Cannes you believe it? Takeaways from Cannes Lions '23

Ryan Barry: 

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this special edition episode of Inside Insights. You thought we were on a break, but we're back. And I'm actually bringing back the OG, the founding partner of the Inside Insights podcast, my friend, my colleague, Babita Earle. What up, Babs?

Babita Earle:

Hi, Ryan. Hi, everybody. I'm privileged to be asked back. Did you miss me?

Ryan:

I did miss you.

Babita:

Oh, good.

Ryan:

I did miss you. Nothing but love for you, Patricia, but I have missed you, Babs.

Babita:

Good.

Ryan:

So, Babita, myself, Steve Phillips, and Vinny and Alex on our marketing team are here at Cannes Lions, the Festival of Creativity. We're both first-timers.

Babita:

Yeah. Not to Cannes.

Ryan:

You've been to Cannes before.

Babita:

I've been to Cannes many times, but it's my first time at this festival, though.

Ryan:

So, what do you think?

Babita:

It is certainly overwhelming.

Ryan:

Yes.

Babita:

The first day you get here and you've got Google Beach, you've got Spotify Beach, you've got so much content around you, and it's really figuring out why you are here and then building your agenda around that. I mean, it's amazing. You could just learn so much here about, not surprisingly, AI and-

Ryan:

Yeah, we'll talk about that a little bit. A little bit.

Babita:

... yeah, DE&I. So, for us being here, it's just an amazing opportunity. And it's really good to connect with customers, ad tech companies, publishers. It's just, it's a really good start for us as a brand.

Ryan:

Yeah, absolutely. So, I've never been to Cannes before and I... Many of you probably are going to resonate with this. There's things in life, places in life that you aspire to go to, bucket list items, things that you personify. And I've always wanted to come to the South of France. And for whatever reason, I've been privileged to travel to a lot of places.

And I have this vision of the South of France, playing volleyball on the beach. This conference is not that. But I was driving to an event last night, which is exactly a personification of this conference. And thank you, iHeartMedia, for having me. I had a wonderful time. And I saw the personification of a family playing volleyball on the beach. South of France is amazing.

Babita:

Yeah. That was really one end of that high end of the South of France. 

Ryan:

Yeah. So it's just beautiful here. And I'm used to being in places like New York City or London where your after hours food is either a gyro, or a kebab, or a slice of pizza. And only in France is the late night food a fresh baguette with beautiful ham and cheese and everything. But yeah, it's beautiful down here.

Babita:

And even McDonald's is upmarket here. I've recommended that, actually.

Ryan:

But it is a really cool event. I mean, I obviously know a lot of folks... This is the first time I've ever been, the first time Babs has ever been. It's a unique event. And I think a few days into it, my observation is that this is a time for CMOs to celebrate their work and celebrate their creativity and get together as peers. And so it's clearly a tight-knit tribe. 

And the conference is absolutely overwhelming. It's equal parts inspiration and a panel of advertising awards, but also each vendor is putting on insanely elaborate installations, whether they're on beaches or on boats or what have you. I got to see Lizzo play last night, which was pretty cool.

Babita:

I know. You were about five feet away from her, right?

Ryan:

Yes. And she told me it's okay to say, "It's bad bitch o'clock," publicly, because she is a bad bitch. And I was so happy to see her.

Babita:

Yeah, she's pretty inspirational.

Ryan:

She's incredible. What an inspiring woman. So one of the things that I wanted to come here for was to learn about the things... 

So in our business, we obviously help CMOs and innovators improve ad effectiveness and improve innovation effectiveness. But our customer is very much the insights department.

Babita:

Yeah, that's clear.

Ryan:

And so we wanted to learn a little bit about some of the things that CMOs are thinking about. So we've had the chance to talk to many CMOs and listen to them. What are some of your observations of the things that the CMO is thinking about today?

Babita:

So data's a big thing, right? But it's the value of data. So really, for me, there's one clear message. CMOs are really focused on understanding their consumer and understanding how the audience they're targeting receive their brand and want them to receive their brand. So what that means for us as an industry is that us as a consumer insights and a data provider is absolutely critical within the CMO's ecosystem. 

So it's really about getting close to the consumer and understanding the consumer. And there are other big topics which are important to them, right? AI is talked about. We're talking about creative effectiveness and The Long and the Short of It, which some of you may have read and it's still very, very relevant. So there are some new things, but I think there's some real trends which continue. But how you approach them obviously changes.

Ryan:

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think there's been two kinds of constructs for me that have stood out throughout the conversation. And one of them is just the buzzword of the week, which is the dawn of AI. But the balance of creativity and efficiency. We're in a tough economic climate, but Les Benet, Grace Kite, Tom Roach all did a presentation yesterday about advertising effectiveness, and looking solely at short-term lift is misleading. 

