Sometimes at Cannes, it feels like brands want to talk about anything and everything — apart from advertising. But fast-food giant Burger King impressed the audience today with their clear message. Advertising is still valuable. As is the power of the traditional agency business model.
Burger King has been having a lot of fun experimenting with technology to bring better service and communication to consumers, to create fans and build brands. As a chain with lots of shops dotted all over towns and cities, they use smart tech, AR and geo-targeting to deliver coupons to people who are close to one of their locations. Whopper Detour is an idea that has delighted consumers by trolling McDonald’s, sending customers within 600 feet of one of its restaurants to get a Whopper for 1cent (instead of $5) so long as they trek to the nearest participating Burger King afterwards to pick up the sandwich. It’s a clever play on what brands can do creatively with geo-targeting, and it won two Gold and the Grand Prix in the Direct Lions last night and a further four Gold in the Media Lions.
Burger King has five core principles for brands and agencies to create engaging content, which at a fundamental level were demanding agencies to be brave.
- Design your way out
- Doing is better than saying
- New monster; new weapon (technology is not your enemy)
- Love your product
- Get out
There have been several brands demonstrating beauty tech at The Palais expo this year — which is really quite exciting for clients like Estée Lauder. SK-II was showing their new AI fuelled skin diagnosis tool. The technology isn’t anything new; you sit in front of the mirror and it detects your real age vs your skin age and the product you need to buy. It’s clever, there is nothing more daunting than going into a store and being faced with hundreds of different creams, toners and oils — it provides the expert advice you seek, simply and effectively. However, there’s space to improve the UI, UX and content design.
IBM’s conversations architecture is a theme I think will have a big impact on our industry in the coming years. They discussed how to design for the dialogue-AI fuelled relationship age. What they mean by this is today, conversation online with chat-bots is purely transactional; you type something, the bot replies and it is generally awkward.
The relationship age will create more meaningful conversations between humans and machines. Teaching bots these conversations would require a phenomenal amount of technological skill, but it could be possible in dentsu X through our deeper understanding of behavioural insight — the Why beyond What. Interestingly, IBM’s approach is not humanoid — they are not attempting to make it close to human but instead a human-friendly machine which is different to what Google and other ‘loveable’ AI robot manufacturers are trying to do.
Mikiko Nishihara, Business Producer, dentsu X
