Cannes Lions has often been characterised in conversation as a place of excess, with free-flowing rosé and little-to-no work actually happening. However, according to a panel of industry leaders interview by B&T during the course of the festival, it’s actually the most efficient place to get work done. Here’s what they said in their own words.
Snap – Ajit Mohan, vice president and managing director, APAC
“It’s three things. A substantial set of important stakeholders in marketing, creative and media spend the week here. It’s a good reminder to everyone of what we stand for. Traditionally, we’ve taken the space right next door at Malmaison. That’s currently undergoing renovation and we’ve done this massive scaffolding around it – saying “This is about the only time we’ll put up a facade anywhere.
“It’s a good place to signal the two things we’ve been talking about – being more vocal about what we stand for and our differentiation versus social media in a way that we have not done enough in the past. This is a great platform to do that.
“Second, the hard work that we’re doing to improve the platform and being able to truly deliver full funnels and fix the bottom funnel. There’s a lot of momentum there and I thought you saw that in the Q1 earnings. And it’s a good time to remind people that we’re renovating, like the building, our ad platform and we’re seeing progress every week, every month. And of course, it’s a great opportunity to meet people, people also come with a lens of spending time, not just sipping the occasional rosé, tuning into the conversation around marketing.”
LePub – Cyril Louis, global executive creative director, LePub APAC
“To celebrate the work. It’s clearly that. People come to show their work, to see other people’s work to get inspired.
“You go to work between six and eight and then to see who gets on the stage. It makes you want to do better next year and then year-on-year and then pushing for more. It’s a celebration of creativity.”
Meta – Tawana Murphy Burnett, head of top accounts and agencies, APAC
“I don’t know if I’m the best person to ask! It’s definitely not a question I’m prepared for!
“I would say that it’s certainly a beautiful backdrop and one thing I’ve learned during the pandemic – I don’t know the answer to your question is the answer – but I’m here for the inspiration. Irrespective of the programming, sometimes it can be hit or miss, or sometimes you have too many meetings that you could have done in Singapore or Sydney, that’s true, but then there are these little in-between moments where removing yourself from your day-to-day and I learned this during the pandemic that when you get to travel, that change of environment and bringing people from whatever they were wearing in their office to the linen shirts, it does something to your brain and it almost releases the idea and structure you had before and you’re more open to ideas.
“It’s almost a place where you expect that there are going to be interesting, innovative, quirky things that will be talked about or some stories that are going to come out of it that will inspire you or some data points that will be unexpected, or a case study that makes you think ‘Wow, that’s weird but ok.’ I wonder if it’s just the change in environment, a beautiful, beautiful backdrop a place that’s somewhat more central, I guess we could be in London but the weather may have screwed us up in London.
“That’s my take, change in environment. There’s maybe a little bit of legacy. I’m sure there’s a history book somewhere that can answer the question of how they picked the south of France but I get excited, genuinely. This is the twelfth year that Meta has been here and for us it is an opportunity for us to be a part of this community, this industry and bring our contribution to it and learn from other people.”
Google – Alex Chen, creative director, Creative Lab; Vidhya Srinivasan, VP/GM, advertising
“For the festival?” said Chen.
“I’m excited to meet folks here. I get to meet people doing interesting creative work, congregate with other fellow creative directors from different companies, have pretty stimulating conversations at the Google beach, with exciting ideas about new projects. For me personally, that’s my favourite part of coming out here.
“People come to Google asking what the latest technology is and they often have ideas that they’re cooking up and I get to play a little bit of a matchmaker and be like ‘Oh, you should try this API and this for this’ so that’s my favourite part of coming out here,” he added.
“For me similarity, it’s exciting and I get to meet an extraordinary set of people. We wanted to get a lot of feedback in an aggregated format because I get to meet so many different agencies and other folks all in one spot. I also think it helps that people are much more relaxed and informal, and the feedback is very free-flowing, I enjoy that,” said Srinivasan.
“It’s also right before our strategy sessions when we go back home, so it’s a good time for me to get grounded in how segments of my customer base is thinking.”
Pinterest – Bill Watkins, chief revenue officer
“We can go anywhere with this question!
“I’ll tell you why I love this place, particularly. It’s my favourite event of the year. This event is for us. End-to-end ecosystem of ads, celebrating creativity – I had breakfast this morning and someone I was sitting with won a Cannes Lion that they’ll be shipping home to their house – but it is celebrating the work that happens within the ecosystem end-to-end. I love that and that’s why I love this event more than any other.
“I’ve been coming here for 15 years. This is the biggest Cannes that I’ve ever seen. The difference for Cannes this year for us is that it’s an incredibly efficient execution. I brought our entire executive team here because you can’t explain what Cannes is. You’ve got to see it. And when we execute something like this, it’s a line item expense for us and to be able to show that we’re up from 5,000 people coming through our experience to over 10,000 people coming through our experience – you said before that this is the only beach that people were talking about on the Croisette – the fact that we’ll have hundreds, thousands of meetings with clients in settings like this over four days, it’s an incredibly efficient opportunity for us to meet with partners. That’s one thing.
“The second thing is I have seen more actionable takeaways and deal generation happening this year than I have in others. I think that speaks to the industry’s commitment to Cannes because at the end of the day, it’s celebrating what we do and our ecosystem. And it’s a nice place, too.”
Yahoo – Tony Gemma, vice president, Yahoo Creative; Adam Roodman, SVP, product strategy and management, Yahoo DSP
“You could say this for any of the large, marquee, tentpole marketing events that go around the year. Our industry is incredibly dependent on the interoperability between different stakeholders and different parts of the supply chain, whether you’re a media provider, creator or marketer, none of it can be done in a vacuum. So these events, and it doesn’t hurt that it’s a great location, but any event that attracts multiple stakeholders, for me it’s super-efficient to have wide-ranging conversations and drive partnerships further and customer growth,” said Roodman.
“In short, it is incredibly efficient, the number of partner conversations I can have in three days here versus the normal course of the day as a business for all of our calendars back home.”
“For me, it’s one of the only major creative festivals that we get to participate in so it’s just really fun to be talking with creators and clients about what we’re doing in this space and bridging creative and media. That’s somewhat a reflection of this festival, in media and creative coming together. For us, it’s a great place to do that,” said Gemma.
