David 'Shingy' Shing & Bonin Bough on Cannes Lions 2019

It has become a long-standing Cannes Lions tradition for me to sit down with my good friend, and Verizon Media's digital prophet, David ‘Shingy’ Shing. We took a few moments (as music artist Celeste was doing her sound-check) to discuss what we thought were the major themes this year. From the fallacies around direct-to-consumer brands, rainbow washing, the lack of creativity in the Cannes Lions activations themselves, and why the industry still struggles to celebrate the advertising that entertains us.

Check out the video or read an edited transcript of our chat below:

Bonin Bough: I have some thoughts about Cannes Lions 2019, and I’ve been dying to ask you about this year. How do you feel coming here?

David ‘Shingy’ Shing: I think for the last couple of years I have really been thinking about - as a data point of one - how to be less distracted and more engaged.

BB: Here [at Cannes]?

DS: No, before coming here - just generally. I have this thing: offline is the new online. What's amazing for me is that the work that is articulated here and talked about here could have been done at any time and could have also been done in any format! 

"...offline is the new online."

If you take the Colin [Kaepernick] piece for Nike, as great as that work is, what are you celebrating: is it the idea, is it the billboard, the spot, the tweet? The ideas are not celebrated here, it’s all about execution. Execution then is about craft. So I’m always intrigued by what ‘craft’ is about, because craft is how you distinctly create something that feels like it hasn't been seen before.

If you've got a great idea and it's executed poorly, or [worse] is executed like everyone else executes, then you end up with something that looks homogenized. I think about that when the videos that tug at the heartstrings all feel like they could have come out of Unilever, PMG, or Beer Brands and I'm really looking for craft to be uniquely different, and executed differently that way.

I’ve also been thinking that the things that resonate for me aren't happening on screens.

BB: Are they not happening on screens? Or, are you just not looking at screens?

DS: They're happening on screens, but they don't start with the screen as the core of it. One that starts with the screen at the core of it is ‘Billion Swerved’ by Burger King. I think that was an interesting stunt - to try and navigate people to a Burger King if you're in close proximity to a McDonald's. That's obviously screen-based, but the idea is that you are activating whilst someone is physically moving, which I actually thought was quite good. It's not necessarily focused on the screen, but the screen needs to be part of the tool.

When I say ‘offline’ a good example is IKEA. Everyone thinks IKEA's furniture all looks the same so they placed IKEA furniture in a museum and challenged people to identify the IKEA piece.

BB: Genius!

DS: Yes! It's a genius idea, but at the center of it isn't, “How do we do something on mass? How do we make sure it sort of crashes the Internet? How does it have a celebrity at the heart of it? How does it utilize an influencer?” They went back to saying, “What's a great idea that we could execute that makes it feel like people are experiencing the brand?” That for me, I'm intrigued by.

BB: I didn't know what to expect coming here. We’re producing a lot of content on the [OpenMic Stage] so my focus was on how can we get the conversation right. But what struck me is that I don’t feel like there is creativity amongst us. That to me is a miss.

I also feel like the youthful vibe of creativity feels a little gone. And you said something earlier today which was, “diversity is being talked about all up and down the beach.” It's being talked about, but what are we doing about it? I guess that conversation is beginning to move the world forward, but is it?

DS: It's not. Hand on heart it isn't. The truth is that [conversation] is the middle bit - that's the baseline. It has to be talked about, but when it’s actioned it’s happening on the sides. We celebrate creativity here, but it's very uncreative.

BB: An uncreative celebration of creativity!

DS: We know that the most abused word in our industry is ‘disruption’, but this industry does not want to be disrupted. So how's it been disrupted? By others who are the makers of this world - the creators who have said, "Hey, that's a platform that I think I can use to express differently. And that hasn’t happened before, but now I’ve got a platform [for my] voice."

Where the traditional model is you make something, you place it somewhere, somebody is aware of it and they buy it. But instead of making stuff for people to buy, we've still in the old world of making people buy stuff. So there is a responsibility for advertising to do the latter, but the truth is if brands are really smart they have to reflect culture by taking a look at their products.

And so the big buzzwords here and in our industry, are direct-to-consumer. But that’s not new! Direct-to-consumer is been around for quite some time! What's now happening is that brands are able to build themselves in the ether, they're able to build themselves…

BB: …without a retailer. But you’re right it’s not new. But what’s even crazier is that you can’t show me a DTC brand, which can get really big without retail - it's a rare occurrence. Now you're seeing them use other channels – different channels than Facebook and Instagram - saying, "Oh here is what it's like to build a brand."

"...you can’t show me a DTC brand, which can get really big without retail"

[DTC] brands have to be built with a different thought and in a different way. At the end of the day I feel like what we are actually solving for is the data relationship between me [as a brand] and the consumer. But I believe that we can solve for that in other ways. It doesn’t have to me shipping the product to you.

There’s no creativity around thinking about the decoupling of [these two things]. I said this when I was leaving [Mondelez International] I said, "Let's just put a phone number on the pack of every single Oreo and whoever texts, just give it to them free!” $4.50 for an Oreo customer’s phone number!

We have a baby food business, Tiny Organics, which is text-to-buy and text-to-talk. That text-to-talk component will live in retail. It will provide the same type of data analysis that any DTC business has, but it doesn't confine our thinking to a tiny sliver of distribution!

