Should be 6/22

"This isn't real life y'all, this is THE life" -Gabby Callaway


So me and my roomie Molly apparently have a sleeping problem. Sometimes we try to get up and it just doesn't work out for us. Long story short, we got to the festival late today and I ended up missing Jesse Eisenberg (who I heard was pretty good) and the person I'm most disappointed I missed out on (next to Pharrel), Jennifer Frommer. BUT, we did make it to our meeting with David Simon who works for HBO. He was pretty cool and not just because we got to into an amazing hotel. He made a series called wired and is basically a "I don't give a ****" kind of person. He's smooth and has a weird sense of humor but overall, I really liked him! He was raw about life and at the same time passionate which I found interesting. The next person we got to speak to was Allison Arden, she's basically a big deal at ad age. She was really cool too, and has a lot of years of experience to back her up. It was pretty interesting to hear about how ad age works, especially since I'm all about industry news. This is where I insert my plug for the 4a's smart brief. If you're into advertising, this is one of the most informative, quick news digests that you can get. It tells you all about what's going on in the field and who's making news. And it's in connection with ad age! She's very inspirational and knows what's going on. I thought it was really cool that we got to talk to such an important person and it really put into perspective just how lucky we are to, as students, be on this trip dealing with the real deals and even having personal time with them. This was also the night of the Cyber Lions Awards show which is my category for our assignment since, to the disbelief of many who see and hear what we're up to on a daily basis, we are here for a class. I specifically have the task of being the ambassador for the websites category which was pretty awesome. These award show are NOT AT ALL what I expected. I guess I knew it would be a cool design, but, I walked in and the place looked better then the stage for the grammy's, it was just so unreal. It was a bit long but it was so interesting to see all these cool designs and how the jury went about choosing the winners. I think the best part though was when when they announced the winners of the soccer competition. My mom and dad are soccer fanatics and my dad has always loved Brazil and my mom has always loved Argentina. This is one of the biggest soccer rivals in the game. The world cup is always intense when these two teams play each other and it ended up being that here, in Cannes, the final two came down to Argentina vs. Brazil, with the win going to Brazil (woo-hoo, I love Brazil!) It was just a really good atmosphere and Brazil has been basically taking over this festival, they're literally everywhere and winning stuff all the time but I love Brazilians so it doesn't annoy me at all. This was also the night they decided to honor the media person of the year, in this case google CEO Eric Schimdt. He was surprisingly down to earth and has done a lot more for google then I thought. It was actually surprising to hear of all of his accomplishments because I really didn't know much about him. All in all, the award show was great. Next, however, was what became the real highlight of the night, the microsoft party. We were lucky enough to get invited to this party because two of our alumns actually work for microsoft. It was so much fun and the people were great. At the end of the night, one of the alumns and his girlfriend or wife, not quite sure which, stayed with a group of us until we safely got into a taxi and helped us pay for it so that they could make sure we got home. I just gotta say, I now love microsoft. I'm still on my mac, but, microsoft has some genuinely great people working for them.