Let’s stop showing off about winning Lions and learn from each other instead
The Cannes Lions awards are all about celebrating creativity aren’t they? Yes, but let’s be honest, we all want to win one. We want to beat other agencies, we want to bask in the glory of displaying that statuette back in our offices, we want to show them off to our clients and we want to use them to gain new business. Awards mean recognition, and are the pinnacle of the creative process, right?
Not according to Facebook’s chief creative officer Mark D’Arcy. At a talk at Cannes titled ‘Connect the world, create for the world,’ he called for awards to be the beginning of the process, the start of a new way of thinking, and an inspiration to others.
“How much do we drive those ideas forward into the world? How much do we leave them on the shelf each year? And how do we start turning today’s breakthroughs into tomorrow’s best practices?” he asked. We know that doing so isn’t as sexy as winning an award itself, he said, but I agree: it’s critical that we hold up innovative ideas and collaborate with each other.
Why? Because sharing our ideas will mean that adland – and business in general – can better contribute to the ‘fourth industrial revolution’, a term coined by the World Economic Forum to refer to the fact that ‘almost every industry in every country’ is being disrupted by technology.
Companies and industries in the western world are disrupting each other – Uber, Amazon, Airbnb – and soon, they will be affected by producers and service providers in the developing world. Working together will be better for everyone.
Facebook’s Africa director Nunu Ntshingila presented at Cannes with D’Arcy, giving the example of an SME in Lagos that had gone from being a sole street vendor to running an online business via Facebook, with eight staff. His customers now come from a pool of 21 million people in Nigeria’s largest city, rather than those who passed his stand – and this in a place whose population swells by eight people an hour.
Ntshingila also talked about Nairobi-based online retailer Soko, a jewellery company featuring handmade pieces from small Kenyan producers, which ships to 45 countries – including many developed nations.
Currently, there are 3.2 billion people connected to the internet, which is ‘not a lot’ according to Ntshingila. A further 2 billion will come online from Africa, India and Latin America in future. “We are about to enter an era of connectivity that will be fundamentally different to the one we know today. It will be radically different,” she said.
The issue for agencies and our clients is that we simply don’t know what this fourth industrial revolution will bring. I know it will be probably the most exciting time to work in the creative world, and as Ntshingila said, we will need to create the right stories, for the right people, to drive value. It means being more creative, not caring where an idea came from, and being generous in our thinking.
D’Arcy’s broader point was about collaboration – and connectivity, Facebook’s raison d’etre. Of course he was on stage to bang the platform’s drum, but he revealed that the question he is most often asked by companies is how they can best structure themselves for collaboration, to get the most out of their teams.
What might be frustrating for agencies is that it is clients that are likely to drive the future – but if we are aware of that we’ll be able to help them do so. Yes, we can celebrate our awards but as well as showing off, let’s realise that collaboration is the new innovation.
Chris Pearce is CEO at TMW Unlimited