5G is the latest hot topic on the bullsh*t roadshow

Well that’s Cannes over for another year. I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted.

Fortunately, I applied my tried and tested three-point plan for getting the most out of the Cannes Lions Festival to ensure that it was a productive week. The first part of my approach is to rise early, ideally before 7am each day.

Second, try and cram as much into each day as possible. And third, and most important, get as far away from Cannes and France as you can and get some work done instead.

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Saving on air fare and spending time on actual work does not preclude you from partaking of the insights that come from the French Riviera of course. They are impossible to avoid. By Monday thousands of tweets, blogs and columns summarised the main themes from the festival for the unwashed, unfortunate and unimportant marketers who could not attend in person.

My favourite summary was from Digiday, which did a splendid job of summarising the bullshit from last year’s event and contrasting it with the (equally nonsensical) replacements on show last week. If 2018 was all about Facebook discussing disinformation, then this year was all about Facebook discussing equality.

Last year’s all-male ad tech panels were replaced with this year’s version, which included one woman. But most notable on the list was that “bullshitting about blockchain”, which was the theme of 2018, had been replaced by “bullshitting about 5G” instead. Spot on.

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