H+K Strategies content team is busy in Cannes, doing interviews with various creative industry leaders and opinion-makers, and we will be sharing their content daily! On their final morning at Cannes Lions our reporters sat down to interview Sir Martin Sorrell. They covered off topics including the future of the industry, where he is at his most creative and his advice for young people entering the industry.
Reading all the tweets, blogs and media around Cannes it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the inspiration and information on offer. Trying to wade through all the big data I offer my ‘small data’ – things I have noticed from some of entries at this year’s PR Lions. Whether you’d go so far as to call them trends or not I don’t know but here are some observations. Creating currency, social experiments, taking a stand, hijacking a moment and of course storytelling were all noticeable in the campaign entries. The storytelling is becoming more and more visual as many of the winning and shortlisted campaigns demonstrated – The Autocomplete Truth for UN Women, Volvo Epic Split and Rice-Code to name a few as well as the adidas and Hair Fest campaigns noted below. The full winners list can be seen here. What I also observed from many of the campaigns is that digital & social makes every good creative campaign global now whether that’s the intention or not and I think that’s interesting for brands because it changes the context of the idea, and for ideas in general as it challenges what is new.
Delving deeper into the creating currency theme – this started several years ago with campaigns including Orange’s RockCorps ‘give, get given’ idea – volunteer 4 hours of your time and earn a ticket to a gig. I noted 7 entries from 7 different countries across categories including not for profit, sports and retail and education using this theme and I’m sure there are many more in other categories. Whilst many of the elements are not new the trend abounds. It is about barter, involvement, collaboration and creating value out of elements of your brand or offer.
Silver Lions Winners
The Silver Lions winner in the event category by TBWA London for adidas D Rose Jump Store asked kids in Hackney to show their basketball skills and jump like NBA player Derrick Rose to receive a pair of new sneakers in a simple and clever execution Having worked for adidas and Speedo in my career, this also cleverly used the ‘2-hour sports talent window’ that you get for PR in a truly impactful way.
A campaign that I personally loved that also won a Silver Lion in Event is the Hair Fest from Ogilvy and Mather Mexico for a cancer charity Casa De La Amistad, using a variation on theme of the Orange Rockcorps, using currency to appeal to a whole new audience for fundraising – heavy metal fans – give at least 25cm of your hair to make a wig for a child with cancer. Now these guys love their hair making the sacrifice for a ticket to a gig even more impactful.
Shortlist entries
The Exchange was a cashless pop-up store for the Organ Donor Foundation of South Africa where you ‘bought’ an item by becoming an organ donor. In terms of the insight behind the campaign I wonder whether the level of consideration for such a serious issue would have been met by the fashion link and immediacy of the purchase/swap but it is an interesting way to talk about a difficult subject and garnered much attention.
The Unicef Tap Project is a challenge – give your time & donate money by not using your mobile phone for 10 minutes at a time via an app. It is the work of the creatively on-fire Droga 5 agency in NY who were also behind the Gold winning Honeymaid This Is Wholesome and Silver If We Made It for Heineken campaigns.
Pay Per Laugh for the Teatre Neu Theatre in Spain was a response to the Spanish authorities raising the tax on theatre tickets from 8-21% which heavily impacted sales. The pay per laugh theatre invited theatre-goers to only pay for what they enjoyed using facial recognition technology.
The Message Barter Akanksha Foundation campaign for a kids NGO used children in a humorous and cheeky way to engage with high profile influencers and celebrities in India – they publicly declared their support with home-made clips in exchange for social media awareness of their issue to great effect This also tapped into the theme of experiment which is prevalent this year too.
In the Mindrive Social Fuel education campaign from the US the currency is a tweet to get an electric car moving across America to raise awareness and get it to Washington meet with legislators to talk about education. This is not new but was well executed and incorporated new technologies.
The Marc Jacobs Daisy Tweet shop was not featured in the short list but is a well-known campaign from this year – pay for handbags with a tweet.
Ways you could apply this to your company or brand would be to play with your audience:
…and think about what you have to offer that you could barter. Call it a trend, call it inspiration, think about how you might collaborate and co-create with your audience.
