“Day Duex Is Upon Us”

B&T’s resident on-the-ground Cannes scribe, IAG’s marketing guru Mark Pearson, is back with his daily Cannes diary. This time looking at all the action – from a marketing perspective – from day two at Cannes…

My French is still awful, but I am getting into the swing of the festival. Now I just need to try and keep up with my agenda.

I’m full of pastry, hydrated with coffee and ready to roll into the palais for another jam-packed day with some top-class speakers. There is now momentum amongst the punters around the palais that you can see and feel.

Speaking to everyone from consultants to CMO’s yesterday – you start to really understand why people keep coming back. It not only feeds their creative soul but also motivates them to get back and start doing great work. It’s hard not feel inspired in these conditions.

First up today, Dentsu Aegis, our academy sponsor, are hosting us at their beach house.

However, I’ll be armed with my laptop over my lotion for this trip to the beach. The session is about how brands need to have an authentic purpose lead approach that aligns with changing consumer pattern. They kicked off the session, with the premise of changing culture shifts.

Having meaning over material possessions, passion over professions and the new American dream, happiness over homes. As a Sydney-sider, amid a housing affordability crisis, this started to ring true.

They spoke of how marketers have the power to define a new lifestyle of sustainable living for the masses, that is both purposeful and commercially beneficial. I find the commercial side of purpose quite interesting and how purpose doesn’t just have to be an altruistic attitude but a business advantage.

Then we were off to the Palais, were we heard from Forrester Research on the value of agency creative to help achieve business goals. It touched on diminishing investment in creative compared to innovation and technology in agencies from the research they conducted. This movement has led to digital customer experiences, all starting to replicate each other in a homogenous fashion.

An interesting point at this part of the presentation was raised about how we call it efficient to replicate these digital experiences across different brands, but we would never replicate advertising in the name of cost efficiency. Seems like a duh moment but I’ve experienced this on websites and apps a lot of late.

So how do we rectify this shift and start investing back into creativity. SIMPLES

Balance, it’s not a matter of one vs. another but a matter of being practical with investment and using the creative experience, rather than the customer experience, as the focus point for investment decisions.

Creativity flowed onto our next masterclass for the day and we were all excited to have Julia Goldin, CMO from Lego, in our midst. Honestly wow – What an incredible, inspiring and intelligent women.

She came to share with us how their strong yet simple purpose of, “inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow” has help build their global brand love.

Ironically, it inspired all of us to build better tomorrows through our brands also.

She spoke about how brands are now held at the highest levels of accountability to change the world we live in. Everything from sustainability, diversity, environment and education.

Something the Lego brand does it spades.

Julia shared with us how Lego, help kids develop through learning – they are literally the building blocks of brand development, where they access both right and left sides of the brain to imagine and then create.

Julia, then went into detail and shared the four promises of Lego, which seemed so simple but effective for them to delivery on their purpose; Planet, People, Children and Partners.

Which keeps them accountable and interestingly enough also innovative.

They innovate by embracing change across these promises. With world class examples, everything from the Bugatti life size Lego car, partnerships with NASA and a new development brail bricks for the vision impaired. Such awesome work.

You can tell from spending an hour with Julia, she is not only passionate about Lego but the world and the impact her brand can and does have on it.

We left the session, with special instruction to head to FaceBook beach for a “legendary” event, emphasis on Legend. Spoiler, John Legend was there. And so was everyone else in Cannes. So, I missed him and hit the buffet instead.

I had some time at the end of my day to check out some of the Titanium award short list entries. Were the agencies, present their case study for the work they have submitted.

I caught, both Burger King’s detour campaign and Aeromexico’s, a world without boarders’ campaign. Both awesome and insanely effective. Despite my recent obsession with Fernando from BK, Aeromexico’s presentation was bigger than a campaign it went out to change racial perceptions in a very tense political climate…and with humour.

Great bloody work.