06/18/19: Cannes Daily

A CYNOPSIS MESSAGE FROM NCC MEDIA

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Cynopsis at CANNES LIONS

It’s Day 2 of Cannes Lions and the advertising fest is off to a strong rosé-infused start (Who would expect anything else?) Monday night on the French Riviera, WarnerMedia House hosted a welcome mixer on their terrace overlooking the Croisette, while Kerry Washington, Padma Lakshmi and Sophia Bush took in an intimate set by Ciara at the Spotify+Hulu party in the hills of La Californie (ironic, but true). Tonight, Mumford & Sons take the stage at the annual MediaLink dinner while Nas and Swiss Beats jump on the Spotify Beach stage. Perhaps appealing to a younger demo, Beyonce protégés Chloe x Halle will perform at FreeWheel Beach. Cynopsis took to the Palais for conversations with Chairman of WarnerMedia Robert Greenblatt, Oscar winning director Alfonso Cuaron, and Spotify Chief Content Officer Dawn Ostroff.

At a panel exploring the future of prestige content in the streaming age, Chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment Robert Greenblatt previewed his company’s upcoming streaming service, set to launch in the first quarter of 2020. “We have gathered all of the assets of WarnerMedia, from Warner Brothers films to HBO, the Turner Networks, DC Comics, Adult Swim, Looney Toons – there are a lot of brands within this company. It will be anchored by all the great programming of HBO,” said Greenblatt. “We’re going to fill that out with new original programming for everyone from kids up through to young adults, millennials – all of the demographics that HBO doesn’t typically program to – and put it all together in a service that will not have the 50,000 hours of Netflix but probably 10,000 hours. We’re not just putting 50,000 hours out there [and saying] good luck finding what you want out of it. We’re trying to put the best of the best of the best together.”

Greenblatt also acknowledged being in discussions with J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot about an exclusive deal with WarnerMedia, rumored to be worth near $500 million . “It is an arms race as every platform comes online and people want to keep the great creators and producers to themselves. We know there have been some extraordinary deals for people who are really worth it,” he said. “Just because you increase the volume doesn’t mean you increase the number of really talented people in the world who can produce these shows, so when they come along – as a J.J. Abrams does, once in a generation – you want to hold on them.”

In a panel discussing whether the influencer bubble has burst, Ian Forester from Whalar shared his research into influencer metrics, in an industry that is projected to reach $21 billion by 2021. By measuring brainwaves of followers responding to influencers, he discovered that influencer ads evoke much stronger emotions than TV ads: +277% emotional intensity and +87% memory recording. He recorded similar results for Facebook and YouTube ads. However, these platforms can all work in tandem. The influencer ads have a priming effect – if a person has viewed the influencer ads first, it improves responses to ads of the same product on TV, Facebook and YouTube.

Ben Jeffries, CEO of Influencer, noted that while there are currently 47 million influencers worldwide, 80% of influencers are inefficient. For example, vanity metrics have no impact on the brand. Instead of seeing how many followers an influencer has, saves and shares are the most important metrics. One should not look at views, but look at the numbers of people who have reacted to a post. As far as success rates and importance of influencer advertising, Jeffries pointed out that 86% of consumers turn to social media before making a purchase. Caspar Lee, CMO and co-creator of Influencer, gave his take on why influencers are seen as the black sheep of the advertising industry. “Part of me thinks that traditional media doesn’t love influencer marketing so there are a lot of articles about how it doesn’t work, because we’re after their ad dollars. When there is a new kid on the block it’s not always good for the old school people.”

On a panel about defining art and activism, director Alfonso Cuarón spoke about marrying content and social impact. According to Ai-jen Poo, Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, there have been decades worth of strides made on behalf of domestic workers in the US and Mexico since the success of Cuarón’s Academy Award winning film Roma, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2018. “You have to put yourself at the service of the organizations that you’re working with,” said Cuarón about partnering up with NDWA and Participant Media. “Not to tell them what to do, but for them to lead the message and you become a platform for that organization.” For Cuarón the key to marrying content and social impact, which he was acutely aware of while contributing to the campaign for domestic workers’ rights, is that the activism does not come off as a publicity stunt. “People smell when something is not genuine. These relationships they have to come from the standpoint of honesty,” he said. “As we were doing a whole publicity campaign, a fundamental part of it was social action and when to trigger it. We didn’t want the social action to be triggered as a selling point of the film. You don’t want to use the action for your profit.”