Claire Bridges is the Founder of Creative Consultancy Now Go Create, Judge at this year’s Cannes Lions PR Jury. Claire is an ex-WPP Consumer MD with 20 years PR experience. We demystify creativity & fear of the blank page via creative training courses for business www.nowgocreate.co.uk. Twitter @nowgocreate, claire@nowgocreate.co.uk or link up with Claire at Google+
Claire is also a PRCA trainer, and runs the online “Unleash your inner creative” training webinars for PRCA and ICCO members.
One of the best lines I heard this week in Cannes, where the 2014 International Festival of Creativity still rages on, was a comparison between winning campaigns and haute couture fashion shows: what takes gold is like a new season’s line-up . . . sometimes impractical, often flamboyant but inevitably influential on mainstream tastes and trends.
How apt.
What happens at Cannes, matters. More so, I’d argue, than any other event on the global PR calendar (partly because there really isn’t a global PR calendar), and more each year, as clients and agencies of all kinds flock to the South of France in ever greater numbers.
And it’s not just the awards competition that counts. Trends are established, deals are done, ideas are shared and careers are launched/advanced in ways that no other event or awards competition can yet offer the industry.
That’s why ICCO, the global body of forward-leading PR consultancies from around the world, put so much energy into ensuring a meaningful role in this year’s festival. We simply cannot afford to be left out of the conversation at Cannes, cacophonous as it may be, if we want to be relevant in the wider world of marketing and creativity.
ICCO wasn’t first among the PR community to land at Cannes. Agencies like my own (Ketchum) and other global leaders like Weber Shandwick have enjoyed success for years in the main PR competition, and now Edelman has taken an elusive Grand Prix home for the PR industry in partnership with CAA (following Fleishman Hillard’s success in 2010).
But ICCO was first to recognise the opportunity for the wider PR community at Cannes, and to make possible a presence and contribution beyond the reach of individual agencies or winning campaigns. This came in several forms this year, but perhaps most powerfully in organising a new Young PR Lions competition, inspiring teams of young agency professionals from around the world to demonstrate in real time the power of PR to do big thing.
(Congrats, by the way, to winning team from Japan, and to the silver and bronze winners from the UK and Austria. Thanks to leading agencies Ketchum, Ogilvy, Golin and H+K Strategies for walking the talk with their sponsorship support, too. And thanks to the PRCA for overcoming a tight deadline to organize the UK competition, a move greatly appreciated by British agencies and a nice connection to a whole new generation of creative talent).
Our debut was a success. The crowd roared for our Young Lions, festival participants learned about ICCO and PR through our team on a dedicated stand in the main hall, and there were literally dozens of PR-related workshops, seminars and panels that ICCO helped promote and, importantly, we now have a voice and credibility we plan on putting to good use in the future.
We’re now in a position to work with the festival organizers to refine their awards criteria, share ideas on promoting PR and continue our efforts to make a career in our industry attractive to creative young stars.
And shining at Cannes was only the beginning. From here we can take a little of the glamour and inspiration from the festival to help promote PR in our member’s countries, and help differentiate their agencies from those who are not as forward-looking or part of their national associations.
As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback – and hope to see you on the catwalk next year at Cannes.
As a Senior Partner and CEO of Ketchum’s European operations and chairman of the UK agency, David Gallagher brings more than 20 years of public relations experience, both as a client and as a senior agency adviser, to some of the world’s leading brands and companies.
David Gallagher oversees Ketchum’s nine European agencies and their specialist services, which include consumer public relations, healthcare communications, corporate affairs and social responsibility, public affairs, change management, and clinical trial recruitment.
He is president of the International Communications Consultancy Organization (ICCO), the global umbrella network of 30 national PR agency trade associations, and a fellow and past chairman of the UK Public Relations Consultants Association. He chairs the World Economic Forum’s global agenda council on the future of media, and was the 2014 PR jury president for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
So we are completely and utterly over the moon to have won silver in the first ever Young Lions PR competition. It has been a once in a life time experience!
