Sean Healy, Global Head of Strategy & Product, Zenith shares insights from six of the most thought-provoking at Cannes Lions Festival 2016.
Raising the Creative Bar:
P&G Chief Brand Officer, Marc Pritchard, presented a keynote on the work that P&G has been doing to raise its creative bar in recent years and cut through in the digital world. He stresses the importance of a human spark regardless of how smart technological execution has become. This emphasis can be seen through work done for Ariel in India around gender equality and housework #sharetheload
It came over as a great showcase for putting brand purpose into action at scale, picking up a theme that ‘arch-rival’ Keith weed of Unilever has focused upon many times.
Spike Jonze & Shane Smith: Making Content We Care About:
Shane Smith, Founder and CEO of Vice took the stage with Spike Jonze, Co-President of VICELAND & Academy Award-winning filmmaker to talk about content. Vice now produces 7,000 pieces of content a day and emphasises authenticity as the absolute editorial priority.
Their policy is to always devolve power to young minds and allow them to fail and learn fast. ‘Da youth’ being the biggest consumers of media in history, after all.
Don’t believe in journalistic objectivity, it’s not possible for humans and if you do want objectivity, watch a live stream.
Unsurprisingly they were opinionated, entertaining and put their feet up on the table but they admitted their fallibility and belief in giving young people a chance as quickly as possible.
Lastly they asked the rhetorical question, ‘what side of history do you want to be on?’
Key point: there appears to be a correlation between Vice’s amazing looking work and their openness to risk.
Rise of The Robots
Our very own Stefan Bardega, Chief Digital Officer, Zenith and Martin Ford, Author, Software Entrepreneur, discussed the somewhat dystopian vision of a world in which almost all repetitive tasks done by humans can, and potentially will, be done by machines.
The session explored the implications of this for society (e.g. minimum incomes for all and lots of leisure time) and what it means for our industry as we automate more. In an age of automation, creativity is even more important, but will express itself in new and different ways.
Stef set up our 4 Ps of ‘automation’:
- Programmatic: 67% of digital advertising in 2017 will be programmatic according to our forecasts
- Platforms: according to Morgan Stanley, in 2016, 85% of new ad spend is going Google/FB platforms
- Precision: Some advertisers now running 100’s of 000’s of creative assets at any one time
- The last P, number four that was cheekily slipped in was people and the impact on jobs in our industry. I refer you to the first sentence
Strata – A Live Biometric VR experiment
Rama Allen, ECD at The Mill, presented their latest research, Strata, a VR experiment using data visualisation driven by biometrics. This was an amazing session in which a bloke called Mike, who is good at mediating, powered himself upwards through a VR world by calming himself in a way that biometric sensors could pick up. It was tranquil and beautiful and it came from a post-production studio.
It was one of two sessions that I attended that focused on VR and sensory control. It is not clear what the implications for brands is at scale, but it shows the kind of work that is being done on an experimental basis by people in the creative and communications business.
Here is some more of what these crazy people are up to.
Key point: the human body is going to become an increasingly active marketing participant.
The Gang of Four:
This was the best thing that I went to: intense, inspiring, scary and packed with great data. Scott Galloway, Clinical Professor of Marketing, NYU Stern School of Business; Founder of L2, is the harbinger of doom for the status quo.
The young and the rich are abandoning TV for subscription services whilst advertising is a tax on the poor who can’t afford to.
Ad revenue to subscription revenue is a great way to view future prospects for media brands and it looks bad for behemoths like New York Times, Viacom, Time etc.
This signals the rise of Product and Stores in importance to the brand. 90% of the top US FMCG brands lost share to new entrants last year: think Dollar Shave Club and Gillette, we see the same picture in US autos.
We can use social media as a measure of innovation;
- Instagram posts to interactions
- Keywords bought versus organic share
Facebook and Google represent 90 cents of each incremental $ spent on digital.
So what will we see in 2017?
- Massive decline in TV sector as the price outstrips inflation rule of disruption
- Look at digital outside Google and Facebook
- Media conglomerates will split out ‘good’ and ‘bad’ businesses
- The public will call for the breakup of Facebook and Google
- Juniorisation will hit the industry
(here is some vintage Galloway)
Selling Creativity Short: Why Short-Termism Is Undermining Creative Effectiveness
The eminence rise of IPA databank analysis kicked off WARC’s effectiveness day in a far flung area of the Palais. Peter Field, Marketing Consultant with a WARC Effectiveness Session – Press Centre, presented an argument that since the ‘advent’ of digital, creative effectiveness has declined. He used the IPA Effectiveness Database and Gunn Report on wins to source his data.
In short the argument is that there is a strong link between creative awards and business results. The short-term focus of goals and measurement that is emerging (driven by digital) means that the impact of winning entries on market share and profit is in decline. This is linked to a drift away from TV advertising and into digital resulting in a drop in the ability of awarded work to drive fame.
Those of us who attended from Zenith felt that this had more than a whiff of ‘dinosaur’ about it. All in all this appeared to be a highly subjective exercise based largely on the work of ad agency account planners.
Key point: a great argument about short-termism undermined by blaming the medium not the objectives
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