Advertising is disrupted but “fucking awesome” work still cuts through

Rachael Micallef
By Rachael Micallef | 18 August 2015
 

A deep dive panel celebrating the best work at of the Cannes Lions has said "fucking awesome" work still gets reach, despite the media landscape being increasingly crowded.

The panel was part of a News Corp and Communications Council event for the Account Planning Group (APG) hosted by APG chair Jason Lonsdale, looking at some of the heavily awarded work coming out of Cannes and learnings the Australian industry can pick up.

“Adblocking tech is reasonably commonplace, as it downloading TV shows yet there are great ads that our industry makes that get 100 million views on YouTube,” Lonsdale said.

“I think if we do stuff that is fucking awesome it still works and it still gets cut through. It's just the average shit that no one wants to see.”

Lonsdale - who is also Saatchi & Saatchi's executive planning director - also pointed to some of the bigger Cannes winning work as being heavily purpose-driven and tapping into a cultural or societal insight.

UM strategy director Chris Colter, who sat on the panel, said one thing he noticed was a number of brands proving the commercial value in purpose-driven marketing.

“The ones that are actually out there and doing it well, like the Doves and like the P&G Always brands, they can actually reach people in away that no other communications can,” Colter said.

“If you look at [P&G Alway] Like a Girl campaign, that's a very powerful ad and for me no ad that has blue liquid is going to connect with women in the same way.

“If you show that your brand is linked by purpose you're going to get great cut through in that idea.”

J Walter Thompson national head of planning Angela Morris said that by definition, purpose is something that you stand for, being that if brands want to tackle purpose-driven marketing it needs to be baked into the heart of what they do.

However, she said there didn't seem to be as much of that type of work coming out of Australia.

“There is an assumption of interest in the product or service that we are advertising on the behalf of many people involved in these projects,” Morris said.

“We're going out there preaching you have to actually earn that interest. It's not something that you can assume in your audience and most of the purpose pieces are saying let's tap into what matters to people, deeply, on an emotional level, a societal level, a cultural level.”

UM chief strategy officer Sophie Price said that the other issue is that there hasn't been the proof that this type of positioning delivers on the bottom line.

“We have clients in this country that have smaller budgets than perhaps some of our western counter parts and every penny is accountable,” Price said. “This year at Cannes we saw many more examples of CMOs for all the big companies talking about and showing us the positive results on the bottom line.

“I think we'll start to see that clients will be brave in terms of investing in that type of work.”

J Walter Thompson senior writer Sinead Roarty added that brands are having a point of view around social good for the first time.

“If they can even do it in a tiny weenie way than what an amazing step forward because they haven’t do it before,” Roarty said.

“And they're accountable. As soon as they put themselves forward and say that they believe in that then they're accountable for it.

“We are savvy people, we demand to have an connection with everything we can relate to in the world and if people don't see a brand doing something then they just move onto another brand that does.”

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