The competition was fierce, competing with the best in the world and having 24 hours to come up with a PR campaign to raise awareness of UNODC’s Blue Heart Campaign which fights against human trafficking.
Having to get an entire PR campaign summarised in 10 slides and 5 minutes is difficult to say the least. Luckily the UK competition, organised by the PRCA, had used the same format so we were well prepped and knew what we needed to deliver. Although we’re not sure we realised how intense spending 12 hours in a room with 15 other teams would be!
The entire experience was amazing but our highlight had to be presenting to the judges. Getting to bring our idea to life and show how passionate we were about it in front of such industry experts was incredible!
Also knowing that our campaign resonated with the judges is hugely rewarding, they described our work as follows…‘Their invigorating and passionate presentation was brilliantly insightful demonstrating a real understanding of the millennial audience. This led them to tapping into the audience’s passion of music, reviving the blues and playing on its heritage as a genre born out of slavery. They reached back into the past to create a positive mobilising campaign that was meaningful and purposeful”
We want to say thanks so much to the judges for taking the time to listen to us and also to the ICCO and PRCA for championing the Young PR Lions. We have loved every minute (even the 6am presentation run through) and are incredibly grateful we were given this chance!
Leila Mountford, Junior Copywriter
Weber Shandwick
Kate Sloan, Brand Strategist
Weber Shandwick
The H+K Strategies content team is busy in Cannes, doing interviews with various creative industry leaders and opinion-makers, and we will be sharing their content daily!
Listen to their conversation with Rob Norman, Chief Digital Officer of GroupM Global. Here’s his take on how the industry’s view of ‘Storytelling’ is too simplistic, and the changes in social media and rise of anonymous apps.
So the question is back again, as the Cannes Lions Festival has started: why is it that the PR industry is not “more creative” – if creative at all?
With 60% of PR professionals and 69% of clients believing that “the PR industry lacks big ideas” (according to the Holmes Report’s 2013 Creativity in PR study), it looks like the answer is not very encouraging….
In my humble opinion, there could be some sort of misleading-ness here and a quite unfortunate semantic misunderstanding.
When you hear people telling you that PR professionals are not good at putting forward and driving “big ideas”, what these people actually refer to, and “come from”, is the traditional mindset of advertising: for them, a “big idea” is still what organizes a 30 second commercial, and is eventually carried through collateral material.
No need to say that this vision is a bit outdated.
Let’s look at figures: three years ago, TV commercials still represented 55% of cases. In 2013, digital channels, and particularly social media, jumped to 85% of the cases, “making it by far the most-used channel in the competition” (See “Why Creativity Sells” in Sunday, June-15-2014 Lions Daily News 2014).
I would argue that, in 2014, the only valid criteria when it comes to judging creativity is today’s Engagement environment.
A creative campaign is above all a campaign, which creates a high level of engagement with people and communities.
(The rest is literature, or food for endless debates in ADs’ clubs)
Having been one of the three judges, together with Marnie Kontovraki, Global Heineken Consumer PR Officer, and Michael Frohlich, Managing Director UK and EAME Consumer Marketing Practice for Ogilvy PR, for the inaugural Young PR Lions competition at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, I lived a vibrant and very insightful experience with 14 teams from 14 countries, with each team comprising two young agency PR professionals, all Millennials born after 1985 – an experience which brutally challenges the current doxa on what creativity is about.
It’s so inspirational to see the hunger and passion with which these young professionals are taking up Citizenship challenges – but then that shouldn’t surprise us: as a global survey MSLGROUP ran last month in 16 countries underlined, Millennials today consider themselves empowered to help businesses and organizations change the world. As our survey reveals it, Millennials really are « Game Changers », with a « fresh » vision on business and Citizenship. (http://blog.mslgroup.com/why-and-how-businesses-need-to-partner-with-millennials-to-better-manage-resilience-relevance-resonance-in-troubled-times/)
My colleagues and I at the jury saw a lot of genuine enthusiasm and strategic clarity in the vision the 14 teams developed, a true maturity from a creative standpoint and a lot of agility in the execution : these Asian, African, European, Latin American Millennials are global, boundless minds and really bold folks – their future is bright, and so is the future of our industry. They definitely don’t see big ideas the good old way, but as powerful 360° weapons which actually transform and reinvent PR the way we used to do it. And no need to say that it’s all digital and social, therefore effective and costless.
