It’s often said that you should work smarter, not harder. To that end, B&T has enlisted the services of the Clear Hayes Consulting team to pick out their top trends and themes from this year’s colossal Cannes in Cairns.
AI, AI-O
AI is going to take your job. AI is kittens playing with tinsel. AI is going to end the world. There’s a lot of takes on the hottest new tech.
One session missed by pretty much everyone as it was very late in the day was Pip Bingemann’s engaging polemic on how we as an industry are going to be the snake that eats our own tail when it comes to AI. You see, AI isn’t going to destroy the industry, we’re quite probably talking ourselves into obsolescence instead.
Bingemann’s Springboards.ai platform aims to give agencies a practical way to harness these generative technologies and use them as – unsurprisingly – a springboard for their own creative endeavours for clients. And it’s much needed in an age of endless content and scrolling where self-serve advertising has created a plethora of “shitty ads” per Bingemann.
As he explains, the machine learning being deployed to create campaigns across multiple platforms is not making incredible creative executions, it’s just “raising the floor” for what good looks like. So the baseline gets slightly less shit, but it’s still pretty shit. The really good, thumb-stopping and eye-catching and effective creative stuff is still coming from the fleshy thing pressing the buttons (humans).
This is good news for agencies – there is scope for us to sell our services still as human endeavour is all we have to flog, but what that looks like is going to change. It means a move to value-based pricing (because charging for time will make your hourly rate like that of Bill Gates in an AI world).
Importantly it means we actually need to do something the industry has probably been failing at for a long time – really invest time and effort into training the next generation of people. According to Bingemann “10x more effort” is going to be needed to help them learn the institutional skills that really make commercial creativity work, the hacks and human idiosyncrasies that make something meaningful and interesting.
It’s a (mostly) positive vision for the future and one which is going to need a lot of attention from the whole industry.
“A challenging marriage beats the single life”
Opposites attract, as the saying goes. Throughout the conference, there were glimpses of how strained relationships can be a catalyst for building better.
A good example is the evolving relationship between CMOs and CFOs across corporate Australia. As Sophie Smith, Head of Marketing at Officeworks said, it’s a relationship she has been working hard to “nurture”.
“I’ve spent a lot of time with our CFO, showing him what we do and the value marketing can bring,” she explains. “Now I know that even if I’m not in the room, they are going to be defending the value of marketing for the business.”
ANZ’s general manager of marketing, Sian Chadwick, explains how she has developed a closer relationship with the money men and women, by investing in getting deep data that informs her decision-making.
“Having MMMs (media mix modelling) feeding into the model means we are able to attribute spend and show them what is working and why,” she explains. “We now have the finance guys talking on our behalf and they’re ambassadors for us.”
In business, however, strained relationships can either be a tax or a catalyst for magic for founders. BOUNCE Inc. founder Ant Morell explained how he and his business partner were polar opposites in what they focused on, which can be useful day to day, but “90% of the time we can’t stand each other”. He revealed they had even reverted to marriage counselling.
Ultimately his message was one of “learning to let go” and that ultimately “a challenging marriage beats the single life” because it is “almost impossible” to build and scale a business on your own.
In the Australian industry, many are watching in fascination at how the newly minted shotgun marriage of iconoclastic media agency mogul Mat Baxter and opinionated founder Henry Innis at Mutinex will play out.
Asked on stage how the business will cope with two “big egos” at the helm Baxter replied: “I want to work with people who are difficult and challenging because people who are that are often ambitious. It works as long as it comes from a place of good intentions.”
The hills are alive with the sound of Menulog
Brand building was a big theme throughout the conference. After a decade of focus on hyper-growth and optimisation, it seems marketers are starting to see the value in building their mental presence with customers. Ironic, given current market conditions probably demand more short-termism to help drive growth.
Throughout the conference, there were interesting challenges to conventional thinking and practices. Audio, for example, which has been an overnight success a century in the making seems to finally be taking hold. The revival of audio being one of them.
Eardrum founder Ralph van Dijk, arguably Australia’s greatest exponent of the audio medium, quipped: “For the first time in 30 years, I’m in a vaguely fashionable medium.”
Lion’s Chris Allan, head of marketing, talked to the recent decision to bring back the iconic “I feel like a Tooheys” jingle in its advertising as a call to nostalgia that is actually bringing younger people, who were saying “I don’t want to drink what my dad drinks”, back to the brand.
“Audio was always the complementary part of the mix, not the starting point,” explains Allan. “But with the growth of podcast and audio streaming this is allowing us to connect with audiences more deeply.”
“Ignore all your fears about wear out because it takes time and commitment to build an audio brand,” says Menulog’s head of brand and media, Fiona Bateman. Love it or hate it, the ‘Did Somebody Say’ jingle sticks in your head (you can hear it now, can’t you) precisely because it has been repeated in different guises for eight years now. But as Bateman points out “it can be polarising, so you have to be comfortable playing in that space”.
And as van Dijk points out, it is something you need expertise to do well, because “lame and bad ads are the result of agencies dabbling in this space” which, when coupled with ineffective ad buys across areas like podcasts because of a lack of experience, can produce artificially disappointing results for marketers leading them to think it won’t work.
His last bit of advice was also pertinent: “Know who is working on your ad – not the company, but the person. Their ability to understand audio is vital, otherwise you’re just dabbling.”
By Alex Hayes, Akansha Singh, Jonelle Lawrence, Pallavi Mathur and Susie Thomson.
