Cannes Lions 2016, The Highlights
As ‘Wake up with The Economist’ returns to the Cannes Lions festival for a third year, we take a look back at Mina Seetharaman, SVP Global Managing Director Marketing Solutions, highlights from the panels in 2016:
Day 1: Tales of risk and connection
Today it became apparent that, while risk and connection are hardly new themes in marketing, they’ll be showing up big this week.
Today’s ‘Wake Up with The Economist’ was moderated by The Economist’s Executive Editor, Daniel Franklin, and featured CMO Jorn Socquet from Anheuser-Busch, Neal George, VP Emerging Markets from Beiersforf and Atilla Cansun, CMO of Merck Consumer Health.
Risk and creativity go hand-in-hand, but still not enough risk is taken especially at the upper levels of marketing organizations. Socquet was particularly pointed about it. “CMOs don’t take enough risks. We’re too worried about keeping our jobs.” For the established brands, George highlighted, the fundamental challenge is to find a way to be creative and win new audiences without alienating the existing ones. Cansun feels brands have to “recruit the cutting-edge audience to help you innovate. Your current audience doesn’t have that vision.”
“CMOs don’t take enough risks. We’re too worried about keeping our jobs.”
We’ll continue to see change in marketing as a discipline — with some silos such as PR, digital and comms merging, and other skills becoming more specialized. With the burden of big data, we need marketing thinkers who parse the data and emotional marketers who create connections to the audience; in the end, audiences carry a brand’s message. The best ideas come from people you trust, regardless of level or agency discipline, according to Socquet, “the pitch process does not work if you want to take a real risk.”
Day two: In praise of agencies
At today’s ‘Wake Up with The Economist’, Marc Pritchard, P&G’s CMO, Brad Jakeman, President Global Beverage Group at Pepsico and Lori Lee, CMO at AT&T, joined The Economist’s Daniel Franklin on stage and discussed the merits and pitfalls of agencies.
Pritchard believes strongly that a good agency relationship makes a difference. “If you treat your agencies like vendors instead of collaborating with them like partners you won’t get good work,” he insisted. He also made a thinly veiled comment about the recent ANA report on agency transparency. “There is too much crap going on about agencies,” he remarked, “they are filled with good people who want to do good work with good brands.”
Lee, from AT&T, who set up a series of industry-focused creative foundries, believes “creativity comes from every corner of what we do: agencies, customers, employees. Collaboration means the best work.”
While Jakeman created the Pepsico Content Center because no current agency infrastructure provided a production model that is “fast, cheap AND good,” he pointed out that brands and the holding company model have put agencies in a tough spot. Procurement negotiates with creative agencies, despite not knowing how to value creative work. “The person who incurs the cost should decide the value,” he suggested, and Pepsi has now taken creative negotiations out of the hands of procurement and made it the purview of brand managers. He further noted that “Agencies have all the shareholder and margin commitments that a brand has. If you squeeze them you’ll get more junior people on your business which often means less value.”
So it would seem that getting the most out of your agency partners requires just that — being a good partner and a better client. But even that is not so simple. “Being a good client at a fortune 500 company is hard. Systems are designed so when your agency gives you a diamond, you chip away to make a rock.”
But clearly at least some clients are getting it right; a walk through the work exhibits at Cannes shows that the right brand and agency partnership can produce some lovely gems.
Day three : Marketing’s happily ever after
Today at ‘Wake Up with The Economist’, panelists Ann Mukherjee, CMO of SC Johnson, Osama Hirzalla, VP Brand Marketing & eCommerce Europe Marriott International and Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar were joined by The Economist’s Alexandra Suich. The topic quickly turned to the changing roles of marketing and marketers in today’s business environment.
Rajamannar highlighted the importance of marketing people who understand the business and don’t operate in a seemingly unrelated silo. “Marketing is increasingly accountable,” he said, and marketers have to be able to measure their success. If marketers cannot defend their decisions, “marketing is the first place to get cut.” As a result, Marriott’s Hirzalla says that “managing the entire cross-platform journey and attribution across that journey is what keeps us awake at night.” SC Johnson’s Mukherjee further emphasized this, “We have to figure out how to connect what we do all the way from media to shelf.”
Mukherjee went on to say that a marketer’s world is no long just about marketing impact. “There are so many factors at play. So we have to act as integrators; as marketers you have to look at everything touching the brand. Because if you don’t understand the business and don’t understand everything that touches the brand, marketing does become dispensable.”
