A week in sun-splashed Cannes, and the pleasures of resplendent Rosé, have hardly diminished the advertising industry’s challenges or opportunities as it navigates the ongoing transformation of the media marketplace. Here’s a few key takeaways from a week among the branding world’s cognoscenti at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity:
It’s still a “hits” business – The world has gotten infinitely more complicated for brands than attaching a small number of commercial messages to the latest hit programs from a handful of major media companies. If anything in our content-saturated marketplace, the importance of creative magic is even closer to the center of trying to shape consumer hearts and minds. For CBS’s Leslie Moonves, that means still making the final call on the major talent decisions for every program that goes on CBS or new platforms like CBS Access (much to his creative executives’ dismay, as he jokingly pointed out to a lunch group). For a digital-first platform developing unique branded content experiences, it is the imperative of creating “thumb stoppers” by making sure in even a few brief seconds that you visually grab a mobile user and they don’t use their all-powerful thumb to click out of an app. The definition of a “hit” has expanded as much as the size of the relevant content may have shrunk, but the creative imperative remains.
Good data demands creativity, and good creative demands data – We’ve been immersed in the world of “big data” for years now, but of course what brands, their agency partners, creative executives and media platforms are really hungering for is insight. It’s not simply the measurement of what “works,” but why, and what lessons we can apply to the next case and the next one thereafter. I was fascinated by a discussion with the leader of the data science team at one of world’s largest media buyers who is looking to add more creative thinking to his data science team. And at the same time, the days of “I’m a creative, that’s your job to worry about the metrics” are a distant memory. Will we see the return to the “full service” creative and media buying agency? Will the media buyer “Harry Crane” once again report to the creative “Don Draper”? I don’t know, but some version of this partnership is the key to every successful step in the advertising supply chain.

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