The Evolution of Marketing
Cannes is around the corner. It’s no longer for creatives. But is it still about creativity?
In about a week, it will be the 71st edition of Cannes Lions, the International Festival of Creativity (June 17 - 21, 2024), the mecca for numerous agencies, media companies, tech giants, and now marketers on the client side. Tens of thousands of creatives, non-creatives, and various types of species of advertising, media, and technology worlds will descend onto the French Riviera for a week to give high fives to and schmooze with each other.
The first time I went to Cannes was back in 2006. I was a young-ish designer with a focus on digital. The festival felt like a gathering by creatives, for creatives, and for the sake of creative work. It was still called the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival.
Since then, the festival as well as the industry that surrounds it has evolved drastically. There have been numerous pieces of great work in the last 25 years that were iconic, memorable, inspiring, and even impactful.
says, “People love advertising in particular but they hate advertising in general.” Everyone has an ad they like.At the same time, there is also an unhealthy dose of cynicism towards advertising.
One of the arguments against what gets recognized at such places is that the award-winning creative work at Cannes is like “the concept car of advertising.” It looks good on stage but you can’t drive it because it’s not real.
There is a degree of truth to this. What wins at Cannes or elsewhere often has more impact on the creatives’ next job opportunity (and egos) than on the brand’s actual business.
Many ads that work don’t win at award shows. That’s because those hard-working ads are often boring. Jurors don’t like boring work. Having been a juror myself a dozen times and more, I have to admit I’ve been guilty of this. We gravitate towards shiny and sexy objects that look good on stage and get the headlines, like the outfits worn by celebrities at the Met Gala. No one in real life would wear that stuff. Which is why I haven’t been entering our work into awards in recent years. The nature of our work is business transformation and a lot of it isn’t shiny or sexy.
Enough with the negative energy and cynicism towards award shows, advertising—or even creativity. Let’s look at the positive side.
Every once in a while, I do see work that pushes the game in new ways and directions. The rare breed of work that has an impact on the industry, on brands, and/or on their business. Over the years, there have been a few pieces that changed how brands and agencies think about advertising, marketing, and brand-building.
When we look at the evolution of creative work in the industry, we can also see the evolution of, not just marketing but, what I call “creative archetypes.”
Creativity used to belong to the creative department, specifically, copywriters and art directors, the creative archetype of the Old World Order. When I got started in this industry, my colleagues and I made websites, digital services, and utilities. In the eyes of traditional creatives, what we did was functional and didn’t have “a story.” We weren’t seen as creatives.
In the last two decades, these archetypes evolved and mutated over multiple generations. Creatives needed to pick up new skills along the way. And those who weren’t considered creatives have now gained more presence, status, and power.
Being creative isn’t enough anymore in this game.
Here’s a look at the evolution of marketing, the Work, and the creative archetypes.
BMW Films (2001)
“A series of short films produced for the Internet. A form of branded content, the shorts were directed by popular filmmakers from around the globe and starred Clive Owen as "the Driver" while highlighting the performance aspects of various BMW automobiles.” (Wikipedia)
Why it mattered: This was before YouTube. Watching videos online wasn’t a thing yet. You could watch these films in super low resolution on the BMW site or get them on a CD-ROM from a BMW dealer. A clever tactic to drive traffic to dealerships.
It was the first example of this millennium that demonstrated and proved to brands that they could, as opposed to distracting an audience, attract them by leveraging a new distribution mechanism called the Internet. Instead of spending millions of dollars on paid media, why not use those dollars for production? From around this time, we started to hear “zero media dollar spent” in case studies almost as a badge of pride.
This work was the catalyst for the Cannes Lions’ Titanium category: “breakthrough ideas which caused the industry to stop in its tracks and reconsider the way forward.” (Cannes Lions)
Since then, many brands and agencies have tried to create branded content that would outdo BMW Films.
I don’t believe anyone has.
The creative archetype: Storyteller
Burger King “Subservient Chicken” (2004)
“On the site, visitors saw a sparsely decorated living room, with the submissive mascot standing in the middle of the room. The submissive chicken would respond to hundreds of commands that visitors typed, i.e. ‘do the Moonwalk,’ ‘turn off the lights,’ or ‘jump rope.’” (AdAge)
Why it mattered: Completely the opposite of BMW Films in terms of production value. Extremely crude on the surface but surprisingly sophisticated in its reaction to human prompts. This was 18 years before the ChatGPT craze. It was so odd yet so captivating.
It was just so different from anything else before it. The idea of a subservient chicken still delivered on “Have it your way,” Burger King’s tagline. This work turned the meaning of “creative” upside down. Being weird was the new cool.
The creative archetype: Hacker
Nike+ Running (2005) and Nike+ Fuelband (2012)
Nike+ Running was a piece of software that tracked and analyzed running activities, providing personalized coaching and social features for runners. Nike+ FuelBand was a wrist-worn device that tracked daily activities, converting them into a proprietary metric called Nike Fuel to measure overall physical activity. Both aimed to enhance fitness and motivate users. (Wikipedia)
Why they mattered: Modern advertising was defined by agencies on Madison Avenue for so long. R/GA, a digital agency in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, developed Nike+ Running and Nike+ Fuelband. R/GA where I got my start was an early adopter of digital and one of the leaders of the anti-advertising movement. It “stood with one foot in Madison Avenue and one foot in Silicon Valley, and then pushed the two together.” This work expanded what a creative agency can do for its clients.
It also questioned what advertising was. Advertising was no longer about just telling stories about a product or a brand. It could engage an audience in a meaningful way and create a direct and personal connection with each consumer.
