Cannes Special: Jaime Robinson

No one was more surprised that Cannes almost-virgin, Jaime Robinson, was picked as this year’s Lions Mobile jury president than the Pereira & O’Dell ECD herself. She tells Ian Blair she wants to reward content that brings the cool and exciting back into our recession-weary lives

As the busy executive creative director of the San Francisco-based agency Pereira & O’Dell, the peripatetic Jaime Robinson is used to moving fast. Even so, she was “a bit shocked” to be tapped as president of the Mobile jury in the 61st Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. After all, she’s a virtual Cannes virgin. “I’ve only ever been once,” she admits. “I’m supposed to go every year, and every year I have my ticket and my bags packed, and then something happens and I’m not allowed to go.”

The last time this happened, ironically, was when Robinson led the creative development and direction for The Beauty Inside, a social film for Intel and Toshiba that earned the agency an Emmy for Outstanding New Approaches as well as an impressive three Grands Prix at Cannes Lions for Film, Cyber and Branded Content & Entertainment last year. “Looking back, missing Cannes was definitely worth it, but I was really, really angry to have to cancel my trip again,” she confesses. “So it’s doubly exciting to finally be going this year – and to be a jury president on top of all that? It’s pretty amazing.”

And she never expected the honour “…so soon! This is actually my very first Cannes jury,” she notes, “so when they asked me to head it I was both thrilled and horrified. It’s a bit surreal. Obviously there’s all the pressure involved, but at the same time it’s very exciting, especially as it’s such a global event, and this is a category that’s still being defined every single day. So I’m really looking forward to seeing some of the best work that people are doing in mobile, and helping the jury define where we think mobile is going.”      

The best approach for the audience

Robinson is well aware that “a ton of work gets entered from all over the world” and that the festival is a key arena for examining international work and spotting trends. “What’s so unique and exciting about Cannes is that it attracts the very best work from all over,” she enthuses, although she finds the thought of this concentrated blast of different approaches and ideas “quite daunting, along with all the different ways out there of how to interpret mobile”, and realises that mobile is very culturally specific. “For example, what’s mobile for the Philippines, who won last year, is very different from mobile in the UK or China or Latin America. It all really depends on how people are using technology, and what level of technology is available to them.” With this in mind, her approach will be to evaluate the best ideas “for the audience” and proceed from there.

Despite her newbie jury status and slim attendance record at the festival, Robinson sees the mobile category as being “a really good fit for me in terms of being the president of the jury. No one had even heard of mobile a few years ago, and now it’s turned into being one of the most interesting categories in the whole festival. So both mobile and I are really fresh to the festival, and I like that.”

She also sees the event as being more important than ever for the industry. “First, we get to see what everyone else is doing globally. We all spend so much time in our own regions. Cannes is this great venue where you can compare work from your own region with work from all the others, and to absorb global ideas. You get this great exposure to new ways of looking at the world, and all that’s very valuable.”

And of course there’s room for a bit of back-slapping. “I think it’s also very important to recognise and celebrate the work that everyone is doing and dedicating their lives to,” Robinson notes. “What I find really awesome about the things that tend to win at Cannes is that they’re often things that really benefit the audience and consumer. They’re not things that are just done to benefit the brand.”

Ask Robinson for examples of recent good or bad mobile campaigns and she’s quick to stress that different people use mobile in different ways for different reasons. “You get everything from basic utility to really in-depth storytelling,” she explains. “Look at the big prizewinner from last year, Textbooks. That looked at mobile in a completely different way, because for most people mobile means smartphones and tablets, but Textbooks used very rudimentary, basic technology, which was what was widely available in that region. It was very much utility-based. They were delivering a function. But then you look at something like Clouds Over Cuba, which also did really well last year, and that was so different – it used mobile to really enrich the story and make it deeper, and allowed people to interact with an event in a far more immersive way. So for me, a great mobile campaign can live anywhere within that broad spectrum. That’s what makes it really exciting for me. You just never know where that star execution will come from. It can really take you by surprise.”

Robinson’s path to ECD at Pereira & O’Dell, and now Cannes jury president, appears to be almost preordained. “As a kid I was always very strangely interested in advertising,” she reports. “I did some creative writing classes, writing commercials, and it seemed like this great marriage between creativity and problem-solving, although I wasn’t really aware of the appeal back then. I just knew that I liked getting a specific task and then making something fun and creative out of it.”

Running with the Mad Dogs

Her first job was a copywriter internship at the unorthodox NYC boutique shop Mad Dogs and Englishmen, “an amazing, insanely creative place” that fostered Robinson’s natural gifts. “I got very lucky, as I was also considering a much more conservative company, and my instinct said, go to Mad Dogs,” she recalls. “It completely shaped the way I look at advertising. Even though this was back in 1998, before the real age of interactivity, they were doing really innovative interactive work in print, radio and TV.”

She cites the famed Village Voice subscription coupon ad, which featured a ‘Yes, I want to subscribe’ box and a ‘No’ box, as an example. “The clever thing was that the ‘Yes’ box needed a simple response while the ‘No’ box had a long list of reasons you could mark – such as ‘I’m a Commie pinko’, ‘Things are fine the way they are’, and so on,” she explains. “So it offered the readers an interactive experience, and that really appealed to me – playing a game and messing with the world.”

Robinson has worked at both traditional and digital agencies, including TBWAChiatDay and EVB, and created campaigns for A-list clients including adidas, Levi’s, Ask.com, Ray-Ban and Haribo Gummi Bears, across every kind of media – from multimillion-dollar spots to custom rock songs for soccer teams. Her approach to creativity earned her a spot in Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business last year.

She’s currently celebrating Pereira & O’Dell’s sixth anniversary and says the agency’s “fun and mischievous” vibe was a natural fit for her own sensibilities from day one. “What’s wonderful about the company is that it didn’t start from a traditional place or from a digital one,” she notes. “Instead, the philosophy and approach was one of, ‘Hey, what’s your business problem? Let us know, and we’ll figure out the best way to get your consumers really excited about your product’. And so over the past six years we’ve been able to create things from scratch, that are essentially blurring the lines between traditional and digital in an exciting, innovative way.”

Robinson reports that the company is currently “incredibly busy” working on campaigns for regular clients such as Airbnb and Skype, as well as “a bunch of projects we can’t talk about yet”. And despite the ongoing fallout from the recession, she’s very optimistic about the year ahead. “I feel we’re really starting to emerge from the slump, and that people are open to having some fun now. You can see that in a lot of the stuff that’s being passed around virally, and in the general tenor of conversations on Twitter and in the media. Yes, there will always be bad stuff happening in the world, but I do feel people are tired of being so negative. They want some sunshine in their lives. And as marketers we can help to bring cool and exciting content to people, which is why I love what I do so much.”