There are three trends in communications I feel passionate (OK, and opinionated...) about: transnational, social and sustainability - as I set out in this IPRA Frontline article. A catch up lunch recently with a former colleague now heading global communications for an Asia-HQ'd global business brought all these into the same frame. Talking about their corporate culture, it became clear that being global was central to strategy and second nature to senior management while local-ness...

Sooooo pleased that Niall Cook, previously worldwide director of marketing technology at Hill & Knowlton, has decided to join me at Sociagility as a director. Niall and I have worked together for more than ten years from the early days of the public Internet and lived through the transition from web to social web, advising and encouraging clients and colleagues along the way. For those that do not know him well already, Niall is something of...

This was my third year at Cannes Lions but the first whole week - I’m totally Cannes’d out. In many ways the first year was the best: everything new and exciting and, of course, a great speaker to introduce on the big stage in 2009 to a packed auditorium: Biz Stone of Twitter with his wake up call. Last year’s ImprovEverywhere show with Charlie Todd was a gentler, warmer affair with his humour in the Debussy theatre...

Terrific performance from Unilever CEO Paul Polman in Cannes Lions Q&A session this AM. "We are already an emerging market company" he says. The company has just reorganised into four global categories with one global COO in pursuit of growth and in response to three global drivers: East/South shift; social; and sustainability. I found myself nodding a lot in agreement... not least because obviously he has read my article in IPRA's Frontline magazine which posed...

Something old...something new. Most of the new stuff at the Effective Brands workshop at Cannes Lions run by their founder Marc de Swaan Arons this afternoon came from ex-H&K Marcomms head MaryLee Sachs - who was plugging her new book The Changing MO of the CMO. But there were also some great anecdotes from the wry & dry Simon Clift, ex-Unilever CMO and equally successful ex-Diageo Global Marketing chief Rob Malcolm, who showed how both purposeful vision...

No PowerPoint, no video, no dancing, all ideas. Cannes Lions' Edward de Bono session courtesy of the Guardian. World’s Biggest Problem = bad thinking. Or rather thousands of years of thinking devoted to ‘truth’ – instead of value. Cue the de Bono lateral thinking method, illustrated by loads of ideas from creativity to peptic ulcers via humour and, of course, the famous ‘Six Hats’. OK, so not all thinking has been bad he says; some has been excellent –...

Fantastic set of crowd-sourced ads at the Mofilm awards last night. My favourite was the Chevrolet Route 66 film, but the final overall winner was for Santander … how to make statements exciting. Brilliant idea and great actor … the director’s dad. Low cost, high value ad-making. Guest presenter was star of The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg who, it turns out, isn’t on...