Festival participants flocking to the Terrace for Happy Hour managed to catch a chat with Spotify Chief Content Officer Dawn Ostroff and Grammy-nominated singer Camilla Cabello about the future of audio streaming. On the afternoon panel, Ostroff discussed recruiting the Obamas and what to expect from the former first couple. “Both the President and Mrs. Obama have incredible voices, in terms of what they want to say. The two of them, to their credit, have both decided they are going to do a podcast series each, in addition to producing other podcast series for us. The topics have not been determined yet, but we’re in discussions and I think it’s safe to say, people are really interested in what they have to say. And I think it’s the right time for them to be able to make a statement with Higher Ground, which is their production entity, about what’s important in life, in terms of personal, politics, culture – all of the above.”

Ostroff revealed that in the US, more people are currently listening to digital audio than are watching video or on social media. “I also think it’s exciting for brands because clearly there is a way in which brands can tell their stories through podcasts that is very unique,” said Ostroff. The platform, which is now available in 79 countries, has also shown that new generations gravitate to music from all over the world. “This generation, they really don’t feel like there are borders. We’re seeing so many people interested in music from all over the world – now that they have access to it.” Spotify has also revealed itself useful for artists using the data from the service to help them better serve fans. “You see very quickly who is listening and where they’re listening,” said Ostroff. “When you’re thinking about releasing music and you want to see which territories it’s doing well in, or if you’re going on tour and doing shows in certain parts of the country and you want to know what they like in certain cities, you can use the data that they have on the platform to see exactly who your fans are.”

Scene Around: Saturday Night Live producer (and Ben Affleck ex) Lindsay Shookus made it to a crowded outdoor 8a spin class on Monday, where the just-turned-39-year-old was greeted with birthday wishes (including from SoulCycle CEO Melanie Whelan) and a fruit and yogurt plate with a sparkler…Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder arrived in 3000-ton yacht so big it couldn’t fit in the Port du Cannes, so was parked along the sea wall…Comcast left brochures on Cannes hotel room doors calling for more addressable advertising, as well as unity in the industry on definitions and standards of addressable. Which brings us to…

A CYNOPSIS MESSAGE

Cynopsis’ That Big TV Conference

September 9-10 / NYC

SESSION SPOTLIGHT > Measurement Matters

The holy grail of unduplicated, consistent measurement across platforms remains a hot point for the media sector. This conversation with A+E Networks, CIMM, AMC Networks, Spark Foundry and Viacom will dive into the emergent models around standards, research, and what our community needs to do in order to solve these challenges.

VIEW FULL AGENDA

Sponsored by: Sinclair – NY Interconnect – Friend MTS – iSpot.tv – NCC Media – TV Time – Tubi

Q&A WITH NICOLLE PANGIS

Nicolle Pangis, CEO of NCC Media, a national TV advertising sales and data-driven technology company – a joint venture between Comcast, Charter and Cox – that aims to enable advertisers to reach their audiences across the full range of TV and digital environments, arrived in Cannes just in time to announce a partnership between NCC and OpenAP, the national consortium of select television publishers. The two will further standardize audience-based TV buying across the greater share of the TV ecosystem, improving advertisers’ ability to reach unified audiences across broadcast, cable and digital TV. Pangis sat down with Cynopsis to discuss advanced television and her take on some of the hot button topics of Cannes Lions.

What is your plan for Cannes?

Primarily to be with clients. A lot of our partners that we work with to drive the TV ecosystem are here as well, so it’s a really efficient way to meet all of our partners and stakeholders in one place. Most of what I’m doing from a panel perspective this week is around advanced television. There’s a lot of discussion around advanced television, because it’s a newer channel, in the sense that television is being driven with different data than it traditionally has been. There’s a lot of interest around learning about how we’re doing that and NCC is the leader in advanced television.

To someone who doesn’t know, how would you explain what’s different about the way NCC is doing things?

