Claire Davidson takes in the seminars at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity: Day 4
Claire Davidson (left) is in Cannes this year and is reporting exclusively for Campaign Brief Asia. Here’s her round up of the speaker sessions on Day 4.
Argh… Day 4.
My rose hangover and I tumbled out of bed early this morning to catch the first session of the day. I took in the tech talk ‘Big Data and Advertising: Big Promise or Big Headache’ with Richard Frankel, President of Rocket Fuel.
If you are creative and have big ideas, then you need to know about consumers and brands. The way to know about that is to learn from data. Big data is not the bully in the schoolyard, it’s the geeky kid in the front row who wants to help you with your homework. If you can build toward certainty, then you can create your ideas around this. All media will be digital in the future. All digital media will be programmatic. It will be bought and sold through technical platforms. Technology will be used to help marketers to reach their consumers more than ever before. That future is here today.
45 billion times a day you have the opportunity to learn about someone, to engage with someone, to understand how someone reacts to your brand or your creative idea. Big data is a tool for learning and measuring. We can then turn that learning into innovation.
Data is all around us. We’ve moved from where people would guess, test and learn, to no longer needing to guess. Today we can just test and learn. For the first time creative people can actually immediately know if their brilliant idea will work for this client, or if it won’t.
The future of marketing is about techniques getting more efficient – which will lead to more resources for creative, strategic and innovative thinkers. Now we can measure if the branding actually drives outcomes that matter.
Make friends with the geeks.
Next up was Jared Leto for me. Ooh Ahh. Jared. Titled “A Conversation with Jared Leto and Benjamin Palmer”, their talk was focused on creative thinking and craft.
Jared Leto represents creativity without boundaries. Benjamin Palmer represents creativity and work with others. When Jared approaches his work, his output always comes from the same source – be it when he’s working as an actor, or a singer-songwriter, or a director, or a producer, or an activist, or a philanthropist or an advisor to tech companies. He’s a product of the times that we live in.
When Jared first started making music, it was really expensive to make an album. Now you can do it fairly quickly and fairly cheaply, and have a lot more means of distribution. The barrier to entry is lower, and due to technology this has changed our lives. It was radio though, that initially changed Jared’s life. It introduced him to music that became the soundtrack of his youth and beyond. There is anonymity with radio. It inserts songs into your life with repetition, and choice is taken out of the equation. Radio chooses for you.
Jared believes in collaboration. He believes in contribution. He believes in communication.
He also loves advertising, which was good news to hear for us folk attending the seminar. The room positively glowed… He thinks it’s informative. It’s a conversation. We can still push boundaries. When advertising is art it’s transcendent. Sometimes you succeed more from failure, than you do if you just have success. You fail and you learn. But stay authentic. Tell the truth. Enrich people’s lives. Offer something. Brands will die if they don’t offer something, regardless of how good your advertising is.
Jared chooses work that motivates him, that moves him and excites him. He makes a commitment to follow through. We all do a lot of different things now. He is constantly learning and evolving. He doesn’t wait. He asked us to do the same. Be evolutional and entrepreneurial. To be a creative person you need to be compelled to want to do it. You need to be passionate. The bridge between reality and a dream is work. Thank you very much Jared Leto.
Keeping up the music theme today, I next caught Courtney Love in the 8th Annual Grey Music Seminar. How does the most controversial woman in the history of rock’n’roll continually reinvent herself to stay current?
Everything that becomes true starts with a manifesto.
Courtney is known for her writing and lyrics, but even she suffers writers block in her creative processes. When she does, she turns to physics. Competition drives Courtney’s creative process. She aspires for her song writing to be as good as PJ Harvey and Leonard Cohen. Competition is always a motivator within the creative field. She listens to songs that she wishes she wrote. Fast songs are harder to write but the payoff is better.
