike Jonze events this year. Plus, bonus footage of an old guy in a Speedo. Video after the jump.

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Published on June 23, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Breakfast with Barbara: Tuesday, June 22

In today's morning dispatch, our ad critic Barbara Lippert talks about the big winners in Promo, PR and Direct and why the Europeans should do well at this year's festival. Video after the jump.

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Published on June 22, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Breakfast with Barbara: Monday, June 21

Welcome to the "Breakfast with Barbara" series. Every morning, our resident critic, Barbara Lippert, sends us a video blip from the south of France about the goings-on at Cannes. For her first dispatch, she tells us that a new "Grand Prix for Good" is energizing. See the video after the jump.

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Published on June 21, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Mano a mano: It's the year of the guy at Cannes

By Barbara Lippert

This year's Cannes ad festival opened on Sunday, which happened to be Father's Day in the U.S., U.K. and Canada. If attendees missed being honored at home, they at least could savor some male-themed potential award winners, like "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" for Old Spice, "The Most Interesting Man in the World" for Dos Equis and "The Man Who Walked Around the World" for Johnnie Walker.
  Yes, the celebration of the XY portion of the population -- whether shirtless, gray-bearded or peripatetic -- registered big in advertising this year (both in the imagery and, of course, in the holding-company boardrooms). It also runs counter to the culture at large.
  A cover story in The Atlantic this month, "The End of Men: How Women Are Taking Control of Everything," notes that males, who've been the dominant sex since, well, forever, were hit hard by the Great Recession and have yet to retool. The writer, Hanna Rosin, offers an alarming statistic: Three-quarters of the jobs lost since the '90s were by men working in the conventionally macho industries of construction, manufacturing and high finance. The new (albeit, lower paying) economy favors workers with qualities seen as more traditionally female. Women now hold a majority of the nations jobs, as well as the places in undergraduate and graduate schools.
  No wonder Dockers ads suggest that men have literally lost their pants.
  Ben Stiller, who is a speaker at this year's festival (in a conversation with Jeff Goodby), embodies this crisis of masculinity as the self-hating male in the movie Greenberg. "We call each other 'man,' but it's a joke," his character says. "It's like imitating other people."

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Published on June 20, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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