We are on the verge of an incredible breakthrough in how we market to consumers. We’re approaching a veritable sea-change in marketing. Marketing will forever be changed in this new era.

That, in a nutshell, was what a number of senior level marketers would have you believe at last week’s Cannes Lions, the annual awards festival that brings together marketing and advertising executives from around the world. Attendees profess that it’s the best place to see and be inspired by the best work around the world, while some saythat it’s basically a self-congratulatory affair with a lot of industry back-patting and awards more or less sold off to the highest bidder to be used for business development purposes. My feeling is that it’s a little from column A and a little from column B.

So are we on the precipice of a new way to market? Hardly, though one can’t fault a marketing executive for hyping things up. It’s their job. But this year more than others I was left oddly uninspired by the key takeaways of the show. To be clear, there was some phenomenal work on display, but the words coming from most speakers were largely the same: that today’s marketing needs to be about storytelling, about saying something meaningful, about delivering value to consumers and building a connection with them, about being relevant to both consumers and the brand. Basically the same thing any good PR practitioner has known for their career, and what savvy marketers have known for years. So not exactly next-level thinking.

And it showed. Amidst all the talk of innovation and brand building, of “redefining marketing”, the work on display was surprisingly average. Apparently the judges thought so too as juries in in two of the five categories set to be awarded decided not to award the top prize, a Grand Prix. Everyone wants to be innovative, but actually being innovative is a little bit harder.

One reason for brands and agencies failing to get over the proverbial innovation hump may be that there’s still a pretty large disconnect between each other. A study released last week showed as much, saying:

• 88% of marketing executives claim to speak their mind freely, even when it’s uncomfortable while agency leaders who interact with those clients feel the percentage of those who do that is only 36%.
• Almost 2/3 of both the marketers (60.5%) and agency executives (70%) surveyed admitted they don’t share the same definition of creativity.
• 76% of agency executives say their clients are afraid to take risks.
• A majority of marketing executives (56%) say that their agencies are more interested in “selling” them their work rather than solving their problems.
• When asked how much even the best creative work could move their business, on average marketers said 26%, while agency executives said 48%.

Long story short: marketing execs want to appear bold and innovative, but not if it risks rocking the boat, so more often than not they’ll play it safe. Maybe this is because marketing execs are pretty skeptical about how much impact marketing could have anyway. Hello?! Marketers feel that creative, one of their core responsibilities, has negligible effects on the business? Uh, what would you say you do here? Meanwhile big agencies constantly look like they’re just trying to sell, which of course, they are. All of this is to say there’s good reason why things sound like the “same old, same old” at Cannes. It’s tough to move an industry forward when the two largest engines for doing so are stuck flooring it in neutral.

So what’s the answer? I don’t think there’s just one. Restructuring the marketing department to breakdown silos, blowing up the marketing plan rather than building on top of last year’s (which was built on the year before that, and so on), hiring people with diverse skills and backgrounds, diversifying agencies, and redefining success metrics so that experimenting with new approaches is encouraged rather than penalized are all good starts. Sounds pretty basic but in this hugely political, highly risk-averse corporate world we live in, even ticking off one of those is a huge win. It appears that some companies at Cannes have already taken some of those steps.

In any event, I don’t think the points above get us to this “new world” of marketing everyone keeps espousing. I’m not entirely convinced that world even exists. Marketing has always been an evolution, and it seems to me that it will keep evolving until things look and feel much different than three or five years ago. The question, as ever, is how fast will some evolve compared to others, and the lessons they can teach the rest. I hope those are the voices we hear more from in Cannes next year.