As soon as we identified the problem, we had a solution. After the first hundred shots of yachts and parties from the 2014 festival, we thought, “What if there was a way to block all of this crap from our feeds?”

On the opening day of the 2015 festival, we launched The Cannescellation, a Chrome plugin that could intercept tweets that it determined to be originating from Cannes and keep the user’s Twitter feed completely Cannes-free. Not only did the plugin block Cannes-related tweets, it showed them being destroyed, making it even more satisfying for the Cannes-Nots.

The Cannescellation works by analyzing tweets in real time as they load in Chrome. The content of each tweet is compared to a list of keywords related to Cannes. If there’s a match, an image of the tweet is captured, resized, and superimposed into a video. The video is then placed over the offending tweet in the user’s timeline.

As an agency self-promo, the Cannescellation was intended to create a reaction within the advertising and marketing community. It succeeded, with coverage in North American publications including Creativity, Campaign, and AgencySpy; and coverage in countries such as France, Brazil, Russia, and Japan. The Cannescellation video was viewed over 5,000 times and downloads of the actual extension far exceeded expectations.

Simply blocking tweets would be functionally useful, but we wanted to be emotionally useful. We needed to find a way to provide some catharsis form the Cannes-Nots.

Every June, the advertising industry divides into two types of people, the Cannes, who attend the festival, and the Cannes-Nots, who are left back at the office, doing actual work. The Cannes tweet photos and videos of the decadent, sun-drenched fun they're having. This fills up the twitter feeds of the Cannes-Nots, who seethe with jealousy, wishing it would all go away.