Claire Davidson is back in Cannes
taking in the seminars and reporting for Campaign Brief Asia. Here's her
round up of the speaker sessions on Day 2 of the Festival.
Monday, June 22, 2015
Wow.
The 'Official' Cannes Lions Beach is very swanky. It's delightful.
What are we all doing inside the Palais Des Festivals all day? I'm
definitely definitely going to aim to catch more seminars at the beach
during the week. It's an undiscovered gem.
I went along this morning (following the 'Official' Cannes Lions Beach blue carpet as I sauntered) to catch "Wake Up With The Economist: Meet and Mingle With The World's Most Creative Marketers". Moderated by Daniel Franklin, Executive Editor of The Economist, he discussed today's topic with Pete Blackshaw, Vice President of Digital and Social Media for Nestle, SA, Bruce McColl, Chief Marketing Officer of Mars and Jonathan Mildenhall, Chief Marketing Officer of Airbnb.
Traditionally
it's been the agencies that have led creativity, but in today's chaotic
world of communication, and the various and varied channels open to us,
it's the clients who are increasingly contributing to their innovative
content. Creativity is more important than ever in marketing,
particularly with regard to these current technologies surrounding us.
This is largely based on the fundamentals.
Brand storytelling is still the fundamental. If you then manage to get
your brand position (and story) onto all of the platforms available to
you, you win lots and lots and lots of points. The digital landscape
has really expanded the creative canvas. It's mindboggling. How do we
take full advantage of that canvas to delight consumers and build
brands?
Technology has been a great enabler. Data too allows us
to look at people's buying behavior to see what advertising strategies
are working. You have to be able to measure your brand success. Boring
advertising doesn't work. You need to get people's attention. Engage
people, and then inform them. Have a creative idea for your brand that
you want to build. Build it on those technological platforms that will
work for you. Never underestimate the power of virality.
Ok, so
we've heard all of this before. This isn't new to any of us, so I'll
put a stop to writing more on it. I glumly left the beach and quickly
ran off down to the Palais Des Festivals to catch "The Millennial Mind: Creativity and What It Means To The World's Largest Living Generation" to look at a take of another successful brand who has done all of the above and hear it from their perspective. Joanna Coles, Editor in Chief of Cosmopolitan spoke with Snapchat's Co-founder and CEO, Evan Spiegel.
The line up to see this session was so long that by the time I was
actually in the seminar room Spiegel had been speaking for fifteen
minutes.
With nearly two billion millennials globally they have a
super duper spending power of over one trillion dollars per year. Holy
moly. Millennials consume their content via new platforms, and brands
must stay ahead of their changing habits. One such brand is Snapchat.
Snapchat
is the third most powerful app among millennials. It began in 2011,
much like Facebook, in a University dorm room. It has grown
significantly since then. It is now the best way to reach 13 to 34 year
olds. Well that counts me out then. More than 60% of 13 to 24 year
old smartphone users in the US are Snapchatters. There are more than 2
billion video views every day on Snapchat. Stories are updated in
real-time and expire after 24 hours. They are a reflection of who we
are in the moment. They aren't everlasting. So no need to worry too
much if you're having a bad hair day. At it's essence, Snapchat
provides a personal window into the way we and our friends see the
world. The company has nearly 100 million daily active Snapchatters.
Snapchat is now valued at a whopping 19 billion dollars. It's the third
most valuable venture capital backed company in the world. Impressive
stats indeed.
Snapchat feels that many different perspectives are
better than just one perspective. It has a depth of experience that
you can't get with just one linear viewpoint. The company - well its
users - are very competent at covering events, and journalists are also
starting to covering with them. A story lasts 24 hours. 15 million
people put their stories on Snapchat at New Years Eve this year. NBC
had a mere 5 million people view their coverage in comparison.
How
do you keep people moving forward (and make them feel that they are
creative) on social media, which is judged by likes and traffic?
Sometimes creativity isn't expressed because of fear. Sometimes it's
scary to do something new. Social media is so quantified and so there
is pressure there to perform. Snapchat tries to increase the velocity
with which people make decisions. Snapchat itself has faced its fair
share of uncertainty, but once it started to get traction it was a
forward movement ahead.
