The 57th Cannes Lions Festival is drawing to a close, today is the last full day of seminars and the hustle and bustle has died down a little, although unlike yesterday there have been some queues to get into today’s seminars. Not surprising with Yoko Ono  apparently doing yoga on stage during the early afternoon session. We’re not sure this was planned but if you invite a performance artist to share the stage, what do you expect?

For me one of the most keenly anticipated  sessions of today was WPP’s chairman, Martin Sorrell interviewing Unilever’s new CMO, Keith Weed. The hour session spanned many topics, including digital during which Weed compared social media and digital to teenage sex. In that lots of people are talking about it, few are actual doing it and they are not sure they are doing it right. Despite this he announced that Unilever will be doubling its digital spend over the next year. However, it’s not being done for the sake of it but rather because consumers are increasingly online and Wood believes that you need to be there not just with the consumer but before the consumer – brands need to be the leading edge.

The other interesting session I took in this morning was from Organic on its work with Kimberley Clarke on the revitalisation of the Kotex brand. Not well known in the UK and considered fuddy-duddy in the States, Organic demonstrated some truly insightful thinking to relaunch the brand, using a product line extension, and created some thought provoking work that’s well worth a watch.

Today was the day that the big guns rolled out at the Cannes Lions with director Spike Jonze, producer Jon Landau and the CEO of everyone’s favourite social networking platform, Mark Zuckerburg gracing the main stage at the DeBussy Theatre. The Facebook session was so popular that a strict one-in, one-out policy was out in place and the first five minutes of his talk was to the background of camera clicks.

The content of his talk was nothing new or shocking. His vision is to stay as CEO and to keep growing the world’s ability to share and connect. He likes the new simplified privacy controls and will keep talking to users about products as they role out.

Far more interesting was the trip that DavidonDemand made to the PN@Cannes stand. David Perez, from US Agency Leo Burnett, was allowed to go to Cannes Lions but has to do everything he is told to do so over Twitter. So not surprisingly, he’s featured quite highly on our top tend trends, capturing over a quarter of the Twitter conversation this week. We  had a t-short printed up for him and handed it over when he game by the stand.

Welcome to Porter Novelli’s sometimes weekly digital news post.

How do we tackle a media landscape in which troubling advertising returns and economic uncertainty are causing inevitable cuts to local news? One answer is hyperlocal websites, which cover their areas in detail and are based on a more sustainable business model than a traditional newspaper tasked with granular local coverage.

Hyperlocal is made possible – or at least easier – by the growth of the social web, and the people behind them tend to be very adept at using this to aggregate content about their beats and engage the communities concerned. Of course, despite traditional media being largely unable to get under the skin of local news in the same detail as a Utopian hyperlocal site would, the occasional war of words ensues between the two.

Most recently, I read Judith Townend’s account of a spat that took place thanks to a blog post about one hyperlocal by David Ottewell on the Manchester Evening News website. The post certainly carried a disdainful undertone and as such was picked up by a number of the UK’s leading hyperlocal innovators.

Philip John is the man behind the wonderful Lichfield Blog, and points out that his hyperlocal work has led to probable collaboration with Trinity Mirror publications and suggests that TM is interested in hyperlocal for a reason. Presumably, that reason is that it has potentially huge value.

LinkedIn hits 70 million users

Professional social networking website LinkedIn announced at the end of last week that it has reached 70 million users worldwide. It’s been a year of change for LinkedIn, with its continued growth matched by amendments to the functionality of the site (some of which work nicely while others don’t).

The fastest growth, says CEO Jeff Weiner, is international, which opens up some interesting avenues for LinkedIn over and above the inevitable commercial decisions to be made by a growing, profitable company.

As TechCrunch writer Leena Rao indicates in the post linked above, there is also a lot of wriggle-room left for LinkedIn in terms of using the masses of data it can collate from its large user base. Watch this space.

Not convinced about the social web?

During a quick glance through one of my favourite blogs, Hypebot, I read about some Nielsen research which spelled out just how important blogs and social networking sites are – or should be – to the PR industry.

In a nutshell, 22% of all time online is spent on blogs and social networking websites, equating to a staggering 110 billion hours a month. The most popular sites, of course, are Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia.

Firing squad death announced on Twitter

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff tweeted his announcement that the execution of murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner would go ahead – yes, tweeted. Sometimes the ways people use social media amazes me. Here’s the tweet:

“I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims.”

Wow. I certainly hope the news was shared elsewhere first.

Digital licence plates for California?

Advertising gone mad or an innovative economy booster? The state of California has floated the idea of switching cars to digital licence plates which show the licence details when the car is moving and allow companies to buy advertising space (alongside a shrunken version of the licence details) for when it’s stationary. From Crunchgear:

Currently, the plates would only display ads while the vehicles are stopped, and the license number would be displayed (admittedly smaller) on the plates at all times, but this still sounds like a terrible idea to me. Light up advertising on a license plate? This just seems like an incredibly annoying idea that should die in the California legislature.

What’s your verdict?