Cannes Lions 2019 Takeaways, Insights & Our “Double Bottom Line”
The iconic (and controversial) Cannes Lions festival serves many purposes for the wide variety of individuals (now industries) who attend. For some, it’s the highlight and showcase of their life’s work, for others, a grandiose display of wealth and power, but for those like us, Cannes is a fantastic networking opportunity and a great way to take the temperature of our malleable, and ever-expanding industry.
For those who couldn’t be there here’s our Top 5 Takeaways of the week:
1. The People
Relationships the core of the Cannes festival so it was amazing to reconnect with old colleagues and make new connections. Big shout outs to Dave Beck, Jerry Ronaghan, Scott Galloway (totally fanboyed over him), Andrew Baldwin (a serendipitous cab ride filled with amazing industry insights.)
Huge thanks to all of you.
2. The Panels & Campaigns
Actor/activist Jesse Williams and MedMen CMO David Dancer lead a galvanizing on impact of marijuana criminalization and stigmas that made us hope for a new normal. “Let’s cut the bullshit and decriminalize it!”
Project #ShowUs is the brainchild of a Girlgaze, Dove, and Getty Images partnership. This library of over 5,000 stock images depicts an inclusive and empowering representation of women. This collection will plant the seed to reverse the status quo of the negative portrayal of women in media.
3. The Work
The New York Times “The Truth Is Worth It” by Droga5 stole the Grand Prix for Film Craft with it’s gripping simplicity and McCann’s “March for Our Lives: Generation Lockdown” won the Grand Prix for Good and a lot of hearts.
4. The “Outlier” Platform Pitches
We also applaud both Reddit and Pinterest, who are often ignored by large advertisers who shun additional choice in the market. These platforms have made great efforts to articulate how brands should think about advertising on their platforms. (Disclaimer: We work closely with SocialGist & Reddit, but we don’t think we’re biased.)
5. The Bombshell “Is The Ad Industry Still Relevant?” Panel
S4 Capital’s Martin Sorrel and Accenture Interactive’s Brian Whipple’s head-to-head meeting was full of fireworks and “they really said that” moments. Whipple accused the holding companies of being fat and lazy, and Sorrel goaded Whipple at one point to buy GroupM from WPP.
Ft Jesse Williams as George Washington
The Cleanup is Real, (a.k.a. Real Painful)
Amidst the spectre of GDPR & CCPA and the sudden outcry from consumers, advertisers, and now governments clamoring for a clean-up of the ad ecosystem, there were a spate of new announcements coming out of the festival. Unilever, Diageo, and Google (and 16 of advertising’s biggest brands and platforms) announced the formation of the “Global Alliance for Responsible Media”. Adobe, Facebook, and OpenX trumpeted their “Brand Safety Institute”, and Reddit revealed a partnership with Oracle Data Cloud to identify brand-safe controls.
This comes as a pleasant surprise given that Facebook and Google — the great dithering hand-wringers of our time — are finally going beyond lip service to tidy up their platforms of hate speech and anti-vaccination videos.
Aside from the content and brand-safety issues, Google formally announced and provided guidance on their post-GDPR privacy solution. They have replaced their former DoubleClick platform with Ads Data Hub (ADH). This will sit alongside Facebook’s own proprietary attribution system, as well as TradeDesk & Rubicon Projects’ Unified ID System.
So 3 brand new proprietary systems for doing cross-walled-garden-attribution! Great. And while having the post-GDPR dust finally start to settle is a welcome development, it is going to continue to wreak havoc on the ad tech and measurement worlds.
Here at Latticework Insights we are getting out in front of this issue and doubling up on our expertise and resources to address multi-channel attribution in a post-GDPR world. If your time and money is being spread too thin over this issue, let’s chat.
The good news is, change is imminent.
On the flip side, SRAX’s BigToken deserves a creative award for their consumer data solution. By putting the power of advertising back into the hands of consumers, SRAX has managed to come up with a social contract of sorts, which allows consumers to provide their consent to advertising through listing interests and demographic information in exchange for monetary compensation. In other words, they are financially compensated every time their identity is sold and advertised to throughout DSPs and exchanges.
All welcome developments amidst a sea of advertisers & platforms that been reluctant to put responsible ad practices at the top of their agendas. Which brings us to our next point…
The “Corporate Woke-Washing” Ad Trend and Our Double Bottom Line
At this point, advertisers have the ingredients for the perfect love potion to woo GenZ into their purchase funnels. The key elements? Brand purpose and a public display of progressive opinions.
Sadly, this creates a bad incentive system for brands to piggy-back on cause-based marketing in an inauthentic way.
Last week, we arrived with a question in hand: “What happens when companies that do bad things, produce great creative?”
Cannes was wrought with examples of brands hemorrhaging money and lofty statements with no real intention to follow through with social action. And while we still reserve some ire for the woke-washing of the Facebooks and YouTubes of the world, a more garish display of this was Philip Morris International’s surprise presence at Cannes and their announcement of a bold CTA to the ad community to create a “smoke free-world”. How about you just stop selling cigarettes?
At Latticework, we are not coy or reserved about our progressive values. Although this may alienate us from some work, we think it’s the right thing to do. We proudly maintain a “double bottom line” which means we make efforts to do good and to quantify that good as part of the net performance of our company. And we have some awesome clients to prove it works: Bully Pulpit Interactive, DemPrimary Tracker 2020, and America Drafts Garcetti (note: He didn’t decide to run). Our personal bottom line goal for 2019 & 2020 is to help advance progressive agendas by sorting out their measurement problems.
We’ll pick this back up in our next post. Stay tuned!
*This post was written back when Latticework was known as 97 Communications