Iain Tate, Global Interactive Executive Creative Director at Wieden + Kennedy, is the bright spark behind the campaign that transformed Procter & Gamble’s Old Spice from venerable shelf-filler into a buzzworthy icon.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone who heard Tait speak about advertising’s embrace of digital at the recent Yahoo! Provoke Summit.

He observed that those stuck with traditional thinking dislike the new reality in which “the best stuff wins,” but it’s now the public instead of “experts” determining what’s best. Furthermore, advertising professionals too often seek inspiration from looking at other ads. “That’s the last place you should be looking,” Tait says.

Success requires watching for what people actually do in real life with technology and with each other. And for those biding their time until things settle down? It’s never going to, Tait warns: “We just have to learn how to deal with it and thrive on it.”

Combining scale with the convenience of a single platform, the Microsoft and Yahoo! Search Alliance can help advertisers reach more consumers more easily. This new video illustrates how.

For more, visit SearchAlliance.com.

— The Team

One of the many informative seminars at Cannes Lions addressed the challenges and promise of social networking. Simon Mainwaring, CEO of Mainwaring Creative, summarizes the proceedings in this video shot on location. “Brands are really trying to reconcile themselves with the fact that consumers want a better world, not just better widgets,” he says, and companies ignore this factor at their peril.

Mainwaring also shares his thoughts regarding how brands are responding to the new reality of reaching consumers who are now networked and actively communicating amongst themselves. He even delves into what he means by his operating philosophy: “The evolution of revolution is contribution.”

Cannes Lions may be over, but the intrepid Yahoo! team who covered the event continues to deliver. Here they speak with Chris Moloney, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Experian, who explains why Cannes Lions is valuable even for companies like his.

Moloney also shares his thoughts on the relationship between traditional and online advertising. He has well-defined and unexpected reasons for disagreeing with “this perception that the traditional media, the TV media, is dying–is being broken apart into many pieces.” Enjoy the video for more detail:

What women want (online)
According to a recent study by Unicast, 95% of women plan to go online and, moreover, 62% of them will interact in some way with online advertising. Fact is, says the study, women aged 18 to 24 tend to be more receptive to advertising than any other audience surveyed. So you might want to do yourself a favor and limit “doodads,” that is, “dude ads,” in favor of those that appeal best to the ones most likely to click—the young ladies. Hat tip to MediaPost for this valuable information.

Trend alert: Social media is not just for kids anymore
Everyone wants a bargain and they want it wherever they are. Those are two of the key messages in Mashable columnist, Barb Baywood’s recent article, “5 Social Media Trends to Watch Right Now,” which appears in American Express’s Open Forum. The other three? Mobile ads, mobile payments and establishing a sound social media policy. Do them all now.

The blogging flow chart
Blogging for your company is not all that hard, right? After all, we do it here every single day and sometimes twice a day, or even more. Well, before you take up the title, “blogmaster,” you might want to take a peek at ad blogger Chris Brogan’s “Ambition” flow chart.

You’re not the only “creative”
Listen up, agencies: Your client has a creative will, and you have to listen to it. That doesn’t mean rolling over and playing dead. It means being able to establish creative boundaries with your clients that allow some leeway for their voices to be heard, especially after your contract is up and you’re out of the picture, as Myles Younger of Canned Banners explains on Adotas.

Don’t get no respect
Remember the late, great Rodney Dangerfield? Man got no respect, right?  Well, as Jim Nicholas explains on iMedia Connection, agencies aren’t giving clients the respect they deserve—and vice-versa. What ever happened to professional manners?

Creative spotlight: The video press release
You know how press releases are written: “Company X (NASDAQ: X) today announced blah blah boring blah…” Well, why not put your press release on video to rap lyrics? Woot!, the online store/community did when it was bought by Amazon, and the results are far more eye—and ear—catching.

— The Team

Andrew Robertson, president and CEO of BBDO Worldwide, explains why it’s valuable for him to attend Cannes Lions every year. In addition to connecting and reconnecting with colleagues from all over the world, he appreciates the “constant surprise of where ideas come from” and that “there is a magic here that we call creativity,” but adds that scale is needed for even the best ads to have impact. (Apologies for the poor sound quality, but it does add to the beachside ambiance!)

In this video, Winston Binch, Partner at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, talks with Yahoo’s Shane Steele at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival about the importance of Cannes and the science behind creativity. Cannes, says Binch, is “kind of like a digital Switzerland for our industry.” Competitors, he says, “can come here and just talk about what’s going on with our business… there’s some real, honest discussion…”

Some of his biggest challenges? “People tend to avoid advertising more than ever… Our work has to be smarter, it has to be bigger than a gimmick or a joke…” Embedding technology in everything his company does, notes Binch, is key not only to things like analytics and reaching audiences at scale, but also to helping develop creative that truly engages.

View other video interviews in this series by Shane Steele from Cannes Lions:

• Nick Parish of Contagious Communications on the evolution beyond traditional advertising
• Babs Rangaiah of Unilever on science + art + scale at Cannes
• Lincoln Bjorkman of Digitas on how to do great creative that reaches a vast audience

Or visit the Yahoo! Advertising’s page on Yahoo! Video.

— The Team

This video captures Nick Parish, North American Editor for Contagious Communications Ltd., talking with Yahoo!’s Shane Steele at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival about the industry’s tempered return to confidence and how the newest challenges are an integral part of growing into the future.

“We’re chiefly concerned with non-traditional idea transmission–non-traditional media, non-traditional campaigns,” says Parish. “And I think in that space the biggest challenge for marketers right now is how to measure engagement.”

In this video, Babs Rangaiah, Vice President of Global Communications Planning at Unilever, talks with Yahoo’s Shane Steele at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival about the challenges facing advertisers and agencies today. The two biggest challenges, he says, are “the globalization and digitalizing of the world.”

“Understanding how we move away from our over-reliance on television and reframe how we think in the digital space,” says Rangaiah, is the key.

— The Team

In this video, taken from last week’s Cannes Lion Advertising Festival,  Lincoln Bjorkman, Digitas’ wunderkind SVP of Creative, talks to Yahoo! VP of B2B Marketing Communications, Shane Steele, about losing pounds for the summer, re-invigorating your agency, and creating art that scales.

Look for more Yahoo! Videos from Cannes in the coming days. In the meantime, check out these great clips from advertising’s fabulous Euro-confab:

• Yahoo!-Cannes video roundup
• Yahoo! CMO, Elisa Steele, and others show their Cannes-do spirit
• If you build a brand castle, clients will come—our tribute to our brand leaders
• Ben Stiller, uncut

— The Team