The mood at this year’s Cannes Lions show among agency folks was mixed, to say the least. Campaign’s editor-in-chief Gideon Spanier wrote that “change and fear” dominated this year’s show.
Some adlanders were wringing their hands about artificial intelligence (AI) and wondering where it left them and the industry as a whole. Others saw it as the silver bullet to solve the industry’s problems and create work that reaches everyone with unprecedented levels of personalisation and, ergo, effectiveness.
But amongst the bluster, there were more considered, thoughtful responses to the technology. Not least at Uber Advertising’s villa tucked away behind the Croisette. There, a panel of creatives and marketers from Australia and New Zealand discussed how brands can strike truth and relevance in a world that feels increasingly fractured but might also be afflicted with an increasingly overbearing global culture.
“CMOs are wondering where they’re going to put their human intelligence, what needs to need scale and what are they going to use AI for,” said Uber’s APAC, EMEA and Latin American marketing chief Lucinda Barlow.
“I have a remit across 60 markets and when I look at what works and what doesn’t work, it’s the local. It’s what resonates locally, whether that’s a deep local insight, local humour or a cultural insight, that’s what moves people and that’s what drives behaviour change. I think it’s really important to spend time truly understanding local or national heritage. I fundamentally believe that great ideas can come from anywhere and when they work, you’re onto a winner that’s great but codify it, figure out what it is that is universal, what can be scaled and then embrace that scaling process.”
“The problem with a lot of the AI stuff is that we’re making mediocre work more efficient and to reach more people, it’s the worst possible thing we can do,” concurred Andy Fergusson, chief creative officer of Leo Australia.
“Whereas I think an idea like ‘Share A Coke’ or ‘Dumb Ways To Die’ which are really media agnostic with a really strong human idea, if you get that right, then the AI tools and personalisation can be a really useful tool for taking the work further, with cultural nuance. But you have to get the idea right at the heart. That’s what’s being left out of the conversation.”
‘Dumb Ways to Die’ was created by McCann Melbourne for the city’s transport department in 2013. The campaign remains the single most-awarded piece of work at Cannes Lions, notching five Grands Prix, 18 Gold Lions, three Silver Lions, and two Bronze Lions.
Uber is one of the exemplars of taking local work globally. Its longstanding ‘Tonight I’ll Be Eating’ brand platform for Uber Eats was created by the team at Special in Australia before going global, as was its replacement ‘Get Almost, Almost Anything’.
“It was this small agency and team in Australia eight years ago that, particularly with Uber Eats, was brought to market. It really had nothing to lose. The only way in an undifferentiated, highly competitive category was to do something very brave, ambitious and go all-in,” she said.
The trick to the campaign’s success in Barlow’s mind was that it was not created, perhaps counterintuitively from the outside, with a global market in mind.
“Brands often fall into a trap where they think ‘OK, we need to be global’. Yet if you do that, you’re going to compromise and so if you can make work exceptionally well in one country and then throw it out there and figure out why it worked and the essence of the idea and localise it from there. The idea has to be so simple that it can be the foundation of something that can last for many years.”
It’s something that Fergusson knows better than most. He’s had work awarded all over the world, including an Innovation Grand Prix at Cannes.
“We don’t set out to create work that has to travel. But great ideas do travel because they tap into human insights because they’re trying to solve human needs. If you do that successfully, the ideas will naturally resonate all over the world. I don’t that we’re that different, fundamentally. If you look at some of the biggest Australian work, with ‘Dumb Ways To Die’ as a case in point, it’s an idea that could be replicated anywhere for any similar problem,” he said.
Fergusson believes Leo’s own work, notably the ‘One House to Save Many’ for longstanding client Suncorp, was similarly universally resonant despite seeming to tackle problems peculiar to Australia.
“[Climate change] is a universal problem and I think that’s one of the reasons it resonated because it was in the zeitgeist everywhere. Maybe Australia’s at the forefront of it in terms of the destruction and so we’re very mindful of it. As Suncorp’s an insurance company, we really looked at the strategy behind it and thought you can’t keep doing the same thing again and again and expect different results. So instead of focusing on the recovery, let’s focus on the resilience. It seemed very simple but the insurance industry wasn’t doing it. We’ve seen a lot of other companies follow suit,” Fergusson said.
That said, when it comes to building an agency or a marketing organisation, it’s important to have global perspectives—tunnel vision might be the ultimate impediment to creativity. When creating its in-house creative agency Aussie tech darling Canva decided on a decidedly global outlook, though centralised in Australia as Cat van der Werff, the platform’s Kiwi executive creative director said.
“It was the almost the opposite with building Canva while we made the very intentional decision to start in Australia and grow the team in Australia and centralise everything there,” she said.
“Our mission is to empower the world to design and so we had to get to the world as quickly as possible. Within the first two years we had the goal to be in 100 languages. But being truly local is wherever you are is really important. Canva should feel like home wherever you are in the world… We’ve taken that approach with advertising too, starting in the US but now in Japan and Indonesia. I actually find the work that we’re doing in all of the markets is starting to inspire the global work.”
Getting to this point, however, requires Australians and New Zealanders to go out into the big wide world. Not that it’s ever really proven a problem as all the panellists, though not least Michael Levine, head of Uber Advertising ANZ, have evidenced.
“The tyranny of distance means that there’s a natural curiosity with Australia and New Zealand—lots of scary things can kill you, though the beaches are great. But our brand is pretty well-liked,” he said.
“But we’re fortunate that because of the size of the market, we tend to be generalists rather than specialists. We don’t have vast teams dedicated to a single tactic or channel. We need to be broad in our scope and our knowledge base and that gives us a more rounded perspective. Characteristically, we’re competitive by nature. Aussies tend to go quite well in the Olympics and Hollywood. We’re collaborative and we have a good cultural sense for ways of working.”
In a world that might be starting to feel the same (and perhaps will become increasingly similar), don’t be afraid to be an Aussie. Or even a Kiwi, if you must.
