Panning for gold at Cannes: how disruption taught us to re-evaluate quality
Reporting from Cannes Lions, Alicia Navarro, CEO and co-founder of Skimlinks, looks at the transformational effect technology is having on the advertising industry.
“Désolé madame, mais on n’accepte pas des cartes de credit.” I can’t pay with a credit card? Also, the meter will not be running and I’ll be charged 80 euros for a cab ride from Nice to Cannes? I’m at a rank of taxis that are all on strike against the encroachment of Uber, and this first experience of their strike terms proved to be my last.
Obviously (to me at least) the taxi drivers’ counter-productive stance did exactly what they hoped it wouldn’t – it drove me to use Uber all week at the Cannes Lions Festival, purely for the convenience and safety it afforded me as a visitor to town.
This first experience provided a microcosm (or macrocosm, depending on which side you’re on) to the shifts taking place in Cannes this year. The parallels are apparent: ad agencies trying to deal with the encroachment of ad tech companies that are disintermediating them; cable companies trying to deal with the advancement of Netflix; and all media companies trying to deal with ad blindness and cannibalisation of their revenues.
What all the disruptors have in common is that they’re using technology to better solve problems for their customers, and the fact is that – late to the party or not – Cannes Lions has become a festival of both technology and creativity, rather than simply the latter. The introduction of the new Creative Data Lions this year, and the expansion of the Lions Innovation section of the festival both indicate that the establishment has bought in, to some degree.
On Tuesday I went to WPP’s annual Stream event, held on the Ile Sainte-Honorat. WPP, Sir Martin Sorrell, and the brains behind Stream – Ella Weston – have the ability to bring together the great and the good, including C-level representation from the likes of Business Insider, The New York Times, the Guardian, Twitter, LinkedIn, Vice, Time Inc, AppNexus, BuzzFeed, Google and Facebook.
The major theme of the day was the transformational effect of technology on our industries, which was borne out by WPP’s announcement on the same day that it is launching a new content marketing agency called Truffle Pig. The venture is a partnership between WPP, Snapchat and the Daily Mail, to bring new native content using Snapchat’s addictive vertical video format to be distributed throughout the media world.
Sir Martin Sorrell said that the way that companies trying to handle the changes in the industry can win is if they embrace three elements together – data, tech and content. From the perspective of publishers, this trio represents their hope and need for a newer, more level playing field when it comes to revenues.
By bringing a media owner like the Daily Mail so closely into the Truffle Pig fold shows at least that WPP has thought about the need to involve all parties in the discussion – rather than simply cater to advertisers’ needs without regard for the publishers’ properties, formats, audience and so on.
Finally, the other big theme discussed at Stream was that the nature of advertising would have to change fundamentally, from being disruptive to the content experience, to embracing scarcity, and becoming more of an “event”. It’s clear that the onus is on agencies to make sure they’re encouraging advertisers to collaborate to create only the best quality content. It’s a trend we’re seeing in our business working with publishers to make sure monetisation is inherent in formats like native advertising where the ad is the content; and also in great social campaigns.
The winners of all this transformation are going to be the companies that leverage technology to better solve the problems of their customers, and – to quote Matt Brittin (president of Google EMEA) – “you have to ask the tough creative questions about what you can aspire to be.”
This is why I am now musing on the ways we can use our data, tech and content assets to better serve our customers, and leap ahead with creative solutions in this competitive and ever-changing world.
If only the French taxi network thought the same, about how they could leverage their own strengths and better serve their customers, rather than trying to block those that are doing so.