Nickie Scriven, the CEO Zenith Australia, at the Cannes Lions festival:
The brilliant thinking and work I spent many hours and days pouring over as a Media Juror at Cannes have for me highlighted the need for a greater focus on the craft of media strategy and planning.
While my fellow jurors and I saw some great content at this year’s Cannes Lions, it also became apparent that some of this fabulous work could have been better amplified with more attention to solid planning principles, understanding how to best use different channels, and how they can collectively bring the content to life.
We were looking for evidence of how the selected channels worked together and relied upon each other to drive engagement with the content.
At a time when we have more channels than ever before – and marketers budgets are under increasing scrutiny and pressure – it is particularly important to ensure that every dollar spent works to maximum impact and effect.
Perhaps with an increasing focus on the use of data and martech there is a tendency to let machines do the thinking and the buying, and with that, the craft of great planning has taken a back seat.
The work that really stood out and drove the maximum impact, engagement and business results was the work where you could see great planning principles in action.
This is why it’s time for our craft to step back up to the plate.
Some of the key themes and learnings to emerge out of the hundreds of entries we judged also provided a harbinger of what will shape the future landscape.
Here are the highlights:
Collaboration and collective ideation
There is a greater need for collaboration among content creators and media planners, but importantly there shouldn’t be a tug of war for control in this space. Collaboration and collective ideation is the future of our industry and the future of effective work for our clients. Those who don’t embrace this will be left behind lamenting the days of old.
What makes engaging content
The lines of content and commercial airtime continue to blur. We saw some great brand integration into an event or existing content; resulting in driving great engagement, conversation, organic amplification and brand affinity among viewers.
Special mentions go to the Uber Australian Open Ambush, Tide’s “It’s a Tide Ad”, and Uber’s “Distracted Goalkeeper”. Uber’s work was one of the bravest and ambitious stunts that led to a really impactful campaign.
Alignment to purpose – hits and misses
We saw a rush of brands attaching themselves to a cause or purpose. In some cases it was well executed and felt true to the brand, and in others, we struggled to find the relevance.
This highlights the need for marketers to be authentic to their brands and only play in this space if it’s really relevant. Otherwise, it can risk coming off as disingenuous.
Key themes were gender equality, environment, health, racism, politics, animal welfare, food safety and education.
The big guys supporting the little guys
We saw some brilliant cases where bigger brands brought smaller brands into their advertising to tell their story. This worked best in the B2B space where genuine business partnerships could be demonstrated and supported. My favourite case was VISA’s “All I Want for Christmas is You”, which saw the financial services brand support local business owners, promoting their businesses as part of VISA’s campaign. It was heart-warming and so cleverly executed, generating a life of its own as the local business owners amplified and shared their segments of the content through their owned channels.
Ambush marketing still strong
This year ambush marketing took on a life of its own.
We saw some excellent examples where challenger brands hijacked their competitors’ advertising through the smart use of mobile, geo-targeting and e-commerce – diverting customers to purchase their products.
This approach was particularly effective in driving engagement and amplification among the under 30s. Special mention goes to Burger King, a brand that has become a master in this space with its clever, entertaining and brave ambush of McDonald’s.
Brand engagement through gaming
We saw some of the most innovative approaches to brands participating in gaming. My personal favourite was Wendy’s hack of Fortnite – “Keeping Fortnite Fresh”. Wendy’s behaved according to its brand belief that burgers should be fresh not frozen, creating a red-headed female character that went about smashing all of the freezers that stored the burgers, starting a food fight that went on for nine hours straight. The way Wendy’s seeded this across social and gaming platforms, and drove engagement and participation with its target audience was exceptional.
Evolving a successful campaign
While we were looking for new and innovative work, we were also looking for cases where brands were able to successfully evolve their existing campaigns, content and approaches.
There can often be a temptation to pursue the shiny new toy to make an impact, however this can come at the detriment of brand building over time. We saw how the power of evolving a campaign and continuing a theme could build strong branding cues and memory encoding over time.
A perfect example of this was Tide’s “It’s a Tide Ad”, where the brand evolved a strong platform from the previous year to then highlight moments in play in the football telecast, where viewers couldn’t decipher what was in play and what was actually a Tide Ad.
All in all, strong branding and engaging content is what cut through among the award entries. It’s what builds brand salience. If a brand can move people emotionally – make them laugh, make them think, or make them cry – these are the campaigns that people remember and are more likely to share.
But alongside creating great content, in order to ensure the maximum amplification of your campaign, never underestimate the importance of a solid media strategy and planning.
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