Many insights provided by the teams were about Millennials’ commitment to make the world a better place. « Rouse the Millennial Army ! », « We can change the world ! », like one of the awarded teams said ! Yes, they love to be part of the change they want to see, and that’s terrific.
Self-expression, storytelling, sharing, crowdfunding – all the key ingredients of what creates succes today in the world of PR (People Relations) are here, and it’s an amazingly refreshing and rewarding lesson. The Millennials are passionate about many things, global issues and causes, and they expect businesses, organisations and PR agencies to tap into their passion.
We should agree that the age of conversation is very different from the age of advertising, with its vertical “big ideas”. It’s now all aboutbig data and smart ideas, which is pretty different, in many ways:
Over the past few years, we thus moved from mass propaganda, with its heavy bombardment of “big” and simplistic top-down messages, to multifaceted engagement strategies. Advertisers are good at bombardment, we – experts in PR, for People Relations – are far better at the latter.
Our PR “agency of the future” model should indeed derive business intelligence and data analytics to build creative content, nurture shareable conversations, and engage people and communities.
MSLGROUP’s Chief Strategy Officer, Pascal Beucler holds BAs in History and Language Sciences, a master’s degree in Linguistics and a post graduate degree in Semio-Linguistics. In 1987 he joined Intelligences, a subsidiary of Publicis, and in 1992 he became Managing Director. In 1994 he was promoted to Partner at Publicis Consultants, and then to General Manager of Carré Noir in 2001. Pascal is an Associate Professor at CELSA (Paris IV Sorbonne) and a visiting professor at HEC – one of France’s top business colleges. He has conducted research and published articles on various topics and in particular on the relationship between text and image. In 2005 Pascal was named Vice-President of Publicis Consultants | Worldwide, in charge of Brand Strategy and development of its international network.
Guest blog post by Pascal Beucler, SVP & Chief Strategy Officer of MSL Group So the question is back again, as the Cannes Lions Festival has started: why is it that the PR industry is not “more creative” – if creative at all? With 60% of PR professionals and 69% of clients believing that “the PR industry lacks big ideas” (according to the Holmes Report’s 2013 Creativity in PR study), it looks like the answer is not very encouraging…. In my humble opinion, there could be some sort of misleading-ness here and a quite unfortunate semantic misunderstanding. When you hear people telling you that PR professionals are not good at putting forward and driving “big ideas”, what these people actually refer to, and “come from”, is the traditional mindset of advertising: for them, a “big idea” is still what organizes a 30 second commercial, and is eventually carried through collateral material. No need to say that this vision is a bit outdated. Let’s look at figures: three years ago, TV commercials still represented 55% of cases. In 2013, digital channels, and particularly social media, jumped to 85% of the cases, “making it by far the most-used channel in the competition” (See “Why Creativity Sells” in Sunday, June-15-2014 Lions Daily News 2014). I would argue that, in 2014, the only valid criteria when it comes to judging creativity is today’s Engagement environment. A creative campaign is above all a campaign, which creates a high level of engagement with people and communities. (The rest is literature, or food for endless debates in ADs’ clubs) Having been one of the three judges, together with Marnie Kontovraki, Global Heineken Consumer PR Officer, and Michael Frohlich, Managing Director UK and EAME Consumer Marketing Practice for Ogilvy PR, for the inaugural Young PR Lions competition at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, I lived a vibrant and very insightful experience with 14 teams from 14 countries, with each team comprising two young agency PR professionals, all Millennials born after 1985 – an experience which brutally challenges the current doxa on what creativity is about. It’s so inspirational to see the hunger and passion with which these young professionals are taking up Citizenship challenges – but then that shouldn’t surprise us: as a global survey MSLGROUP ran last month in 16 countries underlined, Millennials today consider themselves empowered to help businesses and organizations change the world. As our survey reveals it, Millennials really are « Game Changers », with a « fresh » vision on business and