TV is still the most effective medium for long-term brand building. And the things that make up long-term brand building are different from the things that drive short-term sales. And so efficiency is on the other side. We need to sell more, we need to spend less, we need to be more effective. And so those tensions feel inherent to me.

What I found interesting about all the discussions about the customer is it's such a departure from the day-to-day operation I see the insights community driving. They want an insight that inspires a big idea, and then they want data to inspire them as they create it. 

And the opportunity I see is so profound in leveraging what we know, to give them to the people. And as insights people, be the shepherd of the culture in the room to help creative people actually amplify ideas. It's a really, really big tension. But I got to tell you, they're not talking about market research. They're not talking about ad testing. They're talking about improving their business. 

And we all, as an industry, need to understand that and be part of the conversation. But I think as we get our data more harmonized, as we get clear, and as we all upskill ourselves to be strategic storytellers, I've never felt more of a need for the capabilities we have as a consumer insights or market research industry.

Babita:

Yeah. And I just feel that there's a greater savviness in understanding how to deploy different platforms. The one presentation that you and I went to was there was this amazing curve around, we're at the hype of digital, but now we're at the hype, the effectiveness of digital spend is even greater because the industry is knowing how to use it, right?

Ryan:

For the first time, actually. Yeah.

Babita:

For the first time ever. So that for me, was like, okay, spend was high, but effectiveness was low in that period of hype, everybody needs to pile money into all these new platforms, but now spend is dropping, effectiveness is increasing because advertisers and the marketing community are knowing how to use... And we as an industry have been helping that, right?

Ryan:

We have.

Babita:

We, of industry, have been showing them how consumers respond to these platforms. And it is difficult, but we've got to continue providing these insights and providing value and providing an understanding of how consumers are responding to the changing advertising environment.

Ryan:

It's true. So one of the presentations was looking at econometrics and market mix models, and that's the data that Babita is talking about. And it took 10 years of a lot of money to figure out how to effectively deploy creative on different channels. And the key takeaways are that it needs to be native and it needs to be relevant to the audience. And so that doesn't mean take your TV spots and split it. And yet a lot of brands are still doing that. But what was interesting is the data that they were sharing also correlates to some of the stuff we've seen.

So just yesterday, Zappi released a State of Creative Effectiveness Report. And what we did was we looked at over 2,000 ads in the United States across categories. We talked to about a million consumers, and we dated back to 2019. And what we were looking for was what is driving short and long-term effectiveness of advertising over time? And as much as the rise of digital, or, sorry, the calibration of knowing how to use digital is driving effectiveness, the net is, we're just now returning to the creative effectiveness levels that we had during COVID.

And if you remember COVID, everybody was vulnerable, everybody needed something in their homes. But advertising, so advertising was able to cut through with a motive creative. But the challenge was everybody had the violins and the empty stadiums and the empty streets. And so brand recall was massively problematic. And we know that that's important for both the short and the long of it. 

So I think as much as we've now sort of figured out all these channels, we need to be more creative, we need to do better. So I did a talk yesterday with the chief marketing officer at Instacart, as well as Steph Gantz from PepsiCo. We were talking about the power of using consumer insights, not to grade homework, but to learn. And that is a really big shift for us as an industry to go from marketing gives insights in order to insights that understands all of the ecosystem, and these tools are there to take a bunch of ideas.

Babita:

Yeah. And then principles that we adhere to and speak to a lot of our customers about is this whole idea of experimentation, test and learn. And a lot of the CMOs that we've had talk use those terms, and it's critical for them.

Ryan:

It is.

Babita:

And as an industry, I know we can be risk averse. I mean, we face it every day, but this is what the marketing community wants. They want you to come to them with a new way of learning, which basically brings consumer data upstream and de-risks ultimately what they bring later on in the market. I mean, this is a conversation. I did an interview with Elaine at Reckitt with KSV Ventures, and this is exactly what she was saying. It's the cost of releasing an ad. I mean, there's a lot of conversation about the Bud Light campaign.

Ryan:

Yeah. It's been pretty much at the top, almost more than AI.

Babita:

Yeah, absolutely. It's Bud Light and AI. But the risk of getting something wrong commercially is high. So that data is really needed upstream. And this is a point that she made very, very clear, was that this is why upstream early testing, test and learn is so critical to the marketing community and for insights professionals to bring to their marketing stakeholders.

Ryan:

That's right. So we are going to talk about AI for a few minutes. The truth is, I'm no longer going to go to a single talk for the rest of my time here if it's about AI…I'm very proud to say Laura from Instacart, Steph Gantz and I did not utter the word artificial intelligence once.