The company looks to understand the
world through the eyes of people. Empathy is a core value for
Snapchat. Listening is key. They want to know how people feel. Fun
and play are important. People like to communicate with one another.
From an advertising point of view, Snapchat got lucky when building its
advertising platforms. Firstly, by having full screen vertical content
on their phones, allowed Snapchats advertisers to thus utilize the
same. They have also started inserting videos in the middle of their
content, and this makes people watch it. Their audience is passionate
and engaged. Snapchat has quite a lot of partnerships with brands. For
example, yesterday they celebrated Fathers Day with P&G. People
from all around the world submitted videos and P&G's advertising in
turn fitted the context of the videos.
In essence, Snapchat shows stories that are different and can make a difference.
Next up for me was "Jefferson Hack and Samantha Morton Champion Female Creative Talent".
Ninety-five
percent of Hollywood directors are men. Only six percent of the top
250 films of 2013 were directed by women. In parallel, seventy percent
of the PR workforce are women. Only one woman director has ever won an
Oscar in the film industry, with just four others having been
nominated. The drop off rate for the already limited amount of female
directors is most acute at their second or third feature film. But it
hasn't always been this way in cinema. During the golden age of
Hollywood, the most successful screenwriters were women. Where did it
drop off? What can be done to address the gender imbalances in cinema?
What can we do to bring more women directors to our industry?
Jefferson Hack is the Editorial Director and Publisher of Dazed, and Samantha Morton
started her career in the film industry when she was eleven. She's
been an actress ever since, and more recently a film director. She's
worked with celebrated directors such as Steven Spielberg and Woody
Allen. Throughout her entire career she has been vocal about the lack
of well-written roles and directing positions for women. Today Hack
spoke to Morton and us about this.
Morton has passion,
resilience, and integrity. She has what it takes. We have to inspire
young women today to have the confidence to follow their dreams. We
need education in cinema. We need to become masters in our trade. We
cannot carry on having a male dominated opinion. It's not about making
feminist films. It's about have gender equality. We have to bring back
the trust to women. We have the power to change this and we can do it.
Today
at Cannes Dazed are launching the Female First Film Fund. This is a
kick starter production fund awarded to 'revolutionary' female
directors, such as Morton, who really are fighting to bridge that gap
between male and female career imbalance in the industry. There are
certain criteria with the fund. It will finance a percentage of the
film's production budget. It must be a woman's first or second feature
film. It can be any genre from any country. Hack is looking for brand
partners to support the fund. At its essence the fund and what it
produces is to be part of a global cultural mission for female equality.
Well after that it was time for "A Conversation With The Antichrist", also known as Marilyn Manson, brought to us by Tor Myhren,
Worldwide Chief Creative Officer of Grey Group. The last time I saw
Manson in person was when we interviewed him nineteen years ago at the
State Theatre in Sydney when I worked for MTV. I remember holding my
blank clipboard and looking at him in absolute awe. He was so unique...
and enchanting.
Myhren started the talk by asking Manson if he
did indeed have a rib removed so that he could perform oral sex on
himself. The rumor apparently started because Manson used to wear a
medical back brace. Manson was quick to confirm for us that it wasn't
actually about wanting to suck his own dick. Good to know.
Manson
feels that he's reached approximately the 12th grade now. He hasn't
grown up as yet. His writing process / musical process turns off at
around 3am. Once he starts to rhyme words that don't exist he goes to
bed. Manson worries that his music may one day overshadow his image,
not the other way round. He's held a consistently solid brand for the
last twenty years. He works very hard. His mantra is to stay true to
himself but to keep evolving. Don't get lazy. Don't rest on your
laurels. Don't rest on your fan base. Manson wants to make new fans.
It's difficult to maintain 'not emptying the bucket of mystery' but he
never gives in.
Manson spoke of his father a lot today. His
father gave him three pieces of worldly advice. Firstly, if you are
ever with a woman squirt lemon juice on her. If she screams she has a
disease so don't have sex with her. Next, when you get a job, on day one
fire someone so that the other staff members fear you. People have to
believe in you. It's easy to create things that are fake. Manson's name
is fake - a combination of Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson. Manson
moved on and didn't tell us the third element of fatherly advice. I had
been quite interested to hear what it might have been.
