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2nd July 2010

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Cannes 2010: thenetworkone review

Cannes 2010: thenetworkone review 

Last week, with a few colleagues and around eight thousand agency people, producers, writers and occasionally seen marketing clients, I was fortunate enough to speak at and attend the 2010 Cannes Advertising Festival. Several people asked me to write a personal account of what I saw, heard and learned.  Here it is.

-          Julian Boulding, President, thenetworkone

The Major Trend in 2010

Cannes is like the Oscars – a key annual barometer of industry and social trends.

The big prizes at Cannes are the Grand Prix’s. These are awarded for the campaigns most admired by the judges. If no work is good enough in a category, no Grand Prix is awarded (there was no Grand Prix for radio this year, for example).

So which campaigns won…and what pattern do we see? A very clear pattern, in fact.

Of thirteen Grand Prix’s which were awarded:

ONLY THREE WERE FOR ADVERTISEMENTS, OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS.

These were:

-          Wieden and Kennedy, for Old Spice

-          Anomaly New York, for Diesel

-          AMV BBDO London, for the Metroplitan Police

THE OTHER TEN WERE FOR PR / EVENT / EXPERIENTIAL IDEAS AND PLATFORMS. These were:

-          Wieden and Kennedy for Nike (the Livestrong chalkbot) – two Grand Prix’s

-          TBWA Chiat Day for Gatorade (replay of a historic football game) – also two Grand Prix’s

-          Happiness Brussels for Toyota (the iQ font designed by a car)

-          Saatchi Argentina for Cerveza Andes (the teletransporter)

-          Orcan Broadband by Special Group New Zealand (the Iggy Pop remix)

-          Almap BBDO  for Billboard (the faces on the cover)

-          DDB Stockholm for VW (the fun theory)

-          Leo Burnett for Canon EOS (the photochains)

Do take a look. All these campaigns can be viewed at www.canneslions.com. Half an hour well spent.

After years of talking about the growing effect of the internet, our industry has finally woken up and noticed the effect: the move from “sticky content” (look at me) to “slippery content” (which people share with each other). Advertising is very vibrant. Advertisements are in decline. Advertising and PR are now one and the same thing.

The big insight

Every now and again at Cannes, you hear an insight which almost doesn’t get noticed, because it’s so obvious to the person making the comment, that they don’t make a big deal out of it.

One speaker I always go to hear is Jimmy Maymann of Go Viral. His company tracks (and influences) the way consumers use the internet: where they come from, how they behave, where they travel, how long they spend on sites, how they upload content, how they share content, what they respond to, when, how and where they buy. He deals in observation and measurement, not only opinion.

Jimmy said “we’ve found that product advertising is most successful when it also talks about the company behind the product”.

Think about this a moment. Where did “the brand” go in this equation?

Now test it against some companies you know, where products and features are rather important. Take mobile handsets. How much do people know about Apple as a company? (a lot: who founded it, who runs it, what it’s like to work for…). How much do you know about Nokia as a company? Does anyone know who runs it, beyond a few industry insiders? Or what their offices are like? And who is doing better these days…Apple or Nokia? Now repeat the exercise with Google and Yahoo, or Virgin Atlantic and American Airlines.

I think Jimmy’s onto something here, and he’s not alone. Procter & Gamble, the smartest marketers on the planet, just launched their first ever corporate company campaign in the US (P&G supports moms, basically). And yes, they measure its effect, and yes, it’s positive on sales and net promoter scores.

Every marketing company wants to think about this. The reason is not hard to see.

Today, information is available and people discuss what they know in public forums. They have little tolerance for spin, greenwash and other falsehoods. They want the truth, genuineness and authenticity.

A brand, as we all know, is an artificial construct, created and controlled by unseen hands. Artificial doesn’t cut it any more.

A company is a real entity: a group of people, a legal entity, with offices, factories and employees.

In the 2010’s, companies will become more important than brands. You heard it here first.

That doesn’t mean brands are dead. Marc Pritchard, CMO of P&G, gave an eloquent description of how his brands are each based on a specific purpose which guides all their activity, from tv advertising to social programs.  Vicks supports research into respiratory diseases; Tide drives mobile Laundromats into disaster areas, like New Orleans after the floods. But they all start from P&G’s corporate purpose, to improve the lives of the world’s consumers.

Joe Tripodi , CMO of Coca Cola, talked about how his company is spreading happiness around the world. Keith Weed, CMO of Unilever, believes that multinational corporations are better placed than governments to solve world problems like global warming, because they have a broader perspective than narrow national interests. That might be stretching a point, but the theme is clear: big companies are back.

Some facts and figures

Here are a few soundbite statistics that will liven up any conference presentation you may be asked to make:

-          In the USA, online video reaches an audience of 170 million people. The biggest network television station, ABC, reaches only 100 million.

