President Clinton Urges Advertisers
Advertising creativity can help build a better world
A standing ovation welcomed former US President Bill Clinton at his arrival on the stage of a fully-packed Grand Auditorium at Cannes Lions. At the the invitation of Grupo ABC's chairman Nizan Guanaes, Bill Clinton, came to Cannes Lions to talk about his "Clinton Global Initiative" whose mission is to improve global health, strengthen economies worldwide, promote healthier childhoods, and protect the environment by fostering partnerships among governments, businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and private citizens - leveraging their expertise, resources, and passions - to turn good intentions into measurable results. During his speech at Cannes Lions, the former president urged the advertising industry to help solve some of the world's most pressing problems, such as poverty, hunger, global warming, through its creativity and immense power of persuasion. At 65, Bill Clinton, after a lifetime of public service, he kept a brilliant capacity at citing figures to illustrate his words. He painted an objective picture the major problems the world had to face, from recovering from disaster in Haiti, to opportunities and challenges in emerging countries that have to help the poor to stand up while keeping progress to modernity on the move. He then talk about the climate changes and global warming that some of the politicians (like Republicans) don't want to consider as a serious issue. And, evoking social media, Bill Clinton told they were great tools, but real decisions are taken by politicians. So, if some more and more people want to make common cause with others, first, people have to be informed of the reality of facts, and then, the resistance to change must be tackled. Asking ad industry for help, President Clinton said: " We need people like you to fire up our imagination! Communicators will have a profound influence on how the next 20 or 30 years turns out…" He added later: "We need people to realize that our common humanity matters more than our interesting differences". He added that " All economic change comes through creative networking with government, associations, NGO…". Bill Clinton also said that to unite people around one feeling, you had to do that around mutual ethic empowerment. "People need to believe it's going to be an exciting day!
