As Cannes Lions kicks off, here are five seminars you can't afford to miss
We’ve just touched down in Cannes! The sun is shining, the bubbly is flowing, and everybody in advertising has descended on southern France for a week of exploration, innovation, and celebration.
Cannes is the only place in the world where you can listen to world-famous creatives lecture during the day, watch the sunset whilst sipping rosé on the rooftop with CEOs of global powerhouses, and party the night away on yachts with celebrities. Indeed, this is the Superbowl of advertising, and we’re thrilled to have partnered with The Drum to bring you regular updates on what’s hot, what’s not, who won big, and what the future holds in store for the entire media industry.
The main buzz this year is the meteoric rise of digital media, or 'Cyber' as Cannes call it. Digiday has a lovely chart that tracks category entries by year, and 2014 is the first where Cyber took top-three honours. With this in mind, here are five can’t-miss seminars that we’re most looking forward to that break away from Cannes’ historically creative orientation and focus more on everything that has come to the forefront of media in the past year.
1) The evolution of brands in the digital age: “Mondelez’s ‘Blue Whales and Hummingbirds” and panel “How can Marketers Make Sure They’re Applying The Latest Technology To Their Brands?”
Mondelez is a global confectionary powerhouse responsible for brands like Bis, Club Social, Hall, Tang and Trident. They were also behind the now-infamous Oreo halftime tweet that gave birth to “real-time marketing.” In these two sessions, they’ll discuss how the relationship between brand, media agency, creative agency, and technology partner is evolving, and what brands have to do to stay ahead of the pack. (disclaimer: if you’re in a start-up, you shouldn’t miss this).
2) “Nielsen: The Brains Behind Better Ads: Elevating Creative With Consumer Neuroscience”
At its most basic level, advertising connects the brand with the consumer. The more powerful the connection, the more effective the advertisement. Advances in neuroscience show that our brains react to a specific creative in mere milliseconds, before we’ve even consciously processed it. At this seminar, Nielsen is debuting a new headset that shows real-time brain response to ads, and discusses the implications this could have on developing creative.
3) “Integral Ad Science: ‘Bot Attack’: A Wake-Up Call for the Industry”
Show up early to this one, because we guarantee it will be one of the most crowded tech talks all week. If you’re a digital advertiser, you’ve heard a lot about fraud lately. Here’s your chance to hear it from the experts who are actually fighting it, not some executive trying to get headlines. Topics will include how pervasive online fraud really is, what it looks like, why it happens, and most importantly: what you can do about it.
4) Planning creatives for different screens: “Millward Brown: From 60 Seconds to 6 Seconds and 6 Minutes” & “Ebuzzing: How to Create Effective Video Advertising Across Multiple Platforms.”
Do you have a cellphone? Tablet? Thought so. In today’s cross-screen world, traditional standards around creative length (sorry :30s, it’s not you, it’s me) have gone out the window. These two sessions take a deep dive on how people consume content on different devices, and how creative should be tailored accordingly. These are two that everyone – not just digital marketers – can benefit from.
5) “Exponential: Data’s Human Nature”
Despite data’s domination and pervasiveness in all aspects of media, at the end of the day, it’s analysed by humans. In fact, if you look closely enough, data even mirrors some human behaviors – erratic, illogical, and unpredictable. Thankfully we can relate and make some sense out of it. This fascinating seminar looks to establish patterns between the way data behaves and the way humans behave, and how marketers can use both to their advantage.
Keith Eadie is chief marketing officer at TubeMogul. The Drum has partnered with TubeMogul to bring regular updates throughout Cannes Lions this year.