-          USA is still the biggest advertising market, by far: US adspend in 2009 was $180 billion. By comparison, Japan was $42 billion, China $39 billion, UK and Germany around $25 billion each. So US adspend is almost 50% higher than the next four countries combined.

-          China is where the action is, in terms of internet. 400 million “netizens”, 221 million bloggers, 176 million people registered on social networks. Compared to India where only 40 million people have internet access at all.

-          In mobile, Japan and Korea still lead the way. 40% of Koreans now use mobile phones for small payments. But India is coming up fast…there are more mobile phones than toilets. If they sort out the problem of multiple platforms, the same which slowed down the USA, mobile will be a major medium there very soon.

-          Everyone wants an app, but who actually uses them? The quick answer is iPhone users. The average (enabled) mobile phone user downloads 13 apps and uses 8. The average iPhone user downloads 25 apps and uses 15. 75% of mobile data traffic in UK is now via iPhones.

But if you are giving a conference presentation - do not say that if Facebook users were a nation, it would be the third largest in the world. It’s true, but everyone who goes to conferences now knows this already.

The world of agencies

Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP said in Campaign magazine recently, and repeated at Cannes: “I think there are pitfalls in size. Our business, with the exception of media buying, does not lend itself to economies of scale…the perception among clients is that the bigger something gets, the worse it gets”.

And for sure, the independent agencies performed very creditably at Cannes this year, compared to the rich networks whose budgets stretch more easily to entering awards. Of the Grand Prix’s, seven went to network agencies and six to independents:

-          5 went to Omnicom agencies (well done BBDO, DDB and TBWA)

-          2 went to Publicis Groupe agencies (Leo Burnett and Saatchi)

-          3 went to Wieden & Kennedy, a privately owned micro-network

-          1 went to Crispin Porter Bogusky, a standalone agency belonging to Canadian-owned MDC

-          3 went to other independents (well done Happiness Brussels, Anomaly New York and Special Group New Zealand).

WPP, Interpublic Group and Havas all scored zero on this measure.

And interestingly, 4 out of 5 of Omnicom’s Grand Prix’s went to agencies which still keep their former names and character: one each to Almap BBDO in Brazil and Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO in London, and two to TBWA Chiat Day in California.

Perhaps Sir Martin is right, and smaller is more beautiful…

Aside from the prizes, there was much discussion about crowdsourcing. Keith Weed of Unilever advocates it, though he’s not about to dispense with his agencies altogether. “Nokia showed a very successful film for the Nokia N8 product (called foosball – see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5jKcDH9s64) and revealed it was an unsolicited idea, rather than from Wieden and Kennedy.  If Wieden is your agency and you still get better ads from freelancers, agencies could really be in trouble!

Back to a serious comment, though, and another telling insight. This time about agencies.

Michael Roth, Chairman of Interpublic Group (which owns McCann, Draft FCB, Lowe, etc) commented: “Because digital agencies are mainly project based, they are better collaborators.”

Now that’s interesting.

As communications fragments, clients have to employ multiple agencies (or move work in-house). Open source becomes the mantra. The future belongs to the collaborators.

Is the future of agencies project based? It’s not such a dumb idea. The movie industry always was, and that seems rather healthier than the advertising agency business these days.

thenetworkone at Cannes

Just a little note from the author at this point about our own seminar, the “Independent Agency Showcase”. The main auditorium and the gallery were both full and people were sitting in the aisles. That never happened to us before, so we must be doing something right.

The three independent agencies we introduced were Happiness Brussels (winner of the Design Grand Prix, although we didn’t know that, until later), Sid Lee and Taproot India.

Aside from showing some great work – Happiness talked about the way they have broken down the traditional copywriter/art director creative structure, Sid Lee about how their agency is a “collective” of creative talent, and Taproot about how they use their creative skills as a force for good in society. For some reason only the Sid Lee presentation is currently online at the Cannes Lions website, but we will make the others available as soon as we get hold of the film. If any of you would like a copy please let us know.

A final note: the most amazing thing in the whole show

OK, this didn’t win any awards, and probably wasn’t even entered. But here goes. The other great seminar presenter (after Jimmy Maymann) is Akira Kagami of Dentsu. If you ever see him on a programme, book a ticket. He’s a quietly spoken man but he finds the most interesting work you’ll ever see, mostly from Asia.

This year he focussed on Japan and one film he showed was about Hatsune Miku.

You haven’t heard of her? She’s the biggest teenage pop star in Japan right now.  More than 20,000 people have written songs for her and she has performed them all.

She is actually Vocaloid, based on a manga character and created by Crypton Future Media. OK, voice synthesis isn’t new…but this one gives live concerts. Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgjfpoIA054&feature=related and a hundred other variants, or just Google Hatsune Miku. If you’re not awestruck and amazed, you’ve been in the business too long.

Julian Boulding 

President, thenetworkone

June 2010

For more information about thenetworkone or to discuss any aspects of this article, please email julian.boulding@thenetworkone.com.