Cannes has many detractors, but if it didn’t exist I feel someone would have to invent it.
Only the most reductive of rationalists would make the case that persuasion did not involve some form of imagination or creativity.
This week I was back for the first time since Covid.
For old timers like me, walking around the Palais, croissette and bars and restaurants is like some kind of LinkedIn Live.
The content to be fair is always hit and miss. Hearing Elon talk about interplanetary travel and Starlink was great, but then he is such a gauche beginner on media and advertising.
Which I guess goes to show, that if one of the greater industrial minds we have produced lately can be so naive on our topic area, then perhaps you can forgive lesser mortals.
And amongst those lesser mortals, I am afraid, remain many in the PR industry who still pontificate about Cannes without having ever read and perhaps even heard of Byron Sharp, Mark Ritson or Les Binet and to whom the question “what is a brand” is an absolute stumper. By the way, you can argue with all these experts but you need to have read them before you pontificate on brands and creativity.
However, the great news is that this year proved that some PR people and some PR agencies have made huge progress.
My happiest hours at sunny Cannes are always those in the dingy basement of the Palais reviewing the video case studies of the best work.
What was absolutely clear was that the number of PR agencies leading award winning work (rather than just publicising it) has massively increased.
Not surprisingly, the bigger networks with their ability to hire planners and proper creatives (rather than publicists) are over-represented.
Golin’s Specsaver Gold Lion winner takes that brand’s humorous appeal and freshens it with an ‘earned centric’ properly funny idea. Part of its effectiveness was that they didn’t try to jam a cause or charity appeal into it. Helping an optician sell more glasses (or in this case hearing aids) is very OK. You don’t have to save the world in doing so.
But….it was, at heart, a PR campaign and didn’t rely on a media buy. There were purpose campaigns, like Edelman’s Dove work, but there were at least as many campaigns like Ogilvy’s PR’s CeraVae and Edelman’s Lifetime Contract for Hellmann’s that were just brilliantly silly. PR Week’s Danny Rogers has made the case that humour is back even for PR firms too.
Edelman, Ogilvy and Golin seemed to lead the charge. Watching their case studies (and I watched over 40) I was struck by how much the quality of thinking and planning has improved since last time I was here. Some of it made my planner’s heart leap a little bit!
And some of it . . . whisper it quietly . . . was not ‘purpose’ work.
I have already posted about my admiration of the Dove work over the years, but the PR industry’s obsession with purpose and trust were, in my mind, their biggest brake on winning more and better brand work (ie a share of a pie that is up to 20 times bigger than the one we have traditionally dined on).
And whilst I am not suggesting that the PR industry should abandon purpose purely for humour, I am saying that purpose is JUST ONE WAY of differentiating a brand and that for many brands it is too big a stretch and for many sectors so many brands have jumped on the purpose band wagon it is becoming hard to differentiate (hint, differentiation is sort of important for a healthy brand).
Try provenance, attitude or utility before reaching for purpose.
For many years at Cannes the PR industry was like a noisy one string guitar. Agencies were turning up with polls of a few thousand consumers and making really strong claims for the primacy of purpose and trust, ignoring the fact that brand theory included massive databases and effectiveness case work, supported by academics and institutions that demonstrated, if not the opposite, that at least other options were also available.
Purpose will always be a strong way to differentiate a brand and PR agencies have a distinct advantage where that is the right approach. Ad agencies still tend to badge and greenwash and can’t span to organisational change or public outreach or political change.
So though this may sound like a moan about the PR industry’s ability to lead on brand creative work, I have never felt more positive about it.
Bah humbug YAY!
sixtysecondview.blog 