Why Cannes Lions Matters: Creativity In The Programmatic Age

At this very moment, thousands upon thousands of excited ad execs, creative directors, digital specialists, content heads, copy writers, PR gurus and more are descending upon Cannes, France for advertising's most important event: Cannes Lions.

More than just an award show, the Cannes Lions bills itself as a "Festival of Creativity" - a celebration of the brilliant, inspired, and beautiful best of the advertising industry.

But just what "creativity" means is increasingly up for grabs in the era of automation, programatic buying, real time bidding and the relentlessly pursuit of efficiency from online advertising startups.

As a startup that works with both brands and creative agencies and those constantly innovating adtech startups, we at Partnered have a distinct perspective on this question.

From where we sit, not only is "creative" not going anywhere, but the shifts coming in the next 10 years will actually provoke a renaissance of creative thinking in advertising.

Here's why.

1. Creative isn't just pretty pictures

There is a mistaken assumption - especially for casual observers - that the creative side of advertising is simply making things look good. Making a nice print ad. Doing cool visuals for a website takeover. Making a great TV spot.

Of course it is radically more than that. Creative is about uncovering a brand's story and connecting it to what's happening in the world at large and in specific people's lives. It's about taking advantage of the limited space of all media - whether a few pixels on a website or 30 seconds of TV time - to stand out amongst the thousands of messages that bombard consumers daily.

It's about helping brands understand themselves better, and sharing that understanding.

In short, it's not a thing that technology and targeting alone can replace. It is a fundamentally human process.

For more on the Festival of Creativity, watch our Partnered Report Cannes Lions Preview

2. Strategy is inherently a creative discipline.

What is for sure is that the advertising strategy is getting more complicated. As if figuring out a compelling story wasn't hard enough, the options for channels and formats has expanded phenomenally since the Mad Men days.

In 1994, if you wanted to get to music fans, you just worked with MTV. Today, you have to think about music distribution channels like Spotify, iTunes and Pandora, figure out how to engage with influencers driving traffic to music blogs and creating custom playlists on Songza, see whether there are offline event integration opportunities with Songkick or WillCall. And oh yeah, make sure you go direct to the musicians themselves with Bandpage.

Of course it's not just music. The reality of the networked age is that audiences live everywhere and nowhere all at once.

The most successful brands have to create strategies whose messaging and goals arch across platforms, but integrate and take advantage of the unique community and norms of each.

When you start to grok this, the rise of better targeting and buying technology is a godsend; creative strategy has enough to think about without worrying about those pieces, as well.

3. The internet means more, not fewer, formats for creative.

Print ads & radio and TV spots.

That's the way it used to be. Then the internet came and it was banner ads with fixed formats. And boy did we try to hang on to those fixed formats for as long as we could.

But the audience wasn't interested, and we're now in the native era.

Native advertising isn't a format but a concept: ads should be modeled after the content that brings users to the channel where the ads will appear.

So, for Twitter, it's sponsored tweets. For Instagram, it's beautiful, stylistic photos that can hold their own next to the raddest most artsy shots. For Snapchat it's fleeting and captivating messages. For Pinterest it's compelling images and boards. For Buzzfeed it's lists of the top things that somehow, hopefully interest people and kinda sorta relate to your brand enough for them to keep reading and sharing. For YouTube, it's quirky first person videos.

And so on.

This fragmentation isn't going anywhere. In fact, it's just increasing as new channels rise all the time. For example: does your brand have anonymous apps like Whisper and Secret figured out yet?

Of course not. Because no one does.

Just as the second law of thermodynamics states that the universe proceeds towards entropy and disorder, the first law of online advertising is that audiences proceed towards fragmentation.

This means a bigger job for creative, the essence of whose job is going to be figuring out new formats and new relationships with audiences.

4. The future of advertising probably won't be "ads"

As if the above weren't enough, there is good reason to suspect that the future of advertising won't just be ads (native or not).

One reason is that technology breaks down the barrier between intent and purchase. For many networks like Instagram and Pinterest, the most desired "win" isn't big advertising contracts, it's being able to buy directly in stream. This is why Amazon allows users to add things to their cart with hashtags on Twitter and why startups like Soldsie, Chirpify and rewardStyle are experimenting with in-stream buying.

Another reason is one potential outcome of the native advertising experiment; which is that, rather than creating content in the style of platforms, brands will simply pay for the people already creating the content to do more of it.

Today, we call this either "branded entertainment" (when it's referring to big old platforms like film and TV) or "influencer marketing" (reserved for when we're working with a newer generation of creators on Vine, YouTube and the like). In the future, it may just BE what advertising is.

Finally, the next generation of the internet is going to weave networked connections into every device we own, not to mention our actual bodies. What does an advertisement on a heart rate monitor look like? How can brands work with fridges that automatically send information to Instacart for ordering?

These, fundamentally, are questions for creative.

5. It's about emotion and making lives better.

Ultimately, advertising is like all media: stories we tell about the world and the people in it. Some stories inspire us to good; some stories make us feel calm in ourselves.

The long game isn't just about clicks and views; it's about whether people chose to include brands in how they tell the story about themselves.

This choice involves seeing who they are and who they want to be in the way a brand exists in the world; from what it makes and sells to how it makes it to who it chooses to make it and how it chooses to treat the people who help and of course, how it markets and communicates all of that.

Creative is the essence of uncovering those stories and help them profilgate.

At this Cannes there are a number of young categories that recognize the changing times. Cyber (started in 1998), Branded Entertainment (2012), Mobile (2012), Innovation (2013).

But the essence and idea of the event as the Festival of Creativity is unchallenged. In fact, it's more important than ever.

NEXT: "How Startups Are Changing What It Means To Be An Advertising Agency"

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