Data & Technology will be Catalysts for a New Surge in Creativity

As it has for 62 years, the 2016 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity will honor the best work in creative advertising from around the globe, with seminars, forums, workshops, and other events giving delegates the chance to delve deeply into the trends and future directions of our industry.

Programmatic technologies and data have for some time now been transforming advertising, although the effect has almost exclusively been seen on the media side. We believe technology informed by data can have an equally transformative impact on the creative side of our business, shaping more compelling experiences for consumers, bringing media and creativity closer together for advertisers, and helping brands become better marketers.

Because the potential of technology and data to empower creatives is so great, Xaxis and our partners chose to explore this topic in Cannes on June 22 in a special session called The Programmatic 401: Creative Convergence. WPP Global CEO Sir Martin Sorrell will be among the dozen agency, marketing, and technology thought leaders on stage for this exploration.

With programmatic technology, we rely on machines to make decisions constantly in real time. In a transaction facilitated by technology, data is the reason for showing an ad and which ad to show. We have become better advertisers because data and technology put the right ad in front of the right person at the right time.

However, the question persists: are we using all of this data and technology to become better marketers?

One of the key opportunities that will enable us to ensure that we are, is to use the same data and technology we're using to target media to develop and instruct the creative. This is being done by forward-thinking technology companies like Flashtalking, Jivox, and plista. In our first panel on June 22, executives from these companies will discuss self-assembling ads and other dynamic creative with marketer, GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare's global digital marketing lead. Appnexus will deliver a keynote about what they are doing in the space of programmable marketing, in which creativity plays a key role.

Secondly, for technology and data to drive better marketing, brands and agencies must work differently with one another. Programmatic technology has implications on all parts of the marketing value chain and all of the various industry relationships, not just the media ones.

Today, partly because of programmatic technology, the agency-to-agency workflow that traditionally has been slow and linear must become much more iterative, much more real-time-enabled, and much more granular in terms of execution. This fundamentally changes the way all the agency pieces work together.

Some of the top minds in the agency world will come together in our second panel to discuss how to reinvent the ways agencies collaborate and cooperate so that they can make the most of the technology and data that is now available. You will hear the agency perspective from Lindsay Pattison, global CEO of Maxus; Mark Read, global CEO of Wunderman; David Patton, president and CEO of Grey, and John O'Keeffe, WPP's worldwide creative director. The brand viewpoint will come from Zaid Al-Qassab, chief brand and marketing officer of BT, one of the world's leading communications services companies.

Xaxis is a WPP company, and WPP is embracing this revolution. In our final session, Brian Gleason, global CEO of Xaxis, will ask Sir Martin Sorrell how WPP companies are enabling clients to leverage technology and data across the marketing value chain and throughout the creative process.

If you want to learn more about where technology and data are taking us next, join us in Cannes!

This article was first published on the Xaxis blog