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Five takeaways from Drew Barrymore, Facebook, Mondelez & more at Advertising Week New York 2016

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By Natalie Mortimer | N/A

September 30, 2016 | 10 min read

As the curtain closes on Advertising Week New York 2016, The Drum has rounded up five key moments from the event that you need to know about. Words by Minda Smiley and Natalie Mortimer.

Drew Barrymore

Drew Barrymore at Advertising Week New York

Marketers talk diversity, mobile and the future of marketing

During a conversation with Facebook’s vice president of global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson, PepsiCo’s Brad Jakeman and JPMorgan Chase’s chief marketing officer Kristin Lemkau discussed some of the industry’s most pressing issues.

Commenting on the diversity issues that have plagued the industry this year, Jakeman said that innovation “does not come from homogenous groups of people.” He said his leadership team is 85 per cent female and 10 per cent people of color.

“For me, diversity is one of the single greatest sources of innovation and creativity,” he said.

Lemkau agreed, noting that since JPMorgan Chase is in 60m US households, the company’s marketers need to be able to truly understand its wide customer base.

“I need my team to look and think like our customer base, not like people sitting in New York,” she said. “I don’t want to spend gobs of money on market research to figure out what my consumers think. I want to have a good cross section of the consumers in the marketing team.”

Lemkau also discussed JPMorgan Chase’s transition to mobile. While she said that the company has already become a mobile business, she said that they haven’t hit the “tipping point of mobile penetration yet,” noting that its mobile app has 25m “active engaged consumers,” up 18 per cent from last year and 77 per cent from three years ago.

At PepsiCo, Jakeman said that he is pushing the mobile conversation forward by not allowing the television commercial to be the first thing shown during meetings.

“That’s an old way of thinking. In most cases, I love being in meetings where the television commercial isn’t even discussed,” he said. “The fundamental thing that we have to think about when we think about mobile is it’s not a smaller television screen. The whole user experience – when you use it, how you use it – is fundamentally different.”

While discussing the future of marketing, both Jakeman and Lemkau agreed that the role of marketing within companies is likely to change over the next five years. Jakeman said that the “left-brained, excel spreadsheet” types of marketers will be replaced by “creative beings who come into companies like ours and think of their jobs as creating consumer experiences in order to move the business forward.”

CP+B’s Chuck Porter and Lori Senecal discuss globalism and agency culture

Over the past few years, Boulder based CP+B has become a truly global agency. In the past three years, it has set up shop in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing, bringing the MDC Partners-owned agency’s total office count to 10.

During a conversation with Adweek’s editorial director Jim Cooper, CP+B chairman Chuck Porter and CEO Lori Senecal discussed how the agency prioritizes creativity even as it expands at a fast clip.

“As an agency, we’re always talent and creativity forward, so we wanted to make sure as we globalize that we continue to have talent and creativity at the forefront and didn’t let process and scale and those kinds of things get in the way of that,” said Senecal. “We always try to stay true to the insight that inspired people create inspired work.”

Through encouraging “local inventiveness rather than global conformity” in each of its ten offices, Senecal said that creative teams are free to think "innovatively" without feeling like they need to conform to a global standard.

While discussing the oversaturation of marketing and the rise of ad blockers, Senecal said that CP+B tries adhere to the notion that “scale rarely creates impact, but impact can often create scale.”

She said that “rather than throw a money bomb at something,” the agency instead focuses on creating “high impact moments that live up to a brand’s promise.”

“Those things are much more breakthrough and create conversation,” she said. She used the example of Domino’s, whose zero click app and pizza emoji ordering are both examples of “high impact moments” that the agency creates.

Commenting on the ongoing diversity discussion within the industry and the fact that CP+B recently promoted four of its female associate creative directors to the creative director position, Porter said that he believes that “what diversity helps us do is produce less terrible work.” He also said that he thinks that ageism will be the next big thing that everyone is talking about in terms of diversity.