Babita:

No, you didn't. No, no, no.

Ryan:

Which was a goal of mine going into that. But it's everywhere. And I think I want to talk to you a little bit about it because I think it's actually really important. So what I learned from over five talks with a bunch of CMOs and then spot conversations throughout, everybody's leaning into experiment. Nobody's willing to bet on a single language model. And everybody is trying to balance the exponential productivity gains with the risk, the trust, the need for safety and quality.

And I was blown away. So Babita and I went to a session yesterday with the CEO of WPP and the CEO of Nvidia. And what they have basically done is they've created this thing called an Omniverse, which replicates the real world. WPP has then codified all the film that they've created over the years into it. And one of the interesting sound bites that I learned, 97% of the film that they produce across all those agencies goes to waste. So they've codified that to the AI. And so that allows them to basically create an ad in Namibia of a car driving down the road without ever having to go there.

Babita:

Well, yeah, I mean, this is where everybody's thinking about the implications of AI for humans, for industry, for their jobs, everything. And the objective of their partnership was sustainability.

Ryan:

Correct.

Babita:

Which really, I was like, "Oh, right."

Ryan:

It makes sense, right?

Babita:

Yeah. Okay.

Ryan:

They're flying people everywhere.

Babita:

Yeah. Because they don't have to do that. And if they get something wrong, it doesn't matter.

Ryan:

Although, let's be real, that's also for profit reasons. Let's not kid ourselves.

Babita:

Yeah, true. True. 

Ryan:

They're saving a lot of money by not flying agency people around everywhere.

Babita:

There is that. And I think the other soundbite there is where the human features within that process. Because let's face it, everybody's saying, "Is AI going to take our jobs? What's it going to mean for my skills moving forward, or the skills of our children moving forward?" And the point there was, you still need the creators, right? Infinite content doesn't mean infinite creativity, right?

Ryan:

I think that's right. I mean, we've heard talks from the chief operating officer of OpenAI, CMOs from high profile businesses, MarTech platforms, agencies, et cetera. Everybody's saying the same thing. So I think there's a degree of, this is still early. Everybody's experimenting. And I do actually believe what they're saying, which is, this is a great enabler of creativity. 

But think about what that means. It means you have to be working on the skills that enable creativity, your intuition, your empathy, your ability to think through hard problems, talk to people, get out of the Goddamn house and go talk to people.

Babita:

That's what Scott Galloway said.

Ryan:

Scott Galloway said, "Get the f*ck out of your house." One of my idols in life, got to meet him yesterday, and he was wonderful. Not like he's going to listen to this podcast, but Scott, I appreciate you. I think it's a really important point because this is going to make us much more efficient, much more effective, but it's also going to require us to upskill because the stuff that keeps us busy will not be the same stuff that keeps us busy. 

Now, there's going to be new jobs created, clearly. Prompt engineering, I think, was referenced in every single talk. Because if you put the right prompts in an AI, you can get the things you need out of it. But there's two parts I think that are relevant that I want to unpack with you a little bit.

Generative AI is generating things from information that's available, right? That's essentially what it's doing. So I want to talk about consumers and potential risks of homogeny in this. So we can make our consumer insights data, if we make it programmatic, particularly all the pre-launch stuff, go into PepsiCo's internal Omniverse so that they can use consumer insights data to bring why data into this matrix world we're living in. And I think why people do what they do is so important to understand the creative process. Because what we're doing programmatically with the buy side is we're just optimizing on what they do.

So it's inherently important for us to get our data into that matrix, so when they're creating, it's there. That's going to mean five years from now, when we're testing an ad, when we're measuring a brand, we're not doing it the same way we're doing it. We're asking one or two questions to optimize. 

But I know you've been to a few DE&I talks. We're both passionate about the topic. I want to quote Allison Scott, one of our colleagues at Zappi, who says, "If you don't bring the right composition into the matrix, don't be surprised when the same shit happens in 30 years." So what are some of the threads you've picked up on, on the need to diversify the data before we scale it?

Babita:

So today, actually, the theme of all my talks today are about cultivating equity and diversity. So I will have more content by the end of the day, but what I have seen so far is garbage in, garbage out, right? 

Now, that applies to are we representing the consumer as a consumer is for that brand? And it was actually the panel just before yours that I was listening to. There were three individuals. And we refer to minority groups in a certain way. They refer to people of color, people of variant sexual orientation as growth audiences.

Ryan:

Oh, interesting.

Babita:

Yeah. And I sat there and went, "Actually, you're right." These groups are highly, highly valuable if they're targeted in the right way.

