A Cannes Special on Innovation & Marketing

As marketing people around the world, including our agency Havas celebrated creativity in Cannes this week, I felt it timely to write about this year’s success cases from the perspective of innovation and marketing. Both are topics of ongoing research for me personally, and unavoidable questions for companies today.

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”

– Peter Drucker

The above observation was made by the father of business consulting already some time ago. It has never been more relevant than now, as brands compete fiercely both for the value they can bring, as well as for the attention they can command in the market. It has also long served as inspiration to me in unearthing the base elements in these areas and organizing them to a framework for creatives, technologists, and business executives. The research is ongoing, but there are patterns emerging. In the following I’ll share my 6 x 6 Lenses on Innovation & Marketing, using Havas Cannes winners and a few other cases to exemplify the points.

The six innovation lenses are:
Educate, Optimize, Empower, Connect, Express, and Entertain

The six marketing lenses are:
Culture, Relationships, Reflexes, Context, Immersion, and Function

PART I: The 6 Innovation Lenses

While operational excellence is naturally a requirement for success, continuous innovation is increasingly central at a time when we’re competing not just against direct rivals, but constant market transitions, as John Chambers of Cisco put it. Innovation for me means thinking how your brand can create value for its audience, and what kind of experience best enables the value exchange between the audience and the brand.

Judging from my material over the past years, there are only six fundamental ways to create value for an individual:

1. Education

The first lens is education; teaching your audience something they want or need to know—even if they don’t know they need to know it. This can take the form of surfacing the right information at the right time, pulling your audience in to an in-depth learning experience, or giving them tools to set their own learning goals and teaching themselves.

One of the more intriguing examples I’ve seen in this field is “Collapse – the End of Society Simulator”, created by Havas’ BETC for promoting Ubisoft’s recent video game Division. In the game itself, the player roams a post-apocalyptic New York after a weaponized virus has wreaked havoc on society. In the Collapse campaign, you start spreading the virus from your home street, and can explore, based on real data from e.g. supermarkets, power plants and hospitals, how relatively small nudges could actually bring a society to a halt. For its creativity and the results it achieved for the game, the simulator was awarded three Cannes Lions, in PR, data and craft.

2. Optimization

Looking at your customer journey more broadly—or more closely—you‘ll often find opportunities to optimize your audience’s life, by saving their time, money, effort, or all three. Many of today’s industry disruptors lean on radically decreasing transaction costs and required effort, so why not find ways to do that proactively and preemptively in your market.

As a case in point, Les Gaulois from the Havas Family partnered up with Transavia Airlines and Canal Play, for “#HolidaysOnDemand”, a truly unique experience taking watchers instantly from inspiration to action. Those who were inspired by, say the Godfather movie to explore Sicily, could acquire a plane ticket to the destination — right then and there on their TV, without leaving the Canal Play service. This campaign brought home results for the marketers, as well as three Lions for Havas.

3. Empowerment

The third innovation lens is empowerment. This approach focuses on things that have been impossible or prohibitively hard or expensive for your audience thus far. With today’s technology however, your brand can give people superpowers and let them do things they might not have missed before – but later find hard to live without.

In a another win for Havas, Havas Life Brazil partnered up with Spotify to create “Parkinsounds” for our client TEVA. With this life-improving innovation, Parkinson’s disease patients could use their favorite songs to find their pace for walking again, and even improve their motor skills over time.

4. Connection

The yearn to connect with other people, and things we care about, is in large part what makes us human. If your brand can enable a connection between your audience and someone, or something they hold dear, you’ll also be well placed to have a solid place in your customers’ hearts.

In a tragic but powerful case study that earned Havas two Lions, Global Safety Partnership and Havas Shanghai showed how texting while driving kills. They set up an installation with 350 cell phones from people killed in texting-related accidents. They also attached the drivers’ last messages to the phones, connecting the victims, post-mortem, to warn their families, friends and peers of the dangers of mobile phone use while on the highway.

5. Expression

As fully 1/3 of photos taken by millennials and younger are selfies, you can argue that there’s a strong demand for self-expression in a (developed) world where all other needs are satisfied, to the point of saturation. Expression might involve creativity on the audience’s part, but it can also be personalization and customization with lighter audience input.

At Havas Worldwide New York, we were tasked to create an experience for Bob Dylan’s “Studio A Revisited”, and the ask included engaging also younger crowds around the voice of an earlier generation. To allow self-expression, we created an online experience that people could use to mix and match tracks and stems from the Studio A recordings, and also try their vocal skills in a Singstar-like experience via their browser. The well-crafted application won the hearts of our audience, as well as three Lions in Cannes.

6. Entertainment

Finally, and not at all too rarely, people often find value in simply getting entertained and spending their time with something fun. Written stories, moving image, virtual reality, and gaming all fit the bill, as long as they’re able to hold your audience’s attention and engagement.

“The Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign has in many catalogues been listed as one of the greatest ad campaigns in the world since its inception. And not without reason. Havas Worldwide New York has for the last 10 years driven double-digit growth for Dos Equis with the said program. The campaign has become more entertainment than advertising, and has also sparked masses of consumer creativity along the years.

As we sent the Most Interesting Man on a one-way trip to Mars this year, we celebrated his retirement with an all-out campaign across channels, amassing billions of impressions around the globe. From this mix, I included the “Adios Amigo” radio ad to my showcase; both as it won Havas a Lion this week, and also as I believe in great marketing across all channels.

Listen to the ad here – in the Cannes Lions archive.

