by César Vacchiano (@cvacchiano) CANNES, FRANCE: A panel discussion took place on Cannes Lions Day 4 formed by the people all working on all the oceans. The panel included Simon Le Bon, Duran Duran; Keith Weed, Unilever; Patricia Oliva, Evian; and Jeremy Darroch, Sky, and they shared the importance of saving the oceans. If we don’t change our ways, by 2050 there’ll be more plastic in the oceans than fish — which will have disappeared well before that date.
The four companies are investing in startups which will produce packaging that will be 100% recyclable. It’s important to communicate that plastic is valuable so it shouldn’t be used for things where there’s only one-time usage. Recycling needs to be seen as easy and governments need to stop talking and start acting. Unilever is starting to be concerned about its full value chain and not only the plastic bottles and sachets that it uses in manufacturing.
The future CMOs
Brad Grossman thinks that creativity is turning a vision into reality within the context of understanding the impossible. He encouraged CMOs not only to become chief growth officers but to become chief visionary officers and to be the most-indispensable people within corporations.
Brand Marketers’ Creative Summit
The ANA and Cannes Lions have joined forces to focus on growth. They are building platforms and combining forces at Cannes for creativity and, with the CMO Growth Council, aligning CMOs with global leadership and growth. They want to grow their companies but also to grow the values for society. Marc Pritchard, P&G, introduced the global growth agenda that is focused on five pillars and platforms: technology and data, talent, brand-building innovation and experience, customer centricity, and social responsibility/environmental sustainability.
Seng Yee Lau and Tencent shared that it’s vital to properly combine brand-building and growth, focusing on both and not only on growth, as many companies are doing nowadays.
Mathilde Delhoume, LVMH, mentioned the same thought by just saying that one day companies may wake up being huge but with no brand identity. It’s very important to honour the heritage of brands and to also make products as experiential as possible, so that you create desire towards the brands.
Antonio Lucio, HP, pointed out how important it is to put the customer at the centre of all that CMOs do. Consumers expect brands to create hyper-relevant experiences and unforgettable content. To do a good job, it is super-important that CMOs identify the activities that companies want to produce and implement in-house, and those that they want to delegate to suppliers.
The key conclusion, pointed out by Lucio, is that one of the biggest things that Cannes Lions can do is to demonstrate that creativity helps to drive businesses growth.
What creativity can do
Google held a seminar to explain how it trains people all over the world to use technology and change their lives. It showed examples: 70 000 people in Greece are working in the tourist sector and Google is helping them to get out of the financial crisis. Google is also empowering women in the Arab world, and even providing an app that has helped 100 000 refugees from Syria when they come to Europe, and it still helps 1 000 refugees every day.
Effective innovation
Tracey Follows, Wired Consulting, defined the toolkit for effectiveness in innovation.
First of all, when we embark on innovation, it’s important to define the objective. This may be transformational, strategic, operational or emotional. We can identify which of those four types the innovation is by thinking about the timeframe of the innovation, as each one takes 10 years, many years, weeks or a moment, respectively. As an example, Estonia launched e-citizen in 2008 and today it’s a fully digital nation, but it actually took 10 years.
Secondly, it’s important to bear in mind that having long-term vision requires short-term actions. By 2030, China has declared that it will become the world’s premier artificial intelligence (AI) innovation centre and that many simple actions are taking place now (in schools, companies, government…) to make it happen.
Thirdly, it’s crucial to think of the return for society and this requires a theory of social change. But every single individual should have a clear point of view of what a social change is, and for some it depends on progress, technology, culture, cycles… and many more options.
The fourth rule is that we need a moral code that will become standard. Two years ago, everybody wanted to be an Uber in each category but there wasn’t a moral code behind Uber and nowadays there are lots of questions behind and about the Uber model. Also, Google employees complained publicly against Project Moven (a project that got involved in the military and that Google was supporting).
Finally, it’s important to bear in mind that the future is plural and it’s important to investigate the alternatives. Simulation and experimentation are key.
The future of retail
On Thursday, Scott Galloway held another seminar. He focused again on retail… He started reminding us that Amazon bought Whole Foods, that it can buy anything, any company and that it has too much power.
Some of Galloway’s predictions are:
- Amazon will buy Carrefour (grocery) as it is key to gain frequency of purchase. Another option is Nordstrom.
- Selective distribution will begin soon on Amazon. Shiseido, Estée Lauder, Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren etc will soon be available on Amazon.
- Scott thought Snapchat would die in 2016; it hasn’t happened yet but it’ll soon be out of business. Brands are already not investing in Snapchat.
- Facebook will invent something similar to Snapchat soon in order to ensure that Snapchat disappears altogether.
- Bots are not going to survive as AI takes over.
- WeChat is amazing and will keep growing.
- Hammer jobs will survive and advertising jobs will decline.
- Traditional TV will keep declining and Olympics views will fall dramatically.
- If Netflix carried advertising, 74% of its subscribers would leave.
- Voice is the future. Voice is transformative. Echo is going to be the most-transformative wave; it’s very powerful. Amazon has 22% of the power on voice. Now it’s used for searches, music… but in the future voice will be used for transactions.
- Companies bulk up to gain size. Size matters. We will start to see alliances between top companies in all categories (Disney and Fox, IKEA and CVS, etc The most-bizarre alliance will be that of Google and Alibaba partnering in their different marketplaces to fight against Amazon.
Awards
Notable awards of Thursday were:
Product Design
- Kingo, Ogilvy Colombia for Powell Communications (Grand Prix)
PR
- Nature Represented, Maruri GREY for Sambito
- Turning Beer into Water, Fleishman Hilliard for Anheuser-Busch
- The most German Supermarket, Jung von Matt for EDEKA
- FCK, Mother London for KFC
- #shedrives, TBWA\Dubai for Nissan
- The Flip, OMD for McDonald’s on Woman’s Day
- This Coke is a Fanta, David São Paulo for Coca-Cola
- Trash Isles, AMVBBDO (Grand Prix)
Creative Data
- Destination Pride, FCB Toronto for PFLAG Canada
- JFKUnsilenced, AccentureInteractive Dublin for The Times (Grand Prix). First ever Grand Prix for Accenture!
Innovation
- Dot, by Serviceplan
- myline, by MullenLowe Colombia for Ministry of Communications (Grand Prix) — I noted this in my Day 2 report
Johanna McDowell also contributed to this report.
César Vacchiano (@cvacchiano) is president and CEO of SCOPEN, an independent research company headquartered in Spain. Trained in economics and business with postgraduate degrees in American universities, he is an international speaker and contributor to various publications, specialist in image studies and positioning agencies, advertisers and media. César has been at SCOPEN since 1993 and today is the company’s top executive worldwide.
“Motive” is a by-invitation-only column on MarkLives.com. Contributors are picked by the editors but generally don’t form part of our regular columnist lineup, unless the topic is off-column.
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