The dust has settled and the hangovers have finally diminished, so what did we really learn from Cannes Lions? Paul Frampton, CEO at Havas Media, takes a comprehensive look at the key themes that emerged on La Croisette this year.
#CannesLions has come to a close for another year and left its mark in many ways. It’s always a fantastic opportunity for brands to see what the global marketing community considers important and for me there were clear take outs from this year’s festival. The strongest theme throughout was Storytelling and #LiveStorytelling which was attacked from all sides. Celebrity storytellers including Rob Lowe and Kanye West were slightly overdone for me, but these sessions provided a great reminder of how these individuals have managed to build powerful brands with fans. Advertisers would do well to learn from this and to aspire to being more human and telling relevant stories that entertain and matter to people. There was a pleasing amount of momentum behind "humanising" advertising and brands doing good versus heralding 30" spots that often celebrate a fake and fantastic, aspirational world. Sheryl Sandberg promised more "delightful experiences" for people on Facebook and "personalised marketing at scale", whilst Rob Lowe said the only thing worse than 'inauthentic' was #fauxauthentic. As with people-to-people relationships, it felt that last week the marketing community widely acknowledged that people yearn for more honest and truthful relationships with brands. With the above point in mind, there was a great deal of conversation around the need for relevant and engaging content. The key focus was on the importance of genuinely engaging content, rather than the platform or device the content is consumed on. There was also wide acceptance that brands need to collaborate with experts in storytelling, entertainment and content creation, whether that be publishers, film/music talent or entertainment houses. This was brought to our attention during the week when YouTube announced a new subscription model encouraging stronger collaboration between brands and talent. The move could satisfy the needs of both parties and simultaneously the insatiable appetite that people now have for engaging and compelling content. Finally, the crossover of #CannesLions with the #WorldCup2014 highlighted the brilliant creativity surrounding the world's largest global sporting event, with the best #WorldCup2014 ads using superb storytelling featuring real Brazilians and football, not actors. We were reminded again and again that if people care, then they will share. Great, topical stories told through content, like McDonald's brilliant World Cup GOL film, will today travel at light speed through the connected social networks of "people", giving brands more organic exposure opportunities than ever before. Let's not forget though that it is people who make the decision to share, not a platform or an algorithm. If brands wants to be shared, they must matter and create a meaningful connection to people.
#Mobile also made a bigger splash this year with a huge MMA tent in front of the Palais packed with hourly seminars on the future of mobile. Everyone is talking about it, mobile is the future of everything, but mobile demands completely new thinking. The legacy advertising models are simply not going to work - mobile is post-digital and cannot be a classic push medium. Utility and value need to lead which is why I believe what "native advertising” really means is advertising that seamlessly integrates in to the environment the individual is in. Since their inception, Adwords & Twitter have deployed native strategies for integrating ad messages in to content but they start with simple, unobtrusive text, not full page pop-ups. Once there is ubiquitous Wi-Fi and fast 4G, the rich media cavalry and mobile video can return but more than anything mobile teaches brands and agencies that "marketing" is about delivering positive, appropriate "experiences". In a mobile environment, people adapt their expectation to wanting short, useful and portable content. My belief is the only way that brands will win is by considering context, medium and message as complimentary elements working in harmony on a mobile device. #Data driven marketing also trended at the festival and many of the discussions I witnessed addressed the taboo that this is only a media agency "problem" ; it was pleasing to see so many bosses of creative agencies engaging with the data agenda. The simple conclusion of one round table I took part in was that data = people and that therefore advertising needs better data solutions and systems to better serve people. The aversion to the data debate from creatives is definitely softening. Once we talk #peopledata and not #bigdata , planners and creatives lean back in to the conversation. One, well constructed wall that remains is the significant discrepancy between the quality of data driven targeting and the evolution of creative to match that world, whether social or programmatic - which leads me to my last point...With the world of media, creative and technology converging more every day, the other emerging undertone on La Croisette for me was around #collaboration and the urgent need for media and creative to come back together in order to better serve people's needs. Keith Weed of Unilever, in his keynote, talked about "the future needs to be about marketing for people." He then went on to say that "effective engagement demands collaboration and orchestration across an industry of specialists." It's clear that some agency leaders remain uncomfortable about this but if brands are to seize the opportunities that exist in today's content and data driven world, then both brands and their agencies need to eradicate silos and concentrate on serving their customers and prospects better.92 per cent of #CannesLions awards were entered by creative agencies alone, but La Croisette is dominated by digital media owners who rarely interact with that community. These types of discrepancies must be overcome if brands (and their agencies) want to stay relevant in this constantly shifting landscape. The silos that exist between brand, marketing, e-commerce, data, CSR and PR in organisations can not remain if brands want to deliver more consistently meaningful communications across platforms. Integration today means communications weaved together through a central idea and data, not just a tick list of the range of channels or tactics employed. Media consumption is changing so fast that any brand, media owner or agency boss that tries to challenge this is quickly losing credibility.I overheard a lot of conversation around emerging crowd sourced approaches to TV production which will undoubtedly disrupt the creative community in the same way PPC disrupted media agencies. Agency Groups must pursue smart strategies to unite the best brains and talent from across their portfolio. Creative and media people around the same table talking data will discover better insights plus truly leverage the targeting opportunities available. Creative and media people around the same table discussing content will equally find a more optimal balance between content creation, production and distribution. Creativity and data, ideas and maths have had an uncomfortable relationship for years but I feel that this year in Cannes the power of combining these has been more widely recognised. The values of the entertainment industry on the one hand and the start up industry on the other are forcing marketers and agencies to look at the world through a different lens. As this great slide from one Cannes presentation illustrated, success in tomorrow's world requires a melange of different skills:
One of the most meaningful stories at #CannesLions for me was Warner's Lego ad break work winning two Gold Lions; it wasn’t the execution, but the fact that David Wilding collaborated with and orchestrated a whole host of different experts and talent from across the agency, media owner, production and brand communities.I hope that the Cannes 2015 champions' gallery will be akin to Wilding and next year on La Croisette, we’ll be celebrating the values of generosity and togetherness, alongside creativity plus holding up campaigns from brands that have genuinely enriched people's lives. Paul Frampton is CEO at Havas Media. You can follow him on Twitter @Paul_Framp