Manson
and his image cross multiple fields from being a musician to an actor to
a painter. All come with provocative ideas and ideals brought about
from his razor sharp intellect. There is minimal difference when he is
on stage and off stage. When he is off stage he's talking to people he
knows. When he's on stage he's talking to people he doesn't know. He's
shy. He's awkward. But he can hide that on stage.
Manson
doesn't feel that all PR is good PR in today's age where everyone is
striving to have their own fifteen minutes of fame. Having an avatar
doesn't give you a personality. Everyone can't rise to the top. Only
the best will get there. Thank you Marilyn Manson.
After that inspiring talk I went to see "Creativity in The Age of Data", which was presented to us by Koichi Yamamoto,
Executive Planning Director of Dentsu Inc. We live in an age of data.
Most of what we watch is created, and then selected by data.
Entertainment is driven by data. Travel is driven by data. Even going to
work each day is driven by data. We're all busy on our smartphones
getting to our workplaces. Data is the new air. We increasingly rely
on data every day of our lives. It often feels we are drowning in data.
4.4 Zetatabytes were produced in 2014. That's 4.4 Trillion Gigabytes
for us all. And this is just the start. What is to come is
unimaginable.
Smart devices are driving this data, as too are
wearable devices, such as the smart watch. Also sensors. Sensors are
everywhere - on our phones, in our cars, in our buildings. This creates
the internet of things. It's is estimated that there will be 50
billion devices connected to the internet in the next few years. Data
makes life easier. It also makes marketing much easier - adaptation,
acceleration and automation. It makes marketing better. It makes it
more efficient. But can data make creativity richer? That's what we
want to do and aspire to do. Take Sounds of Honda, which created a
complete emotional experience. It's a unique piece of data. The data
was the DNA of the experience. It, as one example, has shown us that
data is the new medium. It can bring about the creation of emotional
content. Big data visualization is another area of this growth as too
is geo-data visualization.
What is the next data-led creative
platform though? How do we bring data to life and tell the story
embedded in the data? What is the new process of creativity? It
started with visualization which led to analytics. In turn, this is
leading on to artificial intelligence. We looked at the Machine
Generate TED Talks as an example. Other good case studies we studied
were Inceptionism by Google Research, Poi Bot and Petiteco, a car that
talks. What, no more Kitt?
As artificial intelligence evolves
will it take over creative thought? Will computers take over our
creative profession? There is already an automated programme that will
write copy for you and design websites for you. Yamamoto believes that
only the human brain has the power to imagine. The combination though
between us and computers is endless. New collaboration is essential to
expand data creativity further. Data is the new source of creativity.
Last up for me today was "Collaboration for Greater Good: Game Changing Partnerships That Galvanize Social Change". Moderated by Emma Grede, Chief Executive Officer or ITB Worldwide, she spoke with Adrian Grenier, Actor, Producer and Social Entrepreneur (swoon swoon), Allison Dew, Vice President, Client Solutions Marketing of Dell, and Aimee Mullins, Actress, Athlete and Model and Livia Firth, Creative Director of Eco Change.
Today
we looked at meaningful partnerships that aim to do more than conveying
a brand's message, and also go to the heart of that brand's value,
particularly in the 'cause' based space. Can brands impact social
change? The answer is yes they can and yes they must. You need to add
value to the brands though. There is no point in doing something
without reason. You need create change with real action. It's
important not to just talk the talk. You must walk the walk as well.
It's
about mutually beneficial partnerships for a greater good, that have
the planet as their focus. It's the marriage of ethics and aesthetics.
It's the creation of sustainable strategies. Yes, companies will need
to invest and spend money to make these changes. Authenticity and
integration are key. Relationships must be sincere. The company
intrinsically must want to make real change. It must be within their
DNA.
Let's all contribute to the world around us and make it a better place. We have the power to move the needle.
Claire
Davidson, Managing Director & Executive Producer - ASIA + MENA @
The Sweet Shop, reporting for Campaign Brief Asia at Cannes Lions 2015.
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