PART II: 6 Marketing Lenses

When talking about Marketing within my 6 x 6 Lenses, I’m not talking about conversion and funnel optimization. While those are crucial for capturing value and proving results, something needs to happen a lot earlier. Far upstream in the process of ideating a campaign, or nowadays sometimes a product, we need to think how to stand out, catch the eye of our audience, and get them in front of our brand.

When talking about about marketing lenses, I talk about lenses for capturing attention for a brand. As with innovation and value creation, this can happen using six core levers.

1. Culture

One of the more powerful marketing levers you can use is culture. Take a good look at the culture surrounding your brand and your audience, and think how to supercharge culture that people are already excited about, or find an interesting, unexpected flip to culture that people take for granted.

Havas’ Les Gaulois created an exquisitely crafted print campaign for Ligne Roset that definitely touched me, and a apparently a few others too, since it scored a coveted Lion in Print & Publishing. The work leveraged cultural references from the history of music, communication, entertainment and play, showing how good design stays relevant through the times. My favorite, as a gamer, was “MODERN SINCE ELYSÉE”, below.

2. Relationships

Another element you can leverage through supercharging or flipping around is relationships; those between your brand and the audience, between your brand and a new, unexpected audience, among the members of your audience , and even other brands — with your brand as the linchpin.

Anticipating the Rugby World Championship, Air New Zealand started a wager with Qantas, Australia’s national airline, on Twitter. The initial wager suggested even repainting one’s whole fleet in case the other country wins, but later the two airlines settled on simply honoring the winning team on the losing airlines’ flights. NZ won, and, as good sports, Qantas cabin crew wore the All Blacks Jerseys during Sydney — Auckland flights. The social campaign earned significant free media and news coverage for both airlines, and won Host Sydney of the Havas network a Lion in Entertainment.

3. Reflexes

In the age of real-time and predictive marketing, great reflexes can grant you the boost you need to stand out in the market. Being set up to monitor market events, audience culture, customer behavior, and competition can unearth opportunities for activities that would otherwise be quite elusive.

At Havas Worldwide New York and Arnold, we manage social marketing for Hershey brands. During the last holiday season, people started posting not-so-flattering images about Reese’s Christmas Trees, complaining how they didn’t really look as promised. Using quick wits and reflexes, Hershey responded with a message of tolerance and positivity, and soon “#AllTreesAreBeautiful” became a phenomenon, amplified by a fascinated audience. For quick thinking and action, Havas won yet another Lion.

4. Context

Tailoring something to context, time, location, situation, and need can act as a powerful lever. In the age of abundance and noise, hyper-relevance in the situation has a better chance of popping out than a more general approach.

The winner I’m showcasing here is not a Havas one, but it’s one of my all-time favorites, and won a deserved Grand Prix at Cannes this year. In a shopping environment where retailers compete with Black Friday discounts, the outdoors retailer REI put its brand values to play. With “#OptOutside” They announced they would be closed on Black Friday, one of the most prominent sales days in the year, because they wanted their customers to be able to spend time outside instead. A truly brave brand behavior play and also a commercial success, as people got their outdoor gear from REI already before the traditional shopping day.

5. Immersion

New, gesture-driven, immersive ad formats are all the rage now, but immersion can also be things other than a “look around” video. Regardless of the format, immersion means giving the audience your brand experience and showcasing the value it offers, before needing to buy the product. Enabling and motivating sharing is naturally also a goal in social age.

I was first thinking about showcasing The New York Times’ touching experience “The Displaced” (see it here). But as I wanted to emphasize how immersion is not only VR & 360, I chose “The Swedish Number” instead. The Swedes have always had a knack for promoting their country, and so it was with this campaign. It let anyone, anywhere in the world call a random Swede, and dive into their everyday lives, whatever they happened to be doing at the moment.

Both experiences won Grand Prix’s in this year’s Cannes.

6. Function

Finally, we come to the sixth marketing lens. Sometimes, when thinking about driving desired brand image and audience behavior, your might have an opening to fundamentally change how the brand and product itself functions to bring this behavior about.

Havas’ BETC brought in two Lions with a quite ingenious product twist, the “Orangina Upside Down Can”. To get people to mix the pulp and the juice before drinking, a crucial task for getting the full enjoyment out of Orangina, BETC and Orangina simply created a can that had its opening in the bottom, instead of the top. This made people naturally shake things up before gulping down the liquid.

6 x 6, not 6 + 6

So there you have them.

The six innovation lenses, with which to create value for the audience:
Educate, Optimize, Empower, Connect, Express, and Entertain

And the six marketing lenses, with which to capture attention in the market:
Culture, Relationships, Reflexes, Context, Immersion, and Function

Depending on the case, you might want to focus on either innovation or marketing first, but both are worth exploring. Even if you’re not going for an innovation or a new product, thinking about how to create value for the audience can spark great marketing ideas, as the above cases show.

Using this approach, you can draw a grid of 6 x 6 = 36 opportunities for creating value and capturing attention for your brand. But don’t try ticking all the boxes with any one idea. While a case might be valuable and interesting from many aspects, you’ll usually find one innovation and/or one marketing angle at the driver’s seat.

So do the ideation, have a strong point of view on what’s most potent and why, focus on that, and make it reality.

I’ll then see you in the next Cannes Lions, SXSW, or IXDA Interaction, showcasing your success. Hope we get to chat about it.

If you liked this piece, feel free to comment and share forward. Thanks!

P.s. I recently also held a speech on the topic on Internet Week NYC. You can read about it here, and check out the presentation here.