Piers Morgan hears that Aaron Sorkin hates Facebook, David Simon loathes Twitter and Eric Schmidt loves Super Bowl ads
Piers Morgan at Cannes Lions said a tweet about his CNN show with Charlie Sheen gained a ratings boost.
Aaron Sorkin, the writer of The West Wing and The Social Network, is not a fan of Facebook. David Simon, the writer of The Wire, doesn't like Twitter. And Google, the online search advertising giant, loves Super Bowl TV ads.
The pair were meant to be discussing the topic of the "golden age of television" but it was their responses to a much broader chat about media – elicited by interviewer Piers Morgan – that proved far more interesting.
(Sorkin's favourite TV show: The Office, Simon's: Game of Thrones).
It was Morgan who alerted the audience to the bizarre fact that the pair, two of the most pre-eminent screen writers in the US, had never met before walking on stage at the Cannes Lions.
"They've been chatting away [backstage] about mutual projects they could work on," said Morgan. "Imagine. Wouldn't that be great."
Sorkin said that he only created a Facebook profile "to find out what it was all about" as he was writing the screenplay for the Academy award-winning film The Social Network.
Describing himself as "just this side of luddite", added he had "barely heard of Facebook, I'd heard of it in the way I've heard of a carburettor".
He said he came off Facebook (which he compared to the computer Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey in the difficulty he had in actually "killing" his profile) "because of a couple of stalker-like people".
While Sorkin admitted to being "impressed" with Twitter, Simon chimed in to voice his concern about what new technology has done to the "high end of journalism".
"I worry about where we are headed," he said. "You can find out everything faster reading a headline, I worry."
His concern is that the race to cover news meant consumers were not getting the full picture.
"You cannot in a Twitter feed or in 24-hour news coverage explain the complexity [of some issues]," he said. "Drugs ... that's an essay, a four-part series ... I'm worried about high-end journalism."
Jeff Bewkes, the chairman of CNN-to-Marie Claire owner Time Warner, echoed the rising issue of the information scramble the internet has created.
"It is a real problem at CNN ... even in magazines," he said. "You've got to run things quickly in order not to be stale news."
However, Morgan – an avid Twitter user who has 885,000 followers since signing up ahead of the launch of his CNN chatshow in January – stuck up for social media, providing an example of the growing power of technology by highlighting the impact of a tweet on the viewing figures of his interview with Charlie Sheen.
He said that CNN had analysed the viewing figures immediately after he sent the tweet and reckon that 500,000 extra people tuned in because they had seen it.
"One tweet which cost me nothing," he said. "It was a fascinating example of the power of a social network to influence television."
Simon also argued the rise of high-end shows such as The West Wing and The Wire was "raising the bar" in the creativity of ad campaigns.
On the topic of new ground in TV advertising, Google chairman Eric Schmidt, speaking at the following session, told how he thought "hell had frozen over" when he was told of a plan for the search giant to run a TV ad in the Super Bowl.
"In the decade I've been at the company I'd never seen the value of that [TV ads]," he said, causing the Cannes audience of ad industry types to squirm in their seats. "I thought someone had a screw loose."
He was, however, happy to be proven wrong – "the board loved it" and Google ran the 60-second spot for Chrome in a prime slot during the Super Bowl, probably costing more than $5m (£3m).
"Was it a good business investment? We looked at incremental search traffic ... and it paid for itself," Schmidt said. "At the end of the day we took a Super Bowl ad and turned it into an ROI phenomenon."
Schmidt went on to talk of what he called the "Fab 5" – Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and possibly either Twitter or Netflix – as digital and technology "platform" businesses that other companies can use to build their businesses on. Farmville-maker Zynga for example has become massive by ponying up with Facebook, he said.
"The source of real wealth for shareholders is not just one of these consumer companies but a platform to build on," he added. "In our industry there has never been four companies [Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon] of that scale growing at those rates."
While media and the business community has marvelled at the explosive growth of these companies he warned more is to come: "New ones will emerge [growing] even faster than the ones I named," Schmidt said. "Don't be surprised."
With thanks to the Guardian's Organ Grinder
