135: Why is this audacious?
More Cannes Lions results; lots more AI+Creativity
First, a huge thanks to the SOLD OUT crowd who are attending this morning’s State of AI in Social Media Marketing event with Ryan Peña and myself. Also, much gratitude to Jen and Mykl who have been tirelessly producing Social Media Breakfast for over a decade. My remarks include a few sources:
Wharton Prof Ethan Mollick’s newsletter, his book Co-Intelligence and his Framework Finder GPT
My own Get/To/By creative brief GPT
This background generation tool for product photos from Flair AI
This post about Adobe Firefly and using Structure, or Tone within Midjourney; and this post about video avatars and deepfakes
🎷🎶 And the Twin Cities Jazz Festival kicked off last night. If you’re in the Twin Cities, I encourage you to check out the FREE main concerts in Mears Park, downtown Saint Paul. 8:30pm tonight features the amazing vibraphonist Stefon Harris. Saturday night, the legendary sax player Joe Lovano plays with my favorite jazz pianist, Kenny Werner (also at 8:30pm).
Cannes Lions Festival - Days 3 and 4
The Cannes Lions podcast, In The Making, features a wonderful interview with a fellow-“why must the socks match?” thinker, McCann Global Chief Strategy Officer Harjot Singh.
We’ve got one more day to go at Cannes. For me, reviewing all this creativity suggests several questions for both marketers and their agency partners:
How do we imagine the process unfolded which led to such remarkable work? What kinds of strategy, courage, politics and candor would we need to acknowledge to achieve similar results?
Why might the judges have been correct or incorrect in making their decisions? What faults can we discern which we can learn from to advance and improve our own work?
Day 3 (June 19)
In the Creative Data category, McCann Poland took home the Grand Prix for its work on behalf of Mastercard, titled “Room for Everyone.” Given the war in neighboring Ukraine, and the exodus of millions into Poland, this concept asks, “how might lots of retail data help reduce social friction?” And it serves as a potent reminder of how data can inspire incredible creativity, and results. And one has to imagine greater retail success ultimately drives Mastercard’s bottom line.
Let’s assume you’re an outdoor media brand, and bookings for your inventory are down 7% year-on-year. Does it make sense to flood every available space in the Madrid subway with the Instagram photos of a 100-year old grandmother with 28 followers? Apparently it does. Agency David’s “Meet Marina Prieto” for JCDecaux won the Grand Prix for Creative B2B. The effort doubled media bookings for the brand. If I’m skeptical, this feels a little stunt-ish. But the Effies integration brought the effort home.
Now, imagine judging the Social & Influencer Lions category. It’s plausible you don’t know half the influencers cited in any of the 1,769 entries submitted. But you probably heard of the Super Bowl.
The more I learn about this effort from WPP Onefluence, led by Ogilvy PR New York, the more you have to applaud the audacity of the team and their clients. It’s simple. It’s dumb. “We’re going to pretend a mildly famous actor who doesn’t even own a smartphone and isn’t on social media, but who’s name is almost the same as your brand—invented your brand.” Of course, this concept really only works when you put a ton of media investment behind it. The known cost of being on the Super Bowl is inherently critical to the success of the idea.
Day 4 (June 20)
Out of 306 entries, the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix went to the five-year collection of work called “It Has to Be Heinz” from Rethink, Toronto. As noted in Contagious, Jury President Harjot Singh said, “[Heinz] took such a kaleidoscopic range of conversations that transcend culture and had a very coherent response to it each and every time, being able to prove that actually, it has a real commercial impact on the business.” Heinz claims the campaign helped achieve a 12% global ketchup sales growth year on year since 2019 and steal 3.2 share points back from its competition. (And as case study videos go, this one is very well constructed.)
The Brand Experience & Activation Lions honor “creative, comprehensive brand building through experience design, activation, immersive, retail and 360° customer engagement,” says Cannes. The Grand Prix went to “The First Edible Mascot” for Kellanova’s Pop Tarts from Weber Shandwick, Chicago. Elevates the notion of live sampling to a bizarre new level. Honestly funnier than the Jerry Seinfeld concept; likely sold more Pop Tarts, too.
AI+Creativity Update
🤖🦋 [Social/AI] Butterflies (Apple App Store, Google App Store) is a new social app seeking to “blur the lines between human and artificial intelligence, fostering a seamless coexistence,” says Shelly Palmer. More via AI Tool Report. I built two “Butterflies,” or AI agents or characters—not sure how to refer to them yet. Bridgette Awesome installs digital billboards, and Weezy is a former fax machine mechanic. And I suspect I will forget about, then abandon this platform is less than a week—but there’s clearly some kind of value here which I am missing.
👩🏻💻 [Strategy] I’m fond of the strategic framing produced by Zoe Scaman. She just published New Cultural Codes (blog post here; presentation deck here). I appreciate how Scaman ….
🤔💭 [Strategy] In Ben Thompson’s latest, an interview with Scale AI CEO Alex Wang, we’re reminded of a valuable insight. Says Wang, “the problem selection, what you choose to work on, has ten times more effect on your ultimate impact than how well you solve any individual problem. I got obsessed with this idea like, ‘Oh, you have to be in general, very good at problem selection, and that’s basically the governor of ultimately how much impact you’ll end up having.’”
🤖🔬 [Strategy/AI] Wharton’s Ethan Mollick has helped launch a Generative AI Lab and in his latest post outlines why adoption of AI, and value-extraction from AI, require a holistic set of behaviors more akin to R&D than cost-savings. He writes, “Since AI doesn’t work like traditional software, but more like a person (even though it isn’t one), there is no reason to suspect that the IT department has the best AI prompters, nor that it has any particular insight into the best uses of AI inside an organization. IT certainly plays a role, but the actual use cases will come from workers and managers who find opportunities to use AI to help them with their job.”