Somewhere along the way, Cannes Lions dropped the word “advertising” from its name and replaced it with “creativity.” The Work like Nike+ Running and Nike+ Fuelband influenced that change. Traditional creatives had to accept what they thought wasn’t creative had become creative, or even transcended what it meant.
The creative archetype: Designer & Engineer
Red Bull Stratos (2012)
On 14 October 2012, Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian skydiver, jumped from a helium balloon from space onto Earth. From the jump to the ground, it was merely ten minutes but over 10 million users viewed live, setting a record for the "live stream with the most concurrent views ever on YouTube.”
This was several years in the making. There were rumors of this project in early 2010 but it was met with a lawsuit later that year. It took until February of 2012 for the project to resume.
Why it mattered: Until then, every advertising, creative, and marketing activity took place on Earth. This was the first time such an activity left the surface of Earth and went to space, drastically raising the bar for any brand, marketer, or creative.
I have an allergic reaction every time I hear the word “bravery” used in marketing and advertising. I find it insensitive to anyone who is risking their lives for their line of work. Red Bull Stratos is one piece of work that might qualify for using that word. If something went wrong, Baumgartner could have died. After Red Bull Stratos, I got multiple clients asking us to give them “a Red Bull idea.” Whether they meant it or not is not important. It gave permission to marketers to think not only creatively but also audaciously about brand-building.
The irony is that this work wasn’t entered into award shows. Yet, it was one piece of work everyone knew and talked about that year and several years after that. It had that kind of influence.
The creative archetype: Marketer
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Nike “Breaking2” (2018)
In December 2016, Nike announced its ambition to break the two-hour marathon barrier, one previously deemed impossible. Most questioned whether it would really be possible to achieve the “holy grail of running.” In May of the following year, an event was held in a closed course to test this premise. The winner of the race, Eliud Kipchoge, came close but missed the barrier by 25 seconds and the attempt failed.
The failure did not matter. Nike Zoom VaporFly Elite, the shoe worn by Kipchoge and a few other elite runners sponsored by Nike, was a product consumers couldn’t buy. However, this bold attempt caught so much attention of the running world that by 2020, the shoe’s offspring were everywhere and dominated the market. So much so that at a major running event in Japan in 2021, 95% of the 210 runners participating in it wore Nike.
Image: Nike
Why it mattered: Back in 2013, I wrote that brands needed to shift from telling stories about themselves, i.e. Brand Story, to making them about the real people, i.e. People Story. In other words, stories needed to be real. Breaking2 was so real that even Nike didn’t know how it would turn out.
This initiative was an ultimate product development and demonstration at the same time. Like the Red Bull Stratos, it was an effort that required multiple functions beyond marketing in a company to collaborate.
In the future, all ads will be product demos. We might be in that future already.
The creative archetype: Product Lead
Patagonia “Earth is now our only shareholder” (2022)
“If we have any hope of a thriving planet—much less a business—it is going to take all of us doing what we can with the resources we have. This is what we can do. —Yvon Chouinard” (Patagonia)
Why it mattered: This wasn’t an ad, nor was it a PR stunt. But it was the best version of an ad or a PR stunt precisely because it wasn’t. It wasn’t even awarded anything. Patagonia didn’t bother trying to win a creative award.
But this is one of the most creative acts any company has done.
The reason why I list this as something that caused/is causing a structural change for brands is this: brands need to have a point of view, a clear stance on issues, and be willing to be on one side, not both. When they try to cater to all and are indecisive or vague in their stance, they lose ground. CNN as of late is an example of that.
The creative archetype: Business Owner
Creativity no longer belongs to creatives only
Creatives, for a long time, were a protected species, particularly in marketing. We stayed up late and showed up late. We wore baseball hats to work. We worked hard but also played hard. We acted like kids. Adults tolerated us for the most part.
After digital made things radically transparent, AI is now causing the deindustrialization of creativity. Some would argue that creativity never belonged to creatives only. People with no discernible artistic talent can now create things that are pretty good. For free. It’s not AI that’s going to eat the creative species alive. It’s the non-creative species that uses AI that’s going to make us extinct.
So what do we need to do to evolve?
As I highlighted above, the role of a creative used to be simpler: create a compelling story. Over time, creatives evolved from storytellers to hackers, designers & engineers, to now business owners, not so much in what they did but rather how they thought. Like in evolution, species inherit previous characteristics and build on them.
The bad news about evolution is that it takes too long. It could take multiple generations for change to materialize because it is mostly based on adaptation. “An adaptation is a physical or behavioral characteristic that helps an organism to survive in its environment.” (Natural History Museum)
I recently came across a concept of exaptations. While adaptation is when “a feature is produced by natural selection for its current function,” exaptation is when “a trait, feature, or structure of an organism or taxonomic group takes on a function when none previously existed or that differs from its original function which had been derived by evolution.”
Here’s a simple example:
“Feathers were an adaptation for thermoregulation - their use for flight only came later. This means that feathers are an exaptation for flight, rather than an adaptation.”
Birds, before they were birds, developed feathers to keep themselves warm. They became birds when they realized that feathers could help them fly. Flying wasn’t part of nature’s plan.
Some might argue that Cannes is now more about marketing than creativity. Perhaps so if we define the narrow definition of creativity.
Whether you are a creative, a designer, an engineer, a product lead, a marketer, or a business owner, we all need to embrace the creative mindset. One day, all of us will be faced with the possibility of extinction. We need to take the skills we have and figure out new and different ways to use them.
We need to use our feathers, not just to keep ourselves warm but, to help us fly.