Linear television traditionally has been traded on panel-based survey data. That’s been really, really successful. Just in the United States, that has created a 70 billion – with a B – dollar industry, so that’s fantastic. As TV becomes more digital, with set top boxes and digital means of delivering content to consumers, the industry has become keenly aware that you can be much more census level driven to target advertising to consumers to make the content more relevant to consumers and the advertising more relevant to consumers. That’s really the crux of what advanced television’s about: using this new, census level data set to drive planning, targeting, and measurement of audiences for brands and for agencies.

Consumer privacy is a subject that still dominates. How are those debates affecting you?

Just by nature of the inventory we represent, which is primarily cable operators, cable networks, we have to be very, very privacy compliant. Everything that we do is aggregated privacy compliant, so we don’t have an issue with that. I think the notion of privacy really came to fruition because of some of the headlines we’ve seen on the digital side. That really is not what we are doing when we’re talking about data driven television. It’s really much more benign; we don’t know your address, we don’t know your name, we don’t know any of the things that are a privacy issue. Set top box data basically sees things – if there’s an advertisement for a show on a particular network, did you actually watch that show if you were exposed to the ad? This is the kind of targeting that we’re talking about. Those types of pieces of information, when aggregated in a privacy compliant manner, actually really are very helpful to brands and agencies to drive more appropriate messages to consumers. What we’re talking about when you aggregate data, it’s really about driving more relevant content and more relevant advertising to consumers, which is not the type of privacy compliance concerns that have bubbled up.

Many of the panels this year focus on matters of equality, humanity and diversity in advertising. As a female CEO, you probably get asked a lot about equality in the industry. Are we talking enough about it and is enough being done?

I have two little girls, 8 and 5, so I’m happy to answer the questions. My hope for them is that they don’t have to answer the questions. Basically, anywhere you go in the industry, there’s not enough senior women, there are not enough minorities in senior leader positions. I think there’s a lot of discussion about these topics and I’ve said it publicly before: a lot of discussion, not enough action. When there are opportunities to promote women and minorities into the most senior leadership positions, those are often passed over, in my experience. I think that’s one notion.

And then I think, there is the secondary notion that we’re starting to talk about more, which is women and minorities represented in media. You can’t be what you don’t see. So, women being superheroes and any sort of minority – Black, Chinese, Indian – in prevalent star positions in Hollywood shows, for example. There are a lot of initiatives that are really, really pushing this agenda. Why do you need to push it? You need to push it because that’s the only way to create change. It will take too long to create change if we don’t create catalyst for change.

MONDAY’S WINNERS OF THE CANNES LIONS AWARDS:

Health & Wellness Lions

Grand Prix
Ikea’s ‘ThisAbles’

McCann, Tel Aviv

Pharma Lions
Grand Prix
‘Breath of Life’
McCann Health, Shanghai

Design Lions
Grand Prix
Google’s ‘Creatability’
Google Creative Lab, New York

Outdoor Lions
Grand Prix
‘Nike Dream Crazy | Colin Kaepernick’ for Nike
Wieden+Kennedy, Portland

Print & Publishing Lions
Grand Prix
‘The Blank Edition’ for leading Lebanese daily newspaper, An-Nahar
Impact BBDO, Dubai

Film Craft Lions
Grand Prix
‘Resolve (Myanmar)’ for The New York Times
Final Cut, New York and DROGA5, New York

Cannes Lions Healthcare Network of the Year
1st Place McCann Health
2nd Place FCB Health
3rd Place Havas Health & You

Cannes Lions Healthcare Agency of the Year
1st Place McCann Health, Shanghai
2nd Place Area 23, An FCB Health Network Company, New York
3rd Place Havas Lynx, Manchester.

TUESDAY’S WINNERS OF THE CANNES LIONS AWARDS:

Entertainment Lions
Grand Prix
‘5B’ for Johnson & Johnson
UM Studios, New York

Entertainment Lions for Music
Grand Prix
‘This Is America’ for Childish Gambino
Doomsday Entertainment, Los Angeles

Grand Prix

‘Bluesman’ for Baco Exu Do Blues

Akqa, São Paulo

Entertainment Lions for Sport
Grand Prix
‘Dream Crazy’ for Nike

Wieden+Kennedy, Portland

Industry Craft Lions

Grand Prix
‘Just