The real winners at Cannes
Greg Grimmer, partner, Hurrell Moseley Dawson & Grimmer, explains why Google and Facebook dominated Cannes conversation…
I have a tough taskmaster in my MediaTel editor. She demands relevance, humour, erudite observations and the occasional plug. So here goes, trying to please a multi-headed task master again.
I shall start this month’s regaling at the salubrious Haymarket Hotel. MediaTel’s first foray into joint media and client based events, this inaugural one being centred around mobile and retail. A stellar list of UK retail marketers attended, together with a smattering of agency folk and Shaun Gregory’s evangelical O2 media team.
I’ve written about mobile before, and hypothesised about the winners and losers (in the longer term) in the fight to own the precious screen in the pocket, and last week’s conference did nothing to confirm anything rock solid, apart from the fact we will all still be attending conferences to talk about mobile for the foreseeable future.
The debate was varied and great brain food but, chatting to the delegates afterwards, the consensus was that we are still developing the mobile ecosystem. So, winners (especially those reliant upon advertising revenue) are not assured and retailers see the e-crm benefits of mobile as their key priority.
Moving back chronologically a few days I find myself at the Cannes ad festival. Here the winners are clear to see. Not the latest Argentinean ad agency with their Lion winning press ad of a semi clothed model promoting road safety, nor even the restaurants, bars and hotels owners all raking in Euros like they are going out of fashion.
No, for me the real winners were the omnipresent global digital brands that rented every inch of the Cannes beachfront alongside the Croissette to entertain their clients throughout the week. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and newcomers Vevo and Say Media were all there in serious force. The last two even used their music industry gravitas to persuade a bemused Ellie Goulding and Friendly Fires to play sets in front of the nonchalant ad folk in a sparse beach party audience.
Their dominant presence and their attraction of the global CEOs of the agency holding companies (Sorrell, Jones, Levy all very much in attendance) made me think. Has the long earnt reputation of Cannes as being a playground for errant creative directors been consigned to the history books or even archived to the back-up server? Is it really, with increased client participation, a serious business event attended by serious businessmen (and your trusty scribe)?
Now, I’ve been talking for two decades about global media barons and how agencies should harness their power, but the reason why Murdoch, Berlusconi, Hearst et al did not come to dominate Cannes conversation in the same way as Google and Facebook is, of course, because they have always represented multiple brands across multiple markets. Young Keith Rupert Murdoch has to explain the power of The Sun, to his Asian customers, the gravitas of the WSJ to his European suppliers and the political stance of Fox to everyone. Eric Schmidt didn’t have that problem in Cannes, from Venezuela, to Australia, UK to Ukraine he greeted his clients as one.
Now I have used MediaTel’s bandwidth before to rail against the hegemony of the interweb’s superbrands, but on the positive side I saw this Cannes festival as the first time the divide between the old world and ‘new’ media was not attempting to be crossed (or even ignored), but instead embraced as a single world, which we all – media owners, agencies, and clients – inhabit.
Maybe it was the sun and the copious St Tropez rose that addled my mind, but I certainly returned from the Cote d’Azur with a fresh enthusiasm for the marketing communications community working in collaboration with the media owner community rather than letting the auditors and procurement debate tear us apart.
Now let’s see if the mobile channel can find its place on the beach next year.