Is making drama an answer to the advertising crisis?
Actor Martin Sheen is looking startled. It’s not the panel’s eye-watering discussion of anal sex in Sex and the City that has thrown him. He simply he has no idea what Manolos are. Fellow guest Arianna Huffington takes off her shoe and shows him the label. ‘Now that’s what creating brand awareness is all about,’ laughs Craig Davis of ad agency JWT, who is chairing the discussion. It’s not often the Cannes International Advertising Festival gets a taste of Hollywood glamour. Sandwiched between the film and porn festivals in the Cannes calendar, it is very much an industry event. But today the Debussy Theatre in the Palais building is packed. Top creatives are here to see Sheen, best known as President Bartlet in TV’s The West Wing, debate what advertising can learn from popular culture with Sex and The City (S&TC) writer-producer Michael Patrick King, and Arianna Huffington, whose news and current affairs blog, www.huffingtonpost.com, has become a US phenomenon (Time recently named her
