The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity creates a roar each year. This year, beyond awards, the festival also featured advice and insights from top industry professionals during the Lions’ seminars and forums.
Celebrities and other famous faces attended as well. This year in particular, seminar attendees and web viewers got to see Conan O’Brien make a (joking) direct request to advertisers to “just give me the money,” as well as hear P. Diddy take a surprisingly expressive moment to profess his affections for — wait for it — yogurt.
Here are the top excerpts that caught our attention and may bring your agency or your brand some fresh ruminations.
Using The Power of Advertising and Branding For Good
TITLE: “The Wharton School Seminar: Co-Creating Advertising 2010”
SPEAKER: Jerry (Yoram) Wind, Lauder Professor, Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School
“Inner city typically is the place with the drug, crime, poverty, and most of you would probably say, ‘why invest in inner city?’ Now what if we changed the name; what if we asked you, basically, to think about — forget inner city for a minute — would you invest in ’emerging market’? Then most of you would say yes”
Find Balance For Your Brand Within The Life of Your Audience
TITLE: “Kiip Forum: Smaller Screens Equal Bigger Brand Engagement Opportunities”
SPEAKER: Brian Wong, CEO, Co-Founder, Kiip
“You have to realize that there is an important respect element that needs to be held and we’re all responsible for this. We’re all in the same game together…respecting everybody and how we interact with our devices — that we have our ‘me time.’ …’This is not the time for me to be interacting with a brand.’ So how do we do it properly? How do we respect that?”
“And so, the question I ask you is: what’s your moment?…What’s the moment you would like to own? This is happening already in how you design your marketing mix, right? Whether it be through TV, or radio, or digital, out of home: this is all part of what you’re thinking about already. But translate that to mobile.”
“Translate understanding what moment you’d like to own. That is the first step. As you figure that out, then you can figure out how to interact with them. There’s an element of rewarding, there’s elements of reciprocity, there’s other things you can do in that moment, but it starts with one thing: what is your moment?”
Being Honest As We Co-Create This Digital Transformation
TITLE: “Adobe Seminar: You Can’t Trust Marketers”
SPEAKER: Steven F. Althaus, Director, Brand Management, BMW; Marketing Services, BMW Group
“I just want to send out the message that everybody is affected by this digital transformation, and we should all acknowledge this.”
“an agency…y’know, sometimes you’re pretty good at explaining to us how our world is changing. I’m also sort of handing over to you, say, ‘hey, you’re world is changing as well.’…So please, let’s join us on this as an open invitation to a journey that we’re both embarking on.”
“I’m using this word ‘journey’ quite a bit because I think we’re — oft the time, we’re being sold to by agencies or any service providers who tell us, ‘I know exactly how it works’…Help us; help the industry; help your clients to find out together, which also sort of elevates the discussion we have between clients and agencies in the spirit of copartnership and co-creation.”
Leading With Courage And Enabling Repeated Success
TITLE: “The Cannes Debate Seminar: The Cannes Debate with the Coca-Cola Company”
SPEAKER: Muhtar Kent, Chairman, CEO, The Coca-Cola Company
“…what separates a great leader from a manager, and I think that is one that is really critical in terms of your human capital in a company, in all businesses”
“One thing is to achieve success as a group, as a team; another thing is to continue to repeat success….It is much more difficult to repeat success than it is to achieve success.”
“I think leadership is all about, as a team, having the courage — the courage — and the foresight and ability to listen to ensure that you can do everything in your power as a team to create the conditions for success”
“…what is success? And there I think it’s all about making a promise in the future without a predetermined outcome. Y’know, you say, ‘okay, this is what I’m going to do’ and you become public.”
Fewer Assumptions, More Context
TITLE: “DARE Seminar: Dare’s Deadly 60”
SPEAKER: Mark Earls, Founder, Herd
“we need to do less of it…one of these assumptions that hails from the middle of the last century that people are fixed in their likes, dislikes, and dispositions. It seems to me to be unhelpful. All the science tells us that people — things like personality traits are entirely context-dependent.”
“On the other hand, y’know, you have to have some idea of who you might be trying to speak to, work with, do business with, and have some idea of what they’re about, and who you’re not interested in…Segmentation does help from that point-of-view”
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