The brand of Courtney Love is something that has evolved. It hasn’t been pre-planned. Emerging from her early days as a stripper, to becoming a multi platinum selling rockstar, to becoming a Golden Globe nominated actress, it’s been an organic process. It’s come with some bleeps of course, but that’s what Courtney Love is all about.
Uh oh… technical problems. With all this talk of technology here this week, Courtney’s seminar ended then and there for me. With her forum being so popular we couldn’t all fit into the auditorium, and the live stream to where the rest of the masses could view it broke. Ho hum…
Now, onto Facebook. The next seminar was Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook who brought us ‘Making Marketing Personal Again’.
Facebook seems to have everything right – from their distribution to their advertising to their revenue and the way they’ve embraced mobile. They have the ultimate business model. Today’s focus was on technology, personalization and media.
Facebook made mobile a priority. They made the transition from a desktop company to a mobile company. Mobile is bigger than what we predicted. It puts incredible powers of technology into our hands. We see the content we want when we want it, wherever we are. Here are some interesting stats – 25% of us admit we take our phones to the bathroom, and 20% of people even use their phones during sex. Jeepers. I realise that people want to share and connect, but that’s just taking it to a whole new level. Who do you really want to be texting when you are having sex?
Mobile is 20% of everyone’s time, but it’s only 4% of budgets. Time is moving faster than budgets. That will change.
When you get something on your mobile or on your news feed it’s personal. Information is coming from people and it’s an individual experience. Facebook is storytelling. It is a tech company but it is also a creative company. It’s people, technology and creative coming together. You can add art to that when you consider Instagram.
With the advent of mobile, brands are now able to be with us all the time, everywhere we go; and this creates an opportunity to make marketing personal again. Facebook uses personalised marketing at scale. The focus is on real identity.
Today our friend Facie has 1.3 billion users, with 63% who connect every day. It is also working with other tech companies to improve penetration in countries where the internet isn’t prevalent. Facebook wants to access those people
who don’t have a connection to data and technology – a very interesting challenge? It stands by its mission to connect the world.
People will do great things if you give them technology.
Or they’ll text their mates while they’re naked with someone else. Whatever floats your boat!
In other news, the Fireflies zoomed in today. In 2001, Sandy Watson Scott (then Head of TV, M&C Saatchi) together with various co-founders established The Fireflies Tour; a cycling fraternity committed to raising money for the Hammersmith Hospital, London, renowned as a world leader in treatment of Leukaemia and cancers of the blood.
Every year amateur riders from AdLand and Film Production take up the challenge to cycle the most gruelling climbs of the Tour de France; inspired by the courage it takes to fight cancer. Their motto is FOR THOSE WHO SUFFER WE RIDE. Thanks to international media industry sponsors, to date the Fireflies have raised an incredible £1.5 million.
This year they’ve covered an impressive 1000+km across the Alps from Lake Geneva to Cannes, riding over 18 mountains in just 8 days.
They look quite hot and tired. I might go and help them find a cold glass of wine or a beer or something.
Next year the Fireflies are starting the Fireflies Antipodes for those of us in the Asia Pacific. We too can ride for an honorable cause. The Antipodean riders will be raising money for the Snowdome Foundation. Formed in 2010, Snowdome is dedicated to improving outcomes for Australian men, women and children with blood cancer, by channeling government and private philanthropic investment into human clinical trials of next-generation drugs and therapies.
The ride is slated for early in the new year. Instead of riding to Cannes, perhaps we can ride to Cairns. It’s really not that different…
The inaugural ride will be organised by Grant Rutherford, National Executive Creative Director, Publicis Mojo, Australia and Wilf Sweetland, Managing Director of The Sweet Shop, Australia. Please visit these sites if you would like more information: http://www.thefirefliestour.com/ and http://snowdomefoundation.com/about
Claire Davidson, Executive Producer ASIA & MENA @ The Sweet Shop, reporting for Campaign Brief Asia at Cannes Lions 2014.
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Another ‘Epic” picture from the Claire Collection