Most advertising and marketing communication is now driven by social media. Not so much social first, as social first, second, third and fourth. Between them, Alphabet, Meta, Bytedance and Amazon now account for HALF of global adspend (up from one third, in 2019), according to The Economist. For marketers, this means that a huge percentage of comms budgets go to highly addressable media platforms, with vast data sets and close-to-real-time analytics, proven deliverables and full funnel ROI attribution.
Traditional holdco agencies, reliant on being able to afford expensive third party data, and possessing negotiating leverage built on scale, mass media buys and upfront financial commitments, are in rapid retreat. It’s no surprise that WPP CEO Mark Read resigned his post, a week before Cannes: his company lost half its value during his five year tenure. Dentsu, Omnicom and IPG are headed in the same direction.
Short term thinking?
KOL companies like e-commerce retailer Doordash in the US (who were seen all over Cannes) adjust their plans continually - and re-think them completely on a weekly basis, based on sales and revenue numbers. Short term thinking is the new black. As Doordash’s CMO said;
“The long term is just a succession of short terms”.
Kofi Amoo-Gottfried Doordash
CMOs need fast, visible results, just to stay in post. The Celebrity CMOs in the Palais (almost all from the USA) may talk to wide-eyed, about building long term brand values. But is that what they say that to their CFO’s back home? Or is it more like “Performance rules and we have the numbers !?”
The problem is that it’s really Google, Meta, Tiktok and Amazon who have the numbers - and if you press the big AI button, out they come, in whichever colour they want.
The current game-changing quantity of data and speed of analysis has only been available in the last couple of years. So it’s inevitable that data-driven thinking equals short-term thinking; because there is no long term data available for real-time attributable outcomes. Les Binet’s time may return, but right now, he is probably busy speaking to his cryogenicist.
The counter-current
Down on the Forum stage and the Rotonde stage, the parts of the Palais where (as Jim Stengel pointed out) the talks and panels are not recorded – there was also a whispered counter-current. Adam Morgan (he who eats the Big Fish, probably in Le Caveau 30 rather than at the Martinez) and Mark Ritson, the Aussie professor who made a fortune by inventing the 10 minute MBA for middle-class toddlers, called out a few home truths.
So the time is right, for creative and media to come back together again.
Does anyone remember why they ever split apart? I’m probably in a minority here, but I do. It happened in the 1990’s. It had nothing to do with strategy or economics. They split apart (and went to live in different agencies) because the media guys were sick of making 112 overhead projector slides for every client pitch, which there was never time to show, before the client had to be taken to lunch. So they left the building and took the money with them. It was all about agency egos and nothing to do with helping the clients.
But those days are gone. We all know that creative and media need to collaborate. Just like paid and earned media. Content and context. Different words, same idea.
And it’s happening.
I sent Alfie Buisson, one of my youthful spies, to the Mirren new business conference in the USA, because agency/client new business is where the rubber hits the road. He came back with the intel that THE best presentation session was the double act between Jaime Robinson, co-founder of the brilliant new female-owned-and-led creative shop JOAN; and Kamran Asghar, the multi-talented founder of media agency Crossmedia – built around their new brand, JOAN X MEDIA.
They have not bought each other, or merged equity, or been banged together like a pair of cymbals by a PE house; but they collaborate, they borrow desks in each others’ offices, they listen to each other, they work together on comms planning from the day they get the brief.
So we invited them to talk on the Indie-friendly LBB Beach in Cannes as another of our young team-mates, Alice Carr, put it “the beach where you have to pay for your own food” to tell thenetworkone’s Indie Community how they do stuff.
We added into the mix, Marcus Krzastek, newly arrived from Vayner Media, who are probably the most talked-about agency in the US today, to lead their expansion into Europe and APAC. Check Vayner’s website and the first thing you’ll see is the GIF oscillating between “we are a media agency” and “we are a creative agency.” They do both, really well. In the same building.
Then we invited Barby K. Siegel, Global CEO of corporate PR giant Edelman’s younger sister agency, Zeno. Barby drew parallels with the PR world, where earned and paid media co-exist in all sorts of imaginative new ways.
Last but not least, we added to the pot, Ian Forrester of DAIVID (the AI is not a typo), a cutting-edge creative analytics company that models and predicts ROI-based effectiveness outcomes, a bit like Creative X. We think you’ll be hearing a lot more about DAIVID. They are currently developing new generation software that models creative effectiveness and media effectiveness, in conjunction.
The average view-time for a TikTok video is 3 seconds.
If, like most advertisers, you don’t name your brand in the first 3 seconds, people won’t know who you are.
Even if they were paying attention. You just bought someone else a ticket. Mark also, showing a bucketload of data, proving that creativity has six times the effect on ROI that media planning does. Because the underlying point is that…
We don’t YET have the vast data sets for creative effectiveness prediction that we do for media effectiveness prediction. But soon, we will.
A panel for the ages?
For the first time in 30 years, maybe, the two parallel universes – owned and earned, creative and media, content and context - were put together in the form of five incredibly smart and committed thinkers. Imagine if you will, the implications for marketers, for agencies and for media sales of knowing which creative assets work best in which media contexts.
I might be biased (I was the moderator), but I do think, this might just have been the moment in time when marketers could once again, see the world of marketing communications in glorious 3D technicolor.
Authored by Julian Boulding, Fellow of The Marketing Society, Founder of thenetworkone, Master of the Marketors Livery Company
