Cannes Lions: How Momentum believes marketing will change the world thanks to digital
Strolling along the Promenade de la Croisette at the Cannes Creativity Festival one trend is abundantly clear. Technology is now just as much a feature of Cannes as creativity.
Google and Microsoft seems to own the beach front. The likes of Radium, Velti and Adobe lavish goodie bags on delegates from well appointed pavilions. Delegates supp free rosé at the Spotify party. Even the famous ‘Gutter Bar’ sports the branding of Yahoo.
And the chat in that bar is just as likely to be about mobile, social and analytics as commercials, directors and exotic oversea shoots.
There is not the sense of a revolution taking place. It is more of one that has taken place. Digital is the new norm, part of the landscape although in fairness the definition of what normal means in practice has not quite been defined.
But apart from a few dinosaurs at once hot London shops, this is a revolution that most welcome. For a start it has allowed a clutch of once low profile agencies to come to the fore. And the reason they were low profile was that they were deemed to occupy that space deemed as ‘below-the-line’. They were certainly below the radar as far as the creative elite were once concerned.
However, their skills - honed in the world of pre-PC customer engagement - are well suited to the new digital economy. One agency that seems to have an extra spring its its step these days is Momentum. Known for their events, shopper marketing and sponsorship, they they are in the midst of a relaunch designed to capitalise on what they see as the opportunities digital presents, as opposed to the threats.
In Cannes sunshine, The Drum caught up with its director of insight, Mathew Gidley, who believes repercussions from this revolution will be felt well beyond the marketing industry.
“I think digital really does give this industry the chance to change the world,” he says. “Once the State was charged with creating the future. But in western economies at least, they have no longer the ability to do that. But digital has given business, working with punters, the chance to create a new future.”
It sounds a bit over the top. But Gildey cites examples like the Virgin Space programme where companies are already taking over from the state.
And he argues that through digital - which gives companies the power to co-create content and products with their customers - this form of initiative will become more common.
“The concept of co-creation is not new. For goodness sake that was how Stonehenge was built. But for some reason people then starting putting themselves back into silos. I think we are now being forced to take more collective responsibility again. There is a chance to reconnect to the world of co-creation.”
Gidley argues that brands and companies are well placed to exploit this trend. And it is an idea which is at the heart of the Momentum relaunch. The agency has ‘torn down its internal silos’ which has seen the merger of its events, sponsorship and shopper teams.
“The people simply focus on the work, not the job titles,” says Gidely. “We are simply now a creation agency.”
Of course, they are not alone in going for a less specific positioning in a world where convergence is all the rage. However, at its core the business does seems to have one primary driver: to engage the consumer to the extent that they become partners in the creation of content. This goes beyond crowd-sharing. There is a determination to produce work and ideas of real depth.
One project which sums up the proposition was a recent campaign known as American Express Unstaged. This allowed music fans to interact and change a concert as it was taking place in real time. They had a say in the music played, how it was mixed and the design of the backdrop. They could even send avatars of themselves onto the stage. The climax of the projects was a Coldplay concert which generated 20m views and crashed YouTube.
They say another great example will be the UPS Olympic sponsorship activation which they are currently working on, but cannot talk about yet.
Said Gidely: “These are great example of the public helping to co-create content to make it more meaningful and engaging. This is pure entertainment. But there is no reason we cannot do similar things to make a real difference to peoples lives. We are working with some of the world’s biggest brands to help deliver that.
“You never know. One day, perhaps a pro-creation project will put a man on the moon.”