DS: Why I love the principles of that is it's not just saying, “let's do this on mass and hope to God we get a small percentage of that respond.” That intimacy that happens with text means that you are offering a valuable service that I'm actually going to respond to quickly! It’s an intimacy that you can't have when it's blasted up on outdoor advertising, which apparently is alive and well here [at Cannes Lions].

BB: And it's not even good! That's what struck me the most when we were walking down La Croisette were the billboards of our own industry that were talking to our industry! And I was like, “the creativity is not even good.” The last really creative thing I saw here was the SNAPS Ferris wheel, and it was stunt-y, but at least it took, it put something out there. There's nobody's even putting things in our face that makes us go, “Oh, that’s clever!”

DS: Part of that is that the industry is at a point where you've got five - six things that a brand has to think about:

1) They have to worry about a media agency saying, "Hey man, we don't actually own any assets, but we're going to take the dollars, and we're going to randomize it like a portfolio."

2) You've got to creative agency who says, "We can build you great creative, but we don't own any scale. So let's figure that out."

3) Then you have the technologist, which is a lot of what we're seeing here, saying, "Forget about intimate marketing. It's all about performance and we're going to do it with tech."

4) And then you have the consultants who come along and say, "Hey, we've been hanging out with your CEO and guess what? We made your business efficient. I'm going to make your marketing efficient too.” You've got these massive consultancies coming through and they've been transforming businesses and then say that marketing should be part of it.

5) And then publishers come and say, "You suck at conversation. Let me teach you to be editorial."

6) And then the brand sits there and says, "Oh my God! You guys are all confusing me! So here's what, I'm going to do: I’m going to build my own creative shop."

It's a really interesting time for it all to change, but that machination isn't reflected here.

BB: I agree! The conversation that’s happening around internal versus external is more about money at its core. It's not about is there a strife, is there an issue inside of the industry today that needs to be addressed?

Somebody here talked to me about Rainbow Washing, and they went through and they showed some examples of it. I don't necessarily know if I would consider all of them Rainbow Washing, but some of them were just poor usage and not really standing. And then he showed me a brand in the UK called Fairy - it's a detergent brand.

Their logo is Fairy with a circle around it. Their most recent is they changed their packaging and on the top of their packaging now it says, "Brought to you by Fairy," the circle is now rainbow, and they literally changed the name of the brand to FAIR! I thought that's genius! If you're going to say it, do it, live it – encapsulating the whole pieces together!

DS: That's bold, man!

BB: Yeah, it's bold!

BB: We haven't seen a move like that, and it’s not really being talked about here. But, you're going to change your entire brand name to fit? It was so slick!

DS: And brought to you by Fairy, so it nods back to its heritage? I think that's pretty genius!

BB: You feel like a lot of those things are being missed. Where you’re like, “Wow!”

DS: And they're being missed because of risk. The safe part of it is, ‘how do you actually treat your brand like a portfolio’? But if you actually want to be part of a culture of change or if you don’t want to be part of it - then just be honest about it! If you want to be part of it, you're going to have to get the core of your brand have to change.

So many people are saying, "[Your brand] has got to believe in something. You’ve got to stand for something." Do you? If you don't stand for something, then don't try.

BB: That was the other thing I said to someone, "What happened to just really good quality entertainment?" People still want to be entertained! I agree that there's an opportunity if you firmly believe in something, but maybe just create [advertising] that's fun!

DS: My last point on Cannes this year is this: all of the work that moves you emotionally is very depressing and it's incredibly sad. It probably needs to be that way for it to be bold, because bland works just doesn't cut through - particularly with all of the noise that we live in.

I would love to see fun celebrated again in a new way that doesn't feel like it just has to tear you emotionally. Because that's just a principle of where human values are met. Make somebody cry, or make somebody laugh their guts out! And I'm not seeing the laughter, but I am seeing the sadness.

At least one part has been well celebrated [at Cannes Lions] – it is gut wrenchingly sad. But this [talking with you] is got wrenchingly fun for me.

BB: What did you think of Wyclef [who just performed on the OpenMic Stage]?

DS: Wyclef is incredible. I mean to be a multidimensional artist, not just in the way that he thinks about music, but also the way he thinks about how society should relate to it. He's multi-dimensions on multiple dimensions, not just all the different genres of music, but also the way those stories get told.

He won't just stay in music, he'll be doing cartoon books, and animated series, and all sorts of things to talk about how that value of that connection is, and music just happens to be the heart of it. But to experience his freestyle here [at Cannes Lions] in a sort of an unscripted way this afternoon has been a highlight of Cannes for me!

BB: It's interesting because when you, when you spend time talking to him, you begin to understand that he loves music, but you begin to realize that what we have missed is that weaving between genres is what creates greatness! There are a lot of artists on this beach and their songs will live in my heart forever. But [Wyclef’s] songs are going to live in the world forever. For example, Dear Mr President - just not even as a song or as a genre, but just as an anthem!

When we did his one-on-one [discussion panel] the one thing I took away was that I wish instead of us trying to fight media and segment what lane we need to be in, greatness is created when there is none of those lanes - greatness is created when those lanes are understood, but not observed!

DS: You know, in the core of your heart though, that sticking in your lane is not survival. It's just not anymore. You have to have a much broader 360 degree radius on how you're servicing the love, commitment and need of humans on planet Earth. And that's really our job [as advertisers]. We just have the privilege of communicating it through mass communication, and it's moving, and it's changing. And that's what's exciting. I'd like to see that celebrated more, maybe next year…

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