Citizenship. (http://blog.mslgroup.com/why-and-how-businesses-need-to-partner-with-millennials-to-better-manage-resilience-relevance-resonance-in-troubled-times/) My colleagues and I at the jury saw a lot of genuine enthusiasm and strategic clarity in the vision the 14 teams developed, a true maturity from a creative standpoint and a lot of agility in the execution : these Asian, African, European, Latin American Millennials are global, boundless minds and really bold folks – their future is bright, and so is the future of our industry. They definitely don’t see big ideas the good old way, but as powerful 360° weapons which actually transform and reinvent PR the way we used to do it. And no need to say that it’s all digital and social, therefore effective and costless. Many insights provided by the teams were about Millennials’ commitment to make the world a better place. « Rouse the Millennial Army ! », « We can change the world ! », like one of the awarded teams said ! Yes, they love to be part of the change they want to see, and that’s terrific. Self-expression, storytelling, sharing, crowdfunding – all the key ingredients of what creates succes today in the world of PR (People Relations) are here, and it’s an amazingly refreshing and rewarding lesson. The Millennials are passionate about many things, global issues and causes, and they expect businesses, organisations and PR agencies to tap into their passion. We should agree that the age of conversation is very different from the age of advertising, with its vertical “big ideas”. It’s now all aboutbig data and smart ideas, which is pretty different, in many ways:
MSLGROUP’s Chief Strategy Officer, Pascal Beucler holds BAs in History and Language Sciences, a master’s degree in Linguistics and a post graduate degree in Semio-Linguistics. In 1987 he joined Intelligences, a subsidiary of Publicis, and in 1992 he became Managing Director. In 1994 he was promoted to Partner at Publicis Consultants, and then to General Manager of Carré Noir in 2001. Pascal is an Associate Professor at CELSA (Paris IV Sorbonne) and a visiting professor at HEC – one of France’s top business colleges. He has conducted research and published articles on various topics and in particular on the relationship between text and image. In 2005 Pascal was named Vice-President of Publicis Consultants | Worldwide, in charge of Brand Strategy and development of its international network.
The first mail that hits my eye this morning is: ‘How do you define creativity?’ Claire Bridges sends it to me, one of my fellow jurors on the Cannes PR Lions jury. Put 21 clever creative PR/communications people from all over the globe in one jury room and not a single one will come up with the same definition. I like to think that everybody can be creative, so I send my partner a quick mail with that one question. He is a wine entrepreneur and has a knack of thinking out of the box. It only takes him two minutes to mail me back: When I was seventeen I stumbled upon this quote of jazz musician Charles Mingus. ‘Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.’
Not bad.
Like every other fussy creative strategist I feel like telling him that something is missing. Something along the lines of: ‘Turning the ordinary into the remarkable – all whilst being truthful’. I will only send him that thought later on, as I reckon that he must be off sharing remarkable stories about wine and the men and women that are producing it.
That thought leads me to ‘storytelling’. Read: the delicate art of crafting the right kind of creative content. When storytelling is at its best, it is light years away from the bland content that so often lands on our plates. When stellar, storytelling is about magnetic little gems.
Do I see you frowning there? Don’t worry – it must be me: I often get asked what I mean by that. Here’s how I recently explained it to my 69-year-old dad. ‘Magnetic stories have many different faces: it can be articles, pictures, one-liners, art, cartoons or videos that touch you in such a way that it creates a strong emotion of recognition. Or even better: that is creates the urge to share it with others. Not necessarily via social media channels, but even so when having a good old chat.
I mostly get people to nod when I put it like that. Some inquisitive souls -including my beloved dad and juniors looking for a job- confront me with questions that grant them access to the next level: how can you tell upfront whether content is good enough to tear the house down – or not?
I tell them about context then: about the importance of understanding whom you talk to, about the importance of sharing a story when the time is right. If you know what the dreams and fears are of the people that you are trying to sweep off their feet, you are well on your way to just do that.
