While the Industry Focuses on Cannes, the Rest of the World Tunes into the Greatest Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts

While ad leaders were back-slapping, swilling champers, discussing creativity and how brands can connect with audiences at the ‘international festival of creativity', one certain creative festival that truly celebrates the epic sounds, tastes, iconography and ideas that audiences connect with in popular culture was rocking…

And that's Glastonbury, the iconic creative well from which our campaigns borrow and the melting pot of pop culture tastes that our brand strategies need to tap into. Shouldn’t our creative agencies, leaders and key staff all be at Glasto? With their tents, VIP passes, killer T-shirts and all? 

Don’t get me wrong celebrating our creative talent and their work through an awards show like Cannes is important. We need to recognise what’s great and the effort of the amazing teams who make ideas happen. If my girlfriend – a marketing manager - had not got tickets, I’d have headed to Cannes. 

But for her and the 40+ other ‘client side’ marketers we knew of at the festival, they decided their tickets to Glasto was more important, more significant. If we’d won a Cannes award, I’d have been in a predicament. But regardless, this was a weird clash of diaries, and it’s odd that we’re not really talking about what’s happening at ‘Glasto’ as an industry more – if at all?

After all, Glastonbury is an iconic creative brand. A modern feat in marketing and a living, breathing epic case study in how a brand can grow year after year by getting talked about in popular culture, through being positively bonkers. 

At 2050, we say it's positively bonkers ideas that get talked about. When brands positively change things and then build entertaining, fun, moving worlds. It’s amazing how many of them fail to do this, and my god Glasto fucking nails it.

At the core of the Glasto brand is a 50-year idea that emphasises that through a shared love of music, more unites us than divides us on the big issues that matter; the planet, kinship and human creativity. And an entertaining world brings this home through an intergalactic explosion on our senses; by getting the most contemporary and timeless music acts to perform classic bangers that celebrate this unifying force. 

You know the names, the acts – remember Banksy’s stab proof vest for Stormzy?

And the crowd really is a diverse reflection of the UK nation. Unlike Cannes, it’s a proper mix; poshos, working class ravers, northern grans, lager lovers, rockers, students, artists, hippies, billionaires and many more are there singing along to their favourite acts – diverse, young and old – propelled into UK living rooms by Dear Auntie, the BBC. 

And these revellers aren’t talking about creativity that changes the world in an air-conditioned room – they’re experiencing it, feeling it and sweating it out together – if they’re lucky with the weather. 

So next year, I don’t think we’ll be bothered by a clash of diaries. And if we win an award at Cannes, sweet, please pop it in the post as we’ll be celebrating at Glasto – not an award show, just an epic festival of creativity. 

We’ll be taking our key staff and our award-winning clients to feel pop culture, to see, hear and feel the raw creativity that real people are talking about around the world. 

See you there.