Marketers now need to think in systems; not just about a single one-off idea that gets implemented but is not repeatable. “If you can’t operationalize it, don’t do it,” said Mukherjee. In that vein, Rajamannar has built a real-time marketing engine, that predicts 3-day microtrends, identifies the business opportunity related to that trend and then implements that opportunity — inside of 12 hours (yes, you read that right). In one case in India, this approach has earned the company additional revenue; an impressive paradigm shift for a discipline that is typically considered a cost center.
“We are in the business of monetizing human behavior”
And for all three, proving the value of marketing to the business comes down to conversion. Mukherjee defined marketing not as being about promoting the company or it’s product. “We are in the business of monetizing human behavior,” she said. “We have to be curious about humans and empathetic. Then we have to link this to the business.”
Much of being able to do this — identify the link between marketing to true business performance — comes down to good measurement, which has been somewhat elusive to achieve. This was the topic of discussion at “Media Measurement: trust & transparency in today’s multi-platform world,” hosted by Pwc on the Black & White yacht (why aren’t all meetings held on a yacht?).
“No one on the planet wants to buy media,” Steve Plimsoll, UK Digital Leader — Retail & Consumer and Industrial Products & Services at PwC UK. “They want an outcome.” But answering questions such as how much am I spending? Does it work? What are my competitors spending? is not easy.
We need to shift from buying media to buying performance. That’s the path to understanding ROI. And once we can accurately measure, this will allow marketers to better tie their results to business results. Which will help marketing organizations live happily ever after.
Day four: Honesty, risk, avoiding the hype
As it turns out, sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. But as the audience wished for respite from the stifling, 30-degree Celsius heat of the Cannes morning, thoughts from Thursday’s Wake Up with The Economist provided a breath of fresh air.
This session, hosted again by The Economist’s tech editor Alexandra Suich, featured Alison Lewis, CMO, Johnson & Johnson, John Rudaizky, Global Brand & External Communications Leader (CMO), EY and Jonathan Mildenhall, CMO Airbnb.
Asked what keeps them awake at night, Mildenhall refreshingly took the brand’s current challenge head-on. Airbnb is facing diversity issues both in terms of workplace and the actual brand offering. He acknowledged it is clearly a problem, but also pointed out that finding the right collaborators to solve it would be challenging in the current industry makeup. “Even here at Cannes, I look around and, aside from celebrities, I am one of the only black people I see. So I’m challenged by who I will work with to solve this problem.”
EY’s Rudaizky, encouraged marketers to admit they need outside inputs. “Throw out the controversial question,” he urged, “because you don’t always know the answer. This will get you to the creative idea.” Lewis said it was the job of leadership to take the blame to allow people to feel free to take risks and discover creative solutions. At a time when marketers are mostly focused on defining KPIs and using data to prove ROI, Lewis broke ranks with all-but-sacrilegious statement, “A couple of failures won’t kill a company.” Mildenhall further called out the industry for the sea of poor quality advertising and content it proliferates. “You know how the Raspberries happen a week before the Oscars? The Raspberries are there to remind actors not to do shitty films.
“What if we had the Cannes Festival of Shittyness a week before this to remind us to stop making crappy ads?”
As with the previous days’ panels, the panelists addressed the topic of the brand-agency relationship. Lewis said the best people are the ones who care so much about the work, the brand and the business, that you cannot tell whether they are brand or agency. Rudaizky recalled his days at Saatchi & Saatchi, when a new client on an existing account agreed to keep the account at Saatchi and pay their existing fee, but in return he expected the best talent and the best ideas.
“Brands and agencies have a mutual obligation to one another. Brands should treat agencies well and be clear about asking for the best.”
Mildenhall suggested a strategic approach to the agency relationship that requires time and investment. Not only should both parties take the time to provide mutual 360-degree feedback on each other, but they should also not focus solely on operational pressure points; all relationships are bigger than this. “In every agency relationship I’m in, I ask myself ‘is the relationship healthy? Is it constructive? Creative? Are we being the best partners we can to one another?’”
Closing with a look forward, all three were cautious around the hype of VR. Rudaizky cited some success with it from an employer branding perspective, but noted it was a tool to be used for the right job. Lewis said she would have to be convinced. “You have to consider the difference it provides versus something like YT for the stories you have to tell. Right now the ration of cost to value doesn’t bear out.” And Mildenhall echoed that sentiment. “The production costs for excellence are astronomical. I was quoted $3.5M for a 4-minute test. I’ll be one of the first brands when I can get scale and quality.”
Join us from Monday 19th June at the Cannes Lions Beach Club, 10.30am every weekday for ‘Wake up With The Economist’ 2017.