So how ‘magnetic’ is the content I’ve seen so far in Cannes?
Really good.
Pretty bad.
I find it remarkable to notice how many wonderful creative campaigns don’t make me tick – for the one and simple reason that the content is just not up to par.
I had a chat with a young creative girl from Romania on this topic when eating an ice cream on the Croisette. In five minutes she quizzed me about content, context and pitched a story that made me smile and shiver. I forgot to ask her contact details, but in case she ever reads this – here’s my message to you: ‘Call me: talent like yours is rare.’
PS: My partner sent me another mail later on – pointing out that creativity is also about authenticity, honesty and empathy. His message made me smile. Creativity is not something people in creative industries own: it is the oxygen that keeps every passionate professional going.
Ann Maes is Managing Director of Ogilvy Public Relations for its Brussels-based operation.
Ann returned to Ogilvy PR after an absence of twelve years. In the intervening time she has demonstrated excellent client counselling and business-building skills through leadership roles at Leads United and most recently as the founder of PrideTBWA.
Ann has worked across a range of sectors and companies in her career – with a focus on integrated campaigns, change communication and reputation management. Ann’s work has won many awards, in Belgium and abroad. Her clients over the years have included: McDonald’s, Coca Cola, Ahold Group, Pfizer, Sabic, Microsoft, Amgen, MasterCard, KBC, Proximus, KPN and Stanley.
Yuichiro Okada and Tetsuya Umeda from ASATSU-DK Japan were announced today as the winners of the inaugural Young PR Lions competition at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
The Young PR Lions competition saw 14 countries sending their pre-selected teams of two PR professionals under the age of 28 to Cannes this year. On Saturday, 14th June, the teams were given a brief from United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and given 24 hours to create an effective and creative PR campaign for the organization’s ‘Blue Heart Campaign’ against Human Trafficking.
On Monday, 16th June, the teams presented their campaigns to an international jury which included Michael Frohlich, Managing Director of EMEA Consumer Marketing Practice and the UK head of Ogilvy PR; Pascal Beucler, Chief Strategy Officer at MSLGROUP and Marnie Kontovraki, Global Heineken Consumer PR Officer.
YOUNG PR LIONS 2014 WINNERS
Gold
Yuichiro Okada, Account Executive, and Tetsuya Umeda, Interactive Planner, ASATSU-DK, Japan
Silver
Leila Mountford, Junior Copywriter, and Kate Sloan, Brand Strategist, Weber Shandwick, UK
Bronze
Doris Christina Steiner, Consultant, and Pepita Adelmann, Senior Consultant, Ketchum Pleon, Austria
The judges said they were impressed by the winning team’s campaign, which focused around the idea of putting the value on the life of a newborn baby in order to raise awareness on human trafficing. The winners will be presented with the Gold Medal tonight at the Creative Effectiveness, Promo & Activation, PR and Direct Lions Awards.
The Young PR Lions competition was launched in February 2014, with the International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO) as the official sponsor in association with Golin, H + K Strategies, Ketchum and Ogilvy PR.
Francis Ingham, ICCO Chief Executive, said: “I would like to congratulate the winners: their agency and their families should be proud of them. I would also like to applaud all this year’s contestants, who can rightfully regard themselves as the best young PR creatives in their respective countries.”
“We are grateful to the Festival and our agency co-sponsors for giving us the opportunity to get involved with this amazing competition, and already look forward to hosting the Young PR Lions 2015.”
To view the profile of all Young PR Lions 2014 contestants please click here.
About ICCO
ICCO is the voice of public relations consultancies around the world. The ICCO membership comp rises national trade associations in 29 countries across the globe in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australasia. Collectively, thesis associations representing over 1,700 PR firms. ICCO is a proud sponsor of the Young PR Lions competition at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
The H+K Strategies content team is busy in Cannes, doing interviews with various creative industry leaders and opinion-makers, and we will be sharing their content daily!
Listen to their conversation with Aaron Huey, celebrated photographer for National Geographic and others, wearer of gold shoes and the only man we know who got married on a tank…