Bidding. Marketing. Creative. Data. The story of Tuesday at Cannes Lions
We’re three days in at Cannes and we’re still going strong! Tuesday’s theme was 'Data, Insight, Strategy, and Creative' – thank God for technology, right? At this point some clear themes have emerged.
Kolle Rebbe’s 'Social Swipe' campaign
Bidding. Marketing. Creative. Data. They’re all real-time, and the implications are massive. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the awards session on Tuesday evening, where the Lions for excellence in Outdoor, Mobile, and Media were awarded to the industry’s finest. Tuesday night was one of the single greatest displays of how advertising can positively impact the world, and it’s largely due to advances in technology.
Arguably one of the best examples of this was Kolle Rebbe’s (Hamburg, Germany) 'Social Swipe' campaign. It set up interactive posters at airports that showed a piece of bread on a cutting board. The poster had a physical line through the middle, much like a knife cut would make. You could move the bread from left to right on the touchscreen, and when you were ready, you swiped your credit card through the line in the poster to cut the bread. The money goes to a charitable cause.
Nivea’s 'Sun Kids' campaign (FCB Brazil) was another amazing example of how creativity and real-time technology came together. Ever worry about your kid running off at the beach? Nivea printed out special editions of a magazine where parents could remove a portion of a page (like a cologne or perfume sampler) and fashion it as a wristband around their child’s wrist. They then downloaded a Nivea app and could track their kid’s physical location whilst relaxing in the shade.
LEMZ Amsterdam’s 'International Children’s AID Org', Delta Miami and Cramer Chicago’s 'Corona Extra', and Whybin/TBWA’ Australia’s 'GAYTM' also stood out.
The spirit of Tuesday night’s award session was probably best stated in a brilliant session by StinkDigital (UK) – 'Improving User Experience with Smart Use of Data'. It argued that all creative executions would eventually be informed by real-time data – and we’re not talking about just taking the screen into account.
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest – we take a lot of pictures. This is partially due to developments in mobile phone camera technology, high-speed data transfer, and pop culture. StinkDigital used military-grade facial recognition technology to analyse people’s selfies (pictures people have taken of themselves). By doing this, they could use the data points to tell a person’s gender, whether they were smiling or not, whether they were wearing glasses or not, sunglasses or not, whether their eyes were open or closed, and their overall mood. They used this technology to build an app that let people create their own music videos, featuring themselves as the star. Whether or not it made those people’s lives better is subjective, but the value of that personal data is very real.
Cannes is in full-swing, and those focusing on unique uses of data to reach an audience give us the largest applause – we can’t wait to see what the rest of the week has in store!
Mark Rotblat is VP media, North America at TubeMogul
