Cannes Lions 2015: Sleeping Through Its Wake Up Call.

The annual festival has become a caricature of an advertising industry avoiding important conversations. Can we afford to continue this trend?

I just returned from the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival for only the second time. While yes, it’s a global festival whose mission is to celebrate creativity, the reason why I had avoided it for so long is that I had always been an advertising business skeptic. The big holding companies were the machine, and sitting out Cannes was another way for me to rage against it.

After two years of attending, I’ve softened my stance somewhat. As always, there was great work on display, and hordes of brilliant creatives were rewarded by trips to the Palais to revel in their deserved success. It’s a great opportunity for some of the industry’s most important players to be in one place, and it can be a highly productive environment if you play your cards (and sleep) right. It’s a bit of orchestrated serendipity, and worth the trip, for me, at least.

But hey, I’m still jaded. After all, it is still money that makes the advertising world go around, even though great, creative work is often done in spite of that. There was a low hum of complaint; that creative budgets just aren’t what they used to be, having to be spread across too many agencies, that it’s harder to hire great talent these days, that brands have lost their commitment to a big idea, that the work that won was too closely and emptily tied into social causes.

Advertising is a business, after all, and the business of advertising was on full display at Cannes, for better and for worse. What I’ve learned in these past two years, is that Cannes is a caricature of the advertising business, and its hyper-exaggerated features are signals of needed, life-preserving change.

If you can’t beat ‘em, get on stage with ‘em.

Advertising, once one of the fuels of popular culture, has now lagged behind it. Some of the world’s biggest ad companies chose to just cut to the chase and bring you Sting, Al Gore, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Boy George, Marilyn Manson, Pharrell Williams, or Will.i.am, rather than say something important, provocative or controversial.

Platforms are also the new celebrity, with WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell getting on stage with Daily Mail and Snapchat to launch a new “agency” called “Truffle Pig”. Hey, with agencies having more and more trouble figuring out how to make content that people want to share and identify themselves by, it’s probably easier to just skip right to the places where it’s actually happening. Right?

While these kinds of things can be construed as admissions of inadequacy, they are also signs of the times. Platforms have displaced publishers as arbiters of popular culture, and agencies have struggled to keep up. The irony is that some of the biggest celebrities at Cannes were unrecognizable to ad executives — YouTube, Vine & Instagram stars with millions of subscribers and followers. But one thing seemed true to most at Cannes: these kinds of celebrity shortcuts are not likely to have their intended effects of establishing relevance. What’s really needed is a massive re-tooling to adjust to a new world media order — not a preservation of problems that the old world is a solution for.

A little in the middle, but they get much back.

There was a ton of talk in Cannes of the more than $26 billion in media dollars up for review by some of the world’s biggest advertisers. And while the media agencies weren’t sponsoring parties like publishers and platforms, they were out and entertaining in force, while the press was busy asking around about rebates. A lot. But while media agencies were defending their turf, their clients were busy announcing partnerships directly with publishers. So while the media agencies are busy playing musical chairs, it seems as though there are plenty of clients willing to cut out the middlemen in experimenting with content partnerships and distribution. That says a thing or two about the media agency value proposition.

It’s pronounced “CAN”tent.

Video dominated both conversations and awards. As Michael Wolff’s new book puts it, Television is the new Television, and even the internet heavyweights know that video is where the money is still at. Maybe it’s because we’re creatures of habit. Maybe it’s because video (including TV) is still scarce — or at least scarcer than display ads. Maybe it’s because video production costs are still what we know. Maybe it’s because video is what buyers are comfortable buying. Maybe it’s because modern internet publishers (eg. BuzzFeed, Vice) have vanity complexes that pull them towards TV whether it’s the right thing to do or not.

Whatever the reasons, video was still the format that dominated the creative conversations at Cannes, even with previously more “social” platforms like Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook. From animated .gifs to original series, video is still where much of brands’ strategies, and publisher and platform business models are at.

But agencies are giving up way too much to publishers right now. As publishers give up content (especially video) in exchange for getting onto a media plan, agencies (and brands) are overpaying for the true commodity — audience. Great content is what is truly scarce. By avoiding this issue, agencies are commoditizing themselves in the process.

Creativity vs. disposability.

It’s begun to seem to me that the brand “big idea” is no longer rewarded by award shows. Instead, advertisers rush to attach themselves to the cultural sentiment of the moment, regardless of how closely it ties back to the brand. It’s why they loosely attach themselves to brand-irrelevant content just because it‘s likely to get shared, or celebrate a Supreme Court decision even if their brand has absolutely no history of supporting marriage equality.

As Mark Borkowski wrote in The Drum,

“…it’s less about original ideas and more how a plethora of different brands can be articulated — to varying degrees of plausibility — through a limited number of current trends. There are ideas that are designed to make a headline or shareable screenshot but that disintegrate on contact with the oxygen of second thought.”

Brands need to rediscover their big idea as something that can be a platform for lots of other ideas to spring from, and award shows should reward them for how well they are packaged to move. Novelty wears off. Great stories are told forever.

If someone says they want to see ads, they’re lion.

In the weeks leading up to Cannes Lions, a lot of statistics and news reflected what we all suspect — people go out of their way to avoid advertising. Days before Cannes Lions, Apple announced that ad blocking will be a part of iOS 9 and Safari, and made it harder for developers to share ad data between apps. While we were angling to get ahead in media reviews, and celebrating creativity in ads, millions of people were taking further steps to avoid them, and thousands of bots were fraudulently viewing billions of ad impressions that machines bought. This should have been a bigger discussion in Cannes, for the sake of creativity everywhere.

“Social media”, non. “Platforms”, oui.

Social media gurus have left the building. Much of the talk at Cannes was around how to leverage the platforms that billions use every day to achieve scale; scale of delivery, and scale of results. The data that these platforms create and additional benefits they enable across all digital advertising is significant, and that’s the glow that much of the ad tech companies were basking in. And as these platforms IPO or receive more rounds of funding, the pressure to scale revenue is on.

Many of the winning ideas at Cannes used some combination of the platforms’ natural network effects and their paid advertising products. This is a sign of things to come.

For decades, the advertising industry has prided itself on its ability to help brands become aware of what consumers want. After a week in Cannes, it’s clear to me the ad industry needs to become a little more aware of itself. There is a chasm of distrust widening between advertisers, agencies, and publishers, as expectations go mismatched between all of them, and land-grabbing ambition fuels paranoia. Disruption is giving way to desperation, and it’s obvious.

This means the ad industry needs to explore new business models. New avenues for creativity. New promises. New standards. More of the same isn’t an option.

Hopefully, the ad industry can spend the time between now and next year’s Cannes Lions self-actualizing, or it will wind up as irrelevant as the ads consumers ignore.