It’s ok that Cannes Lions is a festival. But it has become a festival of exceptions
Opinion
Please go to the Palais and look at the actual work. You will, I guarantee, feel something you couldn’t name. Some of it will remind you why you got into this industry, writes Omar Oakes.
Quelle est votre publicité préférée ?”
For those of us making the annual French Riviera pilgrimage next week, I wish the officials at Nice Airport would ask this simple question upon entry into France. Not because we need even longer arrival queues – please, please let those new EU restrictions for Brits not be as bad as publicised! – but because it would be nice for someone to actually remind us what we’re here for.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the only ads you see next week at Cannes Lions are the ones on your social media feed in between posting Croisette selfies. After all, you’re there to do deals, to network, and bring home leads, right? So you can dutifully tell people back home that “I know it seems like a big jolly, but it’s actually bloody hard work.”
Well, God forbid a creative industry should spend a week in a beautiful seaside town and actually luxuriate in what makes this industry special: creativity.
Indeed, Cannes should be the thing it calls itself. A festival. A party. A celebration. Not just for those who win Lions, but for anyone in this industry who truly created something that didn’t exist before.
The problem is, creativity is the exact thing this industry now spends the other 51 weeks systematically destroying.
Feelings are the business model
That favourite ad you were thinking about (for those who translated my opener)? Now try to explain why it works.
You can get partway there. The idea, maybe. The craft. The performance. But at some point the explanation runs out, and you’re left with something closer to: it just does. It makes me feel something I couldn’t quite name even if I tried.
That’s not a fail. That’s exactly what we should be celebrating.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spent years demonstrating that we are not rational creatures who also happen to feel things. His research into patients with damage to their brain’s emotional centres found something extraordinary: without the ability to feel, they could not make decisions. The logic and reasoning worked fine, but it turns out that reason is not what moves us. It’s feelings.
You know the reasons why you make choices, alright. But your brain comes up with these reasons after your feelings made the decision. Post-rationalisation is the game our minds play to justify the feeling.
Advertising people have always understood this, even when they couldn’t have named it. The work that still gets cited at Cannes 20 years later – the campaigns people actually remember – worked because they reached something that couldn’t be fully explained. Which means it couldn’t be easily replicated. Which means it was scarce. Which means it was worth paying for.
In economic terms, we call that pricing power. A celebration of creativity is, let’s be honest, a celebration of being able to charge a premium for advertising services.
What is a brand if not a way to produce feelings in consumers, as a justification for charging higher prices than another brand they don’t care about?
A machine for destroying the premium
Look around the marina and the Croisette at those brand names flying the flags and owning the beachfronts? Which companies will throw the best parties as part of this ‘festival’?
Adtech’s promise was precision. Stop wasting money on people who’ll never buy. Find the right person, at the right moment, with the right message. Measure everything. Optimise continuously. Drive the cost of a contact down as far as possible.
And it worked, spectacularly. Advertising got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And the agencies, platforms, consultancies – not to mention the verification, viewability, and attention vendors – celebrated every step of the descent as progress.
But what it actually built was a machine for destroying the premium.
The platforms understood this and built accordingly. They didn’t beat traditional advertising by being more creative; they beat it by being more extractive: by learning so much about individual behaviour that broad emotional truth became unnecessary.
Why bother making someone feel something when you can just follow them around the internet until they give up and click? The result was not a more effective industry. It was a cheaper one.
Cheap reach. Cheap inventory. Cheap creative.
And the people who paid for that race were not the platforms, who took their cut regardless. Not the agencies, who found new fees in the complexity they helped create. The people who paid were the ones selling the media: broadcasters and publishers.
Media owners who had spent years building audiences worth reaching, only to find that “worth reaching” was no longer the metric that mattered.
A festival of exceptions
So walk the Croisette next week with that in mind.
The beach clubs and hotel terraces have been carved up between the platforms and the tech companies. The yachts in the marina fly the flags of adtech businesses most people outside this industry have never heard of. The agency holdcos, once the royalty of this event, are largely in the hotels across the road.
It’s a map of who won.
When advertising is cheap, the premium that funds quality media – the journalism, the programming, the content that built the audiences advertisers actually want – disappears too. Publishers cut, broadcasters trim, and the audience worth reaching gets smaller. Which makes the inventory worth less and drives the price down further.
The platforms sit entirely outside this loop because they don’t create the content. They just take their margin while everyone else tightens.
Please go to the Palais and look at the actual work, if you have a pass. You will, I guarantee, feel something you couldn’t name. Some of it will remind you why you got into this industry, rather than the industry you actually work in.
That gap, between the work on the shortlists and the economics that make such work possible, is what Cannes has quietly become: a festival of exceptions.
The campaigns being celebrated are not representative of what the market funds at scale. They are the things that survived despite the market’s logic, not because of it. Proof of what this industry can do when someone with enough conviction and enough budget ignored everything the last 15 years of the efficiency doctrine had been telling them.
For media owners and broadcasters, the question is not whether the work is ‘good’.
The question is whether anyone is willing to say out loud that the business model that produced it is under serious threat.
Omar Oakes was the founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years.