“All of the baby boomers are getting old,” Porter said. “There are millions and millions and millions of them. And I think an awful lot of people who are developing messaging to that audience are 26-year-old people. You can see it in the work, which is mostly really shitty because they’re stereotyping.”

Diversity takes center stage

During Advertising Week New York, the topic of diversity came up during most panels in one way or another. On Monday, all panels that took place at the Thomson Reuters building were around the topic of “empowering women.” Later in the week, the 4A’s released research that found that nearly 75 percent of respondents think that the industry is mediocre or worse at giving ethnically diverse professionals the same opportunities as their white male colleagues.

At a panel hosted by multicultural agency UniWorld Group, a group of panelists from all corners of the industry came together to discuss the future of multicultural agencies, why brands have stayed away from the #BlackLivesMatter movement and what both agencies and brands can do to better respond to issues of race, culture and social responsibility.

On the last day of Advertising Week, Saturday Morning – a nonprofit that was formed this summer by four black creatives with the goal of changing the perception that black lives are not as important as others – revealed that P&G, Airbnb and Syracuse University have all shown interest in its mission.

During the talk, Keith Cartwright, Saturday Morning co-founder and BSSP’s executive creative director, encouraged businesses, individuals and universities to get involved with the organization.

“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, there’s a way to participate," said Cartwright. "You don’t have to be a creative person. You don’t even have to be in this industry to participate.”

Drew Barrymore explains why her Flower Beauty brand doesn’t pay for advertising

While she may be best-known for her acting career, Drew Barrymore is shifting her focus over to her four businesses; Flower Beauty, Flower Eyewear, Flower Flims, and Barrymore Wines, and told an audience at Advertising Week why she doesn’t pay to advertise.

With help from her father in law Arie Kopelman, co-chairman of Chanel, Barrymore’s Flower Beauty, which is currently only sold at Walmart, is in its fifth, and most successful year yet, and Barrymore explained her approach to building the brand in an era of social media and why “minimal advertising” and a focus on the cosmetics products is important to the brand.

“I had been the co-creative director at Cover Girl at P&G…we were on every magazine and every commercial for years. Then I start Flower Beauty and our advertising money is not P&G and I thought we are not going to compete for that, so when you are painted in to a corner it can be an awesome thing because it makes you think differently”.

Barrymore said that she decided to put the money in to the formula of the brand and uses social media as the driving force.

“Because we now humanise everything instead of just projecting an image, I thought if I’m doing this and I’m making the best stuff that I can make and changing profit margins to accommodate prestige formulas being sold in the mass market then it’s a different brand I am going to focus a lot on the message.”

'The Girl On The Train' director, Mondelez debate future of television advertising

With consumers now empowered by new technologies, they're demanding distinct and better ways to view and consume content that's personalised in a variety of new, non-linear environments.

To tackle the challenge of consumers having the ability to skip ads, Mondelez is figuring out how it can create content for its brands that move away from the traditional TV advertising model and add more value for viewers.

One way it is doing this is through is through a new strategy of looking beyond ad agencies and pairing with the likes of Fox and Buzzfeed.

Mondelez global head of content and media monetization Laura Henderson, explained why the current ad model “feels phony”.

“We are in this funny period right now where I think the traditional advertising world understands brand fundamentals and brand messaging; you go to a creative agency with a brief and say you need x,y, and z. The entertainment industry understands how to tell compelling stories, so we are in this funny, messy middle where neither side understands the other, and I think there is a huge opportunity there if we can figure the brand purpose and fundamentals does it inform storytelling or does it show up in different ways, it just feels phony right now.”

Meanwhile The Girl On The Train director Tate Taylor raised the point that can advertising just be about the brand not necessarily the product it is trying to sell.

“I thought about films and who sees them and doesn’t see them and why,” he said. “I thought back to 1997 when NBC showed Schindler’s List in its entirety without any commercials and 65 million people watched it and that was three years after it was released and more people than went to the theater and Ford sponsored it. So it makes me wonder if you go back to the old-fashioned days, can it ever just be about the brand?”

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