While it may be a self-congratulatory advertising event, Cannes announced the winners from the shortlist. Goodby Silverstein & Partners won Gold Lions for Comcastic, Brittle Lactica, and a Got Milk? banner ad, not to mention a silver for a Discover Card work and a Bronze for Specialized Body Geometry. All this made GSP in second place for Interactive Agency of the Year, right after CPB.

Work coming from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners made the shortlist for Cannes Cyber Lions. This includes web sites Comcastic, Brittle Lactica and Cow Abduction, Specialized, as well as banner and viral work for Saturn, Comcast and Discover Card. Yay! Winners announced Thursday June 22nd.

Last night I was standing outside The Mezzanine with a friend, when I suddenly saw a homeless woman in a wheelchair pinned under the wheel of a giant garbage truck. We started screaming to the driver to stop the truck, and he did just in the nick of time. The wheelchair was completely totalled, and the driver had to drive in reverse to unpin the wheelchair from the tire. But the woman, while definitely injured, was conscious. While waiting for the ambulance and police to arrive, the woman kept screaming, “my baby, my baby.” Feeling a deep pit in my stomach I noticed a little hooded swaddling in her arms.

At this point, I’m completely disturbed by the situation, and walk over to her so I can get a closer look at the baby. It turns out that the “baby” was simply a pile of blankets. The woman had sores all over her body from what looked like a flesh-eating bacteria. Finally the police and the ambulance arrive. After talking with everyone at the scene, one of the police officers mutters under his breath that this is not the first time this woman has apparently thrown herself in front of a truck. What a tragic scenario for everyone, and especially for the woman in the wheelchair.

Suddenly, there are a whole slew of mobile social network tools coming out. Sure there’s Google’s Dodgeball, the recent launch of Moblastic, and now, coming soon, to a mobile phone near you, is Street Hive, from VC-funded mobile company Wavemarket. Wavemarket also is known for their “electronic leash” Family Finder program that is used by Sprint and other CDMA based providers as a way for parents to track where their children are, since all recent CDMA handsets are GPS enabled. Ah, to be a child these days, where your parents can track your every move. What ever happened to simply trusting your children? (Er, well, maybe that has always been an issue? But I digress.) The service currently does not work with GSM phones as the tower triangluation method of tracking is not nearly as accurate as GPS.

Street Hive follows the same logic as Family Finder (and only works with CDMA phones), where you can pinpoint the location of your friends on a map, read profiles of people who are hanging out at the same bar as you, and share photos. This is all well and good, and sure, there are great benefits to these types of tools. Group message broadcasting is nice, and definitely there is something neat about learning intimate details about your fellow bar brethren before you approach them to start up a conversation. (”Do you come around here often?” changes to “OMG we like the same music!”) But, there is a bit of creepiness that this type of openness provides, that I haven’t quite adjusted to yet. From an advertising POV, this is an area to tread lightly, as I’m not sure that people are ready to handle the fact that they being tracked not only by their friends and family, but also by marketers.

With Microsoft’s recent purchase of Massive, lots of corporate sponsors are jumping into in-game advertising as a way to reach the younger demographic that is watching less and less TV. The problem is trying to figure out how to do it in a way where it makes sense and doesn’t offend the gamer. While many advertising agencies are scrambling to throw corporate dollars for product placement within existing games, game advertising company Play, a unit of Publicis’ new media consultancy, Denuo, is taking a slightly different approach.

First, as creators of Miller Beer Run, Play focused on creating an advergame that was specific to Miller Beer, but also paid homage to the TV spot created by Y&R taking an interesting storytelling approach where the narrative was played across multiple media platforms. Second, instead of hosting the game on Miller’s corporate website, Play worked with Yahoo and MSN to release the game on their game-specific portals, with the logic that the game would have a greater reach on those portals, rather than attempting to funnel visitors to Miller’s website via banner advertising. The result was successful from Play’s POV — with over 3MM game plays and 1.2MM unique players.