Podcast from Cannes Lions – Marketing Trends

Marketing Trends Social Media: The second episode was recorded at Cannes Lions 2018. Here we looked at some marketing trends being discussed with Somethin’Else; the BRIT Awards and ITV on how brands can succeed on social media by learning from how entertainment companies do it; WE Communications about the role of purpose in business and their Brands In Motion study; and Sky about global immigrants who consume media from their country of origin in their new country of residence

Part 1

For upon |Steve Ackerman, MD, Somethin’Else; Giuseppe De Cristofano, Director of Digital, BRIT Awards and Janine Smith, Head of Digital, ITV discussed how brands can succeed on social media by learning from how entertainment companies do it.

Russell Goldsmith (standing) with L-R Janine Smith, Steve Ackerman, Giuseppe De Cristofano

Steve said the challenge for brands working in the content space is to think and behave like a broadcaster, focussing on their audience in terms of who they are trying to reach and how can they entertain them – you have to change from thinking of people as consumers and what you can sell them, to that of an audience and how to engage with them, which he said is at the heart of the content. Marketing Trends Social Media.

Giuseppe added that they look at is what platforms their audience is on and how are they consuming similar types of content and then tailor their content for that specific platform.

Janine added that it’s also about making an emotional connection with the audience.

Focussing on Love Island, Janine said that this year, ITV added a daily podcast to the assets they are producing.

With The BRITS only on TV for one night, Giuseppe said that they start their build-up in the December before the awards, which take place in February, announcing nominations in January, which he said is a big moment for them on social media.  However, they use social media all year round to talk about British Music and British Artists.  He added that The BRITS is live-streamed on YouTube, which has seen them grow an audience outside of the UK of 1.5m of viewers watching at that time.

Giuseppe said that another key pillar of The BRITS content strategy was using ‘influencers’ from different verticals outside of music, such as Instagrammers who focus on food, which helped bring in a slightly different audience. Marketing Trends Social Media.

Janine explained that ITV also uses YouTubers in their content strategy, giving the example of how they extend the segment in ‘Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Take Away’ of ‘Ant vs Dec’ to ‘Ant & Dec vs Youtubers’, where they bring in different YouTubers to take part in different challenges with Ant & Dec, which gets used on the influencers’ platforms as well as those of Ant & Dec, with the aim of reaching a different audience in a new way.

Part 2 – Melissa Waggener Zorkin, CEO of WE Communications – Starts at 12:05

We spoke to Melissa about the role of purpose within the business and then asked for her thoughts on the #SpyCops campaign from the UK arm of cosmetics brand Lush:

Lush tweeted that Undercover police officers have infiltrated the lives, homes, and beds of activists since 1968 and that “An Undercover Policing Inquiry is taking place, but many campaigners have a complete lack of confidence in the public Inquiry’s approach. We’re standing with them to put pressure on the UK government to make the Inquiry more effective, and we’re asking you to join us.”

Melissa’s responded by asking whoever said that standing up for something is easy and that when you do stand up for something, you are bound not to have 100% of the people join you.  She didn’t comment on whether Lush did the right thing, but what she did say is that as a company, Lush is a ‘poster child for standing up to stand out because since starting the business, they have always been fiercely independent and have made choices that have consequences.  She said that a brand should always stand up and it would not make her afraid to go into any CEO and ask what they stand for.  She added that when you are an activist, you are bound to make errors, and all that matters, is that you pick yourself up and do it again the next day, listen to people, and if you are wrong, quickly say you were wrong.

Brands in Motion

WE Communications Researched six markets (Australia, China, Germany, South Africa, and the UK) surveying over 3,000 consumers and 1,000 B2B decision-makers in each market.  They looked at brands across eight categories, focusing on rational and emotional drivers, and subsequently outlined four realities for brands:

1. Stability is an element of motion.
2. Cutting-edge is transcendent.
3. The Unilever effect – Consumers expect a company to deliver highly effective, high-functional products and services, AND be active on issues that are important to their customers — ultimately, providing long-term social value
4. Love you today, shame you tomorrow. Out of 40 scenarios within 8 industry categories in 6 markets, 54% of the people said they LOVED the industry. Yet 98% said that if a brand steps out of line, they would gladly shame them.

Melissa’s Five lessons learned from having a purpose

1. Celebrate disruption.
2. Put people first.
3. Build the epic, not the episode.
4. Find stability in brands in motion.
5. Co-create

Part 3 – Starts at 26:28

Debarshi Pandit, Head of Multicultural Business at Sky, talked to us about the millions of global immigrants who consume media from their country of origin in their new country of residence.

According to Debarshi, there are 240m global immigrants living outside of their country of origin.  He explained that, as someone born in India, as well as watching the mainstream TV channels broadcasting in the UK and across Sky, he will also be watching a lot of content that originated in India, for example, Bollywood films or some of the Indian news channels.  He calls this dual media behavior. Marketing Trends Social Media.

Debarshi shared a British Airways campaign, called ‘Visit Mum’, the aim of which was to grow the transatlantic sector, which was growing at just 0.3%.  The campaign targeted Indian ex-patriots and students who live outside of India but commute to the US on a regular basis.  This Debarshi said was fascinating as it was still growing the transatlantic sector because the flight originates from Mumbai and stops over at Heathrow.

Debarshi said that this campaign helped grow BA’s market share of this sector by over 50%, generating £22m of incremental sales growth.

Debarshi also spoke to us about Sky’s addressable TV offering, Sky Ad-Smart.  This enables Sky to serve viewers culturally relevant ads but through mainstream channels.  He gave examples of work for Asda running a special Ramadan campaign to South Asian homes, whilst the non-South Asian homes received an alternative advert.

He also talked about being relevant with linear adverts running on mainstream channels too and gave the example of how he ran the first-ever Hindi campaign on Sky Sports during the IPL Cricket because 41% of the IPL viewership on Sky Sports linear was from an Indian background.

All previous shows of the series are available at www.csuitepodcast.com as well as Soundcloud, iTunes, TuneIn, a cast, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher.

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