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ADMAN AND MAYOR OF CANNES
An Interview With DDB's Bernard Brochand
June 18, 2001
By Stefano Hatfield
CANNES (AdAgeGlobal.com) -- Bernard Brochand, the co-chairman of DDB Europe and the new mayor of Cannes, admits he was a tad underwhelmed when he opened his first mayoral salary check. The princely sum of FFr 20,000 (U.S. $2,600) a month is a far cry from the money he is used to
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| Bernard Brochand, veteran adman and new Mayor of Cannes.
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making in a long, hugely successful career as an adman, and it must leave DDB's Keith Reinhard questioning how much he paid his vice chairman all those years!
Speaking at the onset of the Cannes International Advertising Festival, Brochand acknowledges that he doesn't need the money -- in fact, he ran his March campaign with the right-wing RPR party on an anti-corruption ticket. He won 45% of 28,000 votes.
But Brochand, until last month also president of the vaunted French soccer team Paris St Germain, was genuinely shocked when mid way through the campaign, the local French Riviera deputy (member of the national assembly) died, and he found himself being elected to that post too. Imagine New York City mayor Rudi Giuliani, Sen. Hillary Clinton, Allen Rosenshine and the New York Yankees' George Steinbrenner as one man.
Hailing from a fourth-generation Cannes family, this twinkly-eyed 63-year-old with an infectious laugh is a man of prodigious energy. He is said to sleep only four hours a night. But even he admits that in the future, advertising will take more of a back seat to politics -- perhaps one of the two days a week he now spends in Paris. He stepped down from PSG to concentrate on Cannes. He cried when presented with a named seat for life at the historic Parc des Princes stadium.
Also chief of police
Being mayor of Cannes is a full-time job. French mayors have great personal power, more comparable with a Giuliani in New York than, say, Ken Livingstone, London's first politician mayor. Brochand reminds me, chuckling, that he is the chief of police now.
Cannes is a unique city, where the mayor must balance the needs of the 75,000 local residents with the 10,000 to 30,000 visitors that flood in each week as tourists and conference delegates. There are an astonishing 120 conferences in Cannes a year occupying 310 days. They bring in FFr 4 billion (U.S. $524 million) a year through the city's 5,000 hotel rooms, 5,000 rental residences, and the famously expensive bars and restaurants.
The year-round occupancy rate is a Paris-like 85%. For really big festivals, delegates are forced to stay in Antibes, Nice and even Monaco (the horror). A new
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| Photo: Daniel Faure.. |
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| Picturesque Cannes hosts 120 festivals a year.
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five-star and a couple of new four-star hotels will likely be built in the next few years.
Ad festival is city's 6th largest
Brochand estimates that the advertising festival is the sixth-largest of the year behind the Film Festival and its 50,000 visitors and Mipim, a real estate gathering that brings together 30,000 realtors. 30,000 realtors? In one place! And Brochand calls Cannes a Mediterranean paradise? He laughs loud.
Laughter is his mechanism for deflecting questions he doesn't want to answer, such as "When you were just an adman, did you prefer the festival in Cannes or Venice, the city with which it used to alternate?"
On behalf of everyone whose pocket will be burnt this week by a Hotel Martinez bar bill, I ask, "Come on, Bernard, you fix all the prices and put them up according to which festival is in town, don't you?"
'Supply and demand' prices
"My God, I am on the other side now, eh?" he says, laughing at himself. His denial is not at all convincing, but he will only admit to hiking prices for the huge film festival in May: "It is supply and demand".
So, as an adman, did he question the value of the festival? Does he?
"It is not too expensive," he answers with a giggle. "Globalization is everywhere. You need some time in the year to meet everyone from around the world, and to exchange ideas. It is a way of showcasing that we are a business that's dynamic and in good shape."
With that he is off to his next meeting -- civic duties. Sadly, he declines my suggestion that he wear his mayoral sash along the Croisette all week, but with a twinkle he does concede that the idea of formally receiving big-name French admen like BBDO's Jean-Michel Goudard, Havas Advertising's Alain de Pouzilhac and TBWA's Jean Marie-Dru in the official residence has crossed his mind.
On that salary, there's got to be a perk or two.
Stefano Hatfield is managing director and editorial director of Ad Age Global.
© 2001, Crain Communications Inc.
Editor@AdAge.com
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