It's been a star-studded day at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, with creative grandes dames Vivienne Westwood and Annie Leibowitz both sending the audience into a tweeting frenzy at the Palais des Festivals. (Westwood's most-buzzed about quote, "if your ideas don't make the world better - they are useless," certainly chimes with a lot of the other Cannes conversation this week). But the prevailing theme for Tuesday was China: the world's most populous nation and third-largest ad market. China Day brought together presenters from agencies and clients to discuss the nation's opportunities and challenges - and it was rounded off by a standout seminar organised by digital agency Proximity Worldwide.
Chris Thomas, Proximity's chairman, introduced proceedings with some truly mind-bending statistics: in China, he said, 66% of digital consumers follow brands online, while each minute sees 143 visits to ecommerce behemoth Taobao, 95,000 updates on Weibos, 139,000 pictures uploaded through the QQ service and 4.5m Baidu searches. But the real creative insights came with the introduction of client-side presenters from Volkswagen and PepsiCo, who each offered some useful guidance for any marketer wanting to do business in China.
Can brands be a force for social good? This simple question seems set to become a major talking point at this year's Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. We at Warc are celebrating our 2013 Admap Prize winners, who discussed this very topic, with an event on the Croisette on Wednesday. And executives from Coca-Cola today took to the stage at the Palais des Festivals with a convincing argument that their firm has not only made doing good a key aim, but has been responding to social causes for decades.
The soft drinks giant is planning to sharpen its focus on the issue as part of its ongoing Content 2020 marketing platform, Ivan Pollard, Coca-Cola's vice president for global connections, told the audience. "We believe that doing good work - work that does good - is as important as work that does good business," he said. "It's a huge creative opportunity. Our powerful position gives us the opportunity to create significant positive change in the world."
Yesterday evening I attended an event to launch new research by the IPA, the UK ad agency trade body – in association with Thinkbox, which represents the UK commercial TV sector –examining the differences between emotional and rational campaigns and their short and long-term effects on marketing strategy. The report, by Les Binet, Head of Effectiveness from adam&eveDDB, and Peter Field, a marketing consultant for the IPA, is an update on their landmark 2007 effectiveness study, Marketing in the Era of Accountability.
This latest research, ‘The Long and the Short of it: Balancing the short and long-term effects of marketing’, draws on 996 advertising effectiveness case studies, from 700 brands, across 83 sectors, spanning over 30 years of IPA Effectiveness data. And the authors found there is a recipe for advertising effectiveness, but the choice of ingredients will determine whether a brand achieves short-term or long-term effects.
Les Binet and Sarah Carter get a little bit angry about some of the nonsense they hear around them... like the the idea that brands are 'thought leaders'.
Often when putting together pitch submissions, we're asked which brands exemplify best practice. Which brands do we admire for their innovative marketing? Or for their social responsibility programmes?
Last week, the question was: 'Which brands are "thought leaders"?' We knew what sort of brands they were alluding to: Apple, Google or Nike. And these brands certainly have had a big influence on marketers.
Following the recent North America Effies Awards in New York City, Warc has published 45 winning case studies showcasing great thinking and brilliant results.
Here we've chosen some of our highlights, selected because we feel they are especially interesting - either because the client faced a particularly tough challenge, such as reaching dual audiences, or because the campaign demonstrates how to implement a specific strategy, such as harnessing brand advocates.
Warc has again teamed up with the A[P]SOTW - or the Advertising [Planning] School On The Web to give it is full title.
This excellent initiative, run by a team of senior planners from across the world, poses challenges for up-and-coming planners and marketers. It's a chance to show off your ideas in front of a seriously, seriously senior line-up of judges.
We're lending a hand by carrying and promoting their challenges here on the Warc blog, offering some free content to help people's thinking (see below for that) and hopefully highlighting some of the ideas that come out of them.
(You can view the previous challenge we helped out with here).
Now, over to Gareth Kay and the details of the new assignment...
In the June 2013 issue of Harvard Business Manager (German edition) there is an article by Prof. Thorsten Henning-Thurau of Münster University entitled "Crisis of Marketing".
It makes for disturbing reading.
Professor Henning-Thurau's thesis is that Marketing is taken less and less seriously in a broad range of companies and industries, often being degraded simply to an execution function for other more respected departments such as R&D and Finance.
As a business with 80% of the board executives and 50% of the directors being female, there has been quite a lot of buzz on the subject of gender diversity around the Brand Learning office in the last few weeks, provoked by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Slightly late to the party, I watched her extremely engaging 2010 TED talk Why we have too few women leaders, and shared it with my colleagues on our social collaboration network, Yammer. 26 comments later, it was clear this topic of gender equality and leadership was on the top of many people's minds.
Since then, a group of us at Brand Learning, along with thousands of others, have explored and dissected her philosophy in greater detail. We wanted to know – why is this topic important for organisations in general and for marketing in particular?
As you may have read this morning, IAB Europe, the region's internet advertising trade body, released its 2012 digital adspend figures at its Interact event in Barcelona yesterday. And the headline data from the AdEx report tell a familiar success story. Despite the tough economy, the sector grew by 11.5% year on year, with digital taking a 25% share of Europe's all-media adspend. Over the next few years, it's a safe bet that online advertising will overtake TV, which took a 28% share in 2012, to become the region's single biggest adspend channel.
But dig a little deeper, and it's not all good news. While online is still vastly outperforming the traditional media, adspend for which contracted by -4% in Europe in 2012, the way digital budgets are being allocated should cause concern. One of the big themes of day one of Interact was advertisers' tendency to use digital for direct response rather than for branding. The 2012 data bear this out: search ads remain by far the biggest online category, up +15.5%, while display rose by +9.1%. And one euro in two spent on digital over the year was spent on search. In other words, while TV's dominance over digital is under threat in absolute adspend terms, its role as the biggest brand-building channel is considerably more secure.
Warc needs you to decide the winner of the Popular Vote in the Warc Prize for Innovation 2013. This will be awarded to the long-listed entry with the highest combined total of likes for its video on our Vimeo page and downloads of its case study on Warc.
Heavy downloading on Warc of the IKEA Human Coupons case study from Leo Burnett has catapulted it from the bottom of the Vimeo popularity rankings to the top of the all-important combined rankings.