Let's move this forward

There's been lots of talk this week this week about how there was a seismic shift at Cannes this year.  A lot of people are pointing to the fact that it was a piece of film for the internet made by a digital agency that won the film Grand Prix, Obama's web driven campaign won the much coveted Titanium Grand Prix (as well as the integrated prize) and a PR campaign for Tourism Queensland won three Grand Prix (the first campaign ever to achieve this).  It made Ad Age declare that the 'ad age is over'.

Yet when you look at the industry chatter this hasn't been the real conversation. There's been much navel gazing by digital agencies at their poor haul of cyber lions - only 12 of 83 Cyber Lions came from pure digital agencies and the Interactive Agency of the Year was an ad agency not a specialist.  A few seem to be taking some solace in the fact that Cannes is an 'advertising' award when digital can be so much more.

What really scares me about this is we're getting caught in the same debate again about labels and types of output, rather than thinking about how we can create real innovation that solves business problems which is what commercial creativity should be about. Perhaps the closest thing to this from an advertising or digital agency was AKQA's work for Fiat that won an interactive Grand Prix.  That, to me, is the shocking truth of Cannes this year.

It's time we stopped obsessing about labels, accept that advertising has a broader definition than messaging and make stuff that excites people and solves business problems in the most effective way possible.  Sometimes this will be about the craft of communication.  Other times it might be about baking marketing into a product or service.  More often than not I think, it will be both.

One place to start is to look at our structure.  There's been precious little innovation in how agencies are structured or the type of talent they attract which is a recipe for replication rather than progress.  Thankfully, some of the more progressive agencies are trying some new ways of working through the creations of labs focused on marketing R&D.  BBH has had the wonderful BBH Labs for a short period of time, and now W&K London has launched Platform a hothouse for new ideas and a natural progression from WKSide.  Let's all try some new things to move the industry forward.  Labels don't matter but the work does.  And if we embrace the risk of failure and experimentation we so often preach to our clients, then perhaps we'll be seeing some more innovation and fresh problem solving at Cannes next year.

Comments

[paul isakson]

Completely agree, Gareth. Great ideas are great ideas, period. Where, how and who executes them is a waste of a good debate. Who cares. It either solved a problem and/or grew the business or it didn't.

As for the agency structures, well, I agree with you here too, but there's got to be more change on the client side of the world to drive bigger change in agencies. So long as clients keep cutting budgets, pinching margins, and keeping agencies busy with the everyday workloads they continue to push out, agencies are going to have a hard time putting top billable minds against work that doesn't pay in the short term and has no guarantees of paying in the long term. I wish I could say differently, but I just don't see many agencies being brave enough to make it happen.

[Gareth]

Isn't billable hours perhaps the real problem issue? Allied with a lack of creativity in budget deployment? There's that old adage 'a principle isn't a principle until it costs you money' (I believe originated by Nigel Bogle). Perhaps we need some new principles and start, as we tell our clients, with objectives and strategy first, not tactics, when working out how we engage with a client.

[greg christman]

chatter is cheap...funny part is that a biz trip 2 cannes is not. Like you, I look 4ward 2 the day when the focus isn't talking about how the biz is changing but actually producing work that creates change in the way we treat & collaborate w/ our audience.

Like Paul mentioned I think clients play a huge role in this reality. To me the future looks bright w/ potential from my desk 2 all the way 2 the south of france. thx 4 the post.

gc

[DUSTIN]

I don't know, I think nothing has changed. Client side? Come on, the goal is and always will be the same: sell the m-f'in product, make that money.

Thing is, to me, it's simple, people forgot how to be salesmen. I think the world today is full of douches, sorry, people don't do the work. They refuse to the the work. It's a major bummer. But Cannes. Come on. That shit is a mess. S.O.F. is pointless. A fiasco. The domain of Russian mobsters, hacks, d-bags, fools, sick-o-fants, 3rd wives and wigger phychos. Wanna find the truth? Check out Bonnier from Sweden. Or - truth be told the soccer. Brazil stomping the USA. That's the truth; that's the key. Fuck Cannes. Win the soccer. Seriously. Look at Iran. Look at what those boys did with the arm bands, look at the secret police at half time. That's the shit.

Woolmington. Where is Uganda with the Soccer? Rwanda can hang, where is Uganda? Did they qualify?

[Lachlan]

spot on. The best people I've ever worked with ...(I say people not agencies, as its all about the people's openess and skills not the building they're in, not the label that building has above the door ;+))... have always started with the business and the issues at hand with no preconception of the form that the answer might take... new product, service changes, interactive, TV, book, PR, etc... or all and more.

And as Jeremy Bullmore is always keen to point out, its what the best agencies (or people) of many ages have tended to do... in the old days especially they didn't think "advertising" meant just TV, print and radio... something a lot of the industry forgot somewhere around the 80's and 90's.

[Dion]

bravo gareth. labels are walls. and the debating about what label fits where is a waste of time.
also agree with paul, but more like this: the boxes that are hardest to break are the ones in the client budget, the line items. that's where the definitions can become really claustrophobic.

[avin]

Solid points from all. And Gareth, even though you're (almost) not my boss anymore, I still agree with you. Funny enough :-)

Especially the point about billable hours, calls for restructuring on both client and agency side. And someone on either side willing to take the risk to push for it.

[Darren Herman]

No labels. It's about total communications. Media channel neutral. Some ideas take advantage of a few channels, others take advantage of many.

While in a perfect world, this is optimal but none of us, whether in a "labs" group or a major silo, lives in a perfect world. There many factors that contribute to how we got to where we are and it's going to take some time to change.

[vincent]

Well put... THE WORK COMES FIRST

[jerome]

Hi Gareth,

As one of the people who pointed the finger, I have now written 10 points to help . Hope I can be redeemed.