Ryan:

Correct.

Babita:

So if we look at it not from an equity perspective but even a commercial perspective, we know there's loads of studies out there, like a more just diverse organization is more profitable, it's going to grow at a greater rate, but actually these audiences are growth audiences. And I think that's how brands need to look at it. 

So yes, there is a concern actually around AI and when you programmatically feed in data who we're going to exclude. But I think we need to look at it from a growth angle. And that gives it a much more positive and something that you can sell more internally. Because I think the challenge is, yeah, everybody says, "Right, yeah, we do need to include more people of color, more Hispanic," but actually what is the business value? And it's going back to what the CMOs will be thinking as well.

Ryan:

It's true. I mean, I've talked to many people, I'll keep them all unbranded because I'll be disclosing some sensitive gnarly shit. They need help to make a business case for sustainability in a business case for DE&I. And that's the truth. These are publicly traded companies that are responsible to shareholders. So the growth angle, Babita, is really smart.

So the Bud Light example is a really interesting thing. So the strategy was very clear. Engage in what I think is a very harmless influencer strategy to appeal to an audience that is a growth audience for them. And then doing that in isolation of your base customer is an intentional strategy that you need to be really coherent about the risks for. And if you're doing that, that's right. But you have to be willing to lean into it. It struck me that in that example, perhaps they weren't seeing the full picture of the risk and perhaps the company didn't know what they were doing. 

And that's one of the risks of big brands rapidly experimenting. And so I think there's ways you could have prevented some of that risk. Of course, you're not evaluating everything you do, but I think understanding that, because doing the right thing doesn't always mean growth-

Babita:

No, no.

Ryan:

... which is an interesting tension in that.

Babita:

No, it doesn't, but it can mean growth in many different ways, right? It could mean growth from your brand, your knowledge, your culture. I think, yes, there's monetary growth, which ultimately is going to be important, but I think it can mean growth in multiple ways.

Ryan:

Yeah. No, I agree. And I think as an insights and data community, we have a responsibility here. So we need to get our surveys more engaging, our sample more representative and our data more codified so that the data that we're giving marketers can give them tools that they don't need to stop what they're doing in a low... Because let's face it, what that was was a low cost production influencer strategy that derailed a brand for a little while. That's what happened there. So you're not going to stop and do an eight-week copy test.

So if we can codify what we know about people, then we could say, "Ooh, there's a core customer base that has a certain set of societal views. For the record, I disagree with those societal views. Humans are humans, but that's not the point of this topic. Those people will be triggered by these things." Knowing that in a codified way then gives them some, "Okay, we want to grow this audience. Well, how will we do it tactfully?" or, "Hey, it's high risk. Let's isolate this persona and talk to them about this influencer and see how that will relate." There's an opportunity to do that.

Babita:

And I wonder whether that's right for my brand.

Ryan:

Correct.

Babita:

Is it authentic for my brand?

Ryan:

I agree.

Babita:

Because sometimes there's pressure to be serving groups which perhaps don't engage with your brand because they're minority groups. But it's probably not right for your brand.

Ryan:

Yeah. And you have to be really clear, who are you as a brand and who aren't you? At some time we were a small company, but we still talk about that all the time. What are our values? Who are we? And let's be real to those in good days and in bad.

Babita:

Yeah.

Ryan:

Shall we go back to the festival?

Babita:

Yes.

Ryan:

Everybody, we hope that you enjoyed our episode. I've always wondered what the hell happens here, because I've never been. So we decided to do this.

Babita:

Now we know. Now we know.

Ryan:

Now we know, and now hopefully you have a little bit more context. When I get on the plane tomorrow, I'm going to be very tired because this is exhausting.

Babita:

Comfortable shoes.

Ryan:

Comfortable shoes. Don't get as dressed up as you think you need to. Shout out to Kim Malcolm, my colleague, who told me, "The one thing you're good at is being you. So don't stop wearing T-shirts." So thank you, Kim. I've been comfortable as hell all week. I was a little bit underdressed for the party last night, but that's okay.

Babita:

Oh yeah, that's fine.

Ryan:

It is what it is.

Babita:

But we did try and convince him to go to the Chanel shop next door and buy a new sweater.

Ryan:

Not my style, people.

Babita:

No.

Ryan:

Okay. So thank you for listening.

Babita:

Thank you for inviting me.

Ryan:

It is a pleasure. I'll have to have you back.

Babita:

Thank you.

Ryan:

And we are going to be in touch with our next season, season seven, believe it or not-

Babita:

Wow.

Ryan:

... yes, in the fall. Have a great summer, everybody. Cheers.

Babita:

Okay. Thank you. Bye.