Digital Cinema Media's CEO, Simon Rees, offers some reflections on an atypical Advertising Week.
Advertising Week is a pretty adventurous concept - more than 200 distinct events from day to night drawing attendees from the client, media, celebrity and broader cultural communities. The fact that it was celebrating its 10th anniversary in New York last week, and expanded internationally to London this year, means the team behind it is getting something right.
For me, its enduring appeal is that it covers a number of spectrums with great diversity. The event creates a concoction of multi-faceted debate, drilling into today’s advertising issues and challenges, interwoven with more holistic concepts and insights that are both local and global.
A lot of the energy driving the event came from the fact that all businesses had a sense of urgency and a ‘start up’ mentality in their approach. Nothing is static and the great brains and great talent in our media industry are forever trying to keep abreast of the need for change and innovation.
A big theme of the week was the debate about whether the consumer and technology advances are actually running ahead of the ability of the advertising industry to adapt and change. Technology is moving so fast that we cannot create perfect solutions. While inevitably mistakes can be made, we have to move on and keep iterating.
In a panel I sat on with Mark Howe from Google and Rupert Staines from RadiumOne, there was a very direct discussion about how technology has ambushed advertising. While there is no doubt that consumers, then the technology, are driving change at an incredible rate, I believe there is still place for great big brand advertising.
The challenge for us all is how to execute this across a plethora of new channels and platforms. The idea and the creative execution are still at the forefront, the challenge for brands is to talk to people through the lens in which they consume content.
We also discussed the future of media as being an audience rather than a platform buy with the increasing importance of personalisation and targeting, which ultimately equals data. In advertising, people pick on words and stomp them to death and the latest one is data.
But we’ve always had loads of data. The key is to be insightful and to be insightful at speed. We have to react and adapt quickly. In a session led by Amazon, the panellists talked about the increasing multi-faceted availability of data. Ultimately, analytics will outnumber planners and the media buying process will be increasingly a function of technology. Hopefully, as agencies automate the more mundane functions, such as buying, investment in driving creativity will increase.
Amazon also shared their approach to the consumer: inform, discover and empower. It seems obvious that great advertising happens when you focus on customer needs, yet this clear approach was set in the market context that the path to purchase was very complex. Amazon’s key driver was to simplify the path to purchase, a process supported by data, insight and clarity. The result – ecommerce now accounts for $1.2 trillion of spend.
My old boss Sir Martin Sorrell also put on a great show, challenging sports body luminaries on their money making feats and successes, and in classic Sorrellian style, ruffled a few feathers in the process.
Finally, the highlight of my week was Arianna Huffington’s session where she brought together a number of leading lights from celebrity, advertising, good causes, and the odd business leader – all female. The intensity and openness of the debate and some pretty bare-all points of view allowed for a great discussion on the rapidly emerging issue of stress in the workplace, precipitated by, amongst other things, smartphones and iPads.
It was a bloody good session and, although it over ran, for me, it could have kept going on for another two hours! As chair of an international mental health charity (BasicNeeds), stress and depression are alarming facets of our lives and need to be addressed so I welcome the profile given this debate.
This was an unusual seminar for an advertising conference but it’s typical of Advertising Week’s unique approach.
Looking forward to more of the same and even more surprises in London next year.