Cannes Lions: A Marketing Technologist's Experience

This was the first year I attended Cannes Lions, the Festival of Creativity a few weeks ago. Much has already been spoken about the focus on diversity and inclusion in the post event coverage so I won’t cover that here. I will, however, take the opportunity to congratulate the team at State Street Global Advisors, an asset management company, and their agency McCann for shining the spotlight on creativity in B2B marketing by winning 18 awards for “Fearless Girl”, making it one of the most recognized campaigns in the history of Cannes Lions. For a B2B marketer who has spent most of her career regarding creativity as a luxury, it was really inspiring to see a fellow B2B brand understand and leverage the importance of brand building through unique content which earned, not just awards, but millions in earned media based on all the coverage the statue got. Go B2B, Go Fearless Girl!

The most remarkable thing about Cannes Lions for me was the peaceful co-existence of technology and creativity. IBM UX, Oracle, Microsoft, Linkedin, YouTube, Facebook, Alibaba, Snapchat, Pandora, Pinterest, Twitter were amongst the biggest sponsors of the Festival, dominating the aerial view of the Croisette. This is a far cry from the early days of the festival when the big agencies set up cabanas on the beach.

Why was Technology at the Festival of Creativity?

It was not just peaceful co-existence. It was a celebration of technology and creativity coming together. If you look at some of the Cannes Grand Prix winners, you will see a very natural integration of technology and creativity to deliver the brand’s message effectively.

For example, the Cyber Grand Prix winner, Bank of Aland – Baltic Sea Project has used all client tools and data to figure out the real cost of consumption i.e. the environmental impact of their customer’s credit card purchases so they can engage the bank’s clients as agents of change not just customers.

Without data and technology Bank of Aland would not have been able to build the index but it was creativity that connected this back to the brand purpose and values. In May 2012, I first spoke about the emergence of the Chief Marketing Technologist in this and subsequent blogposts on the back of a new CxO Study that came out that year. It’s been over 5 years and it’s good to see more and more CMOs look at technology as a key investment area.

According to IDC’s APeJ C Suite Barometer, 91% of CMOs leverage IT for marketing, with 25% asking their agencies to integrate the solutions into their campaigns and 34% sourcing directly from IT vendors. 

What's the next frontier for Chief Marketing Technologists?

Here is an interesting perspective I found on Scott Brinker's blog. It shows how sophisticated technology tools for marketing and customer engagement, also known as “martech” stacks have become under the leadership of marketing technologists. This shopping mall metaphor, coined by Tony Bryne of Real Story Group, shows some “anchor tenants” like marketing automation, web content management (WCM) and analytics and some “niche or boutique” stores like content marketing and account based marketing (ABM). 

There is an interesting “niche store” in the Martech Mall which is starting to get more attention amongst B2B marketers in particular, which is Lean and Agile. It is located bang in the middle of the martech mall. Some of you must be wondering why it’s there. Agile is well understood and mainstream in software development as a way to accelerate time to market of products. Here is a great definition from McKinsey. (Sourced from an excellent and comprehensive article: Agile Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide. Edelman, Heller, Spittaels, Nov 2016). 

“Agile, in the marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results and rapidly iterating. At scale, a high functioning agile marketing organization can run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously and multiple ideas every week.”

How can Agile marketing help Content Marketers?

I work with a lot of marketing teams in India who are trying to set up always on content marketing programs but struggle with the volume and variety of content needed to support the buyer journey of the target audience. Linkedin Marketing Solutions best practices suggest that companies always run 4-5 pieces of content at a time to each audience and rotate 1 to 2 new pieces of content every week. That can be quite overwhelming for some marketing leaders but here is where their marketing technologists can help.

Marketing technologists not only have the mandate to identify and deploy the martech platforms to enable their organizations but also introduce processes and best practices such as agile marketing. These can be very useful in helping content marketers collaborate with their agencies and other parts of their business like legal and IT to reduce the complexity and burden of content creation and drive more ROI from their content marketing efforts.

Scrum Master: a must have skill for marketing leaders

Some B2B organizations like Cisco are already adopting agile marketing techniques. Katrina Neal, the former global content lead for Cisco (she now works for Linkedin) recently shared how she got certified as a Scrum master and aligned her whole organization like a newsroom to accelerate content marketing at Cisco complete with the following roles: customer experience manager, content managing editor, subject matter expert and content marcom manager, supported by an editorial board. She ran a series of 1-4 week sprints to deliver the content to support the editorial calendar. Here is the Agile Scrum Framework she shared at the B2B Content Marketing Class at CMS Asia in May 2017:

As I think back objectively to content marketing programs I have spearheaded in my former role, there were several inefficiencies in how we executed these programs and I can see how Agile methods could have helped. Applying some Agile techniques could have not only accelerated time to market (through the daily Scrum meetings) but also brought the right people to the table early to set up the sprint. This includes people from finance and local sales leaders to ensure we had the right sales capacity to follow up with the leads generated from the content marketing campaigns (which we didn't). While I was in the role, I tried to solve the issues through escalations, marketing reviews, lead management hacks while pushing for more tools, resources and analytics. Effective marketing cannot only rely on the “anchor tenant” technologies.

We need new skills like Scrum to make our marketing programs successful and sustainable well after we move on to our next play.

After all, content marketing is a mix of science and art and we need to make sure people have the opportunity to be creative and the sprints allow for that under the watchful eye of the Scrum Master.

At the next Content Marketing Masterclass hosted by the Content Marketing Council in India, we will be covering the role of agile marketing in helping organizations “Get Ready” for content marketing. If you have experience using agile marketing in your organization to improve your marketing productivity, I would love to learn from you! 

A final note: I confess that I had several preconceived notions about Cannes Lions and images of sunglasses and chino clad "Mad Men" yatch-hopping with their awards in hand. I was concerned that I would feel out of place as a technologist. It was really encouraging to see how the creative community from the agency ecosystem has embraced technology instead of feeling threatened by it, as has been the case in some other industries. Perhaps the media, creative and marketing communities are leading the way in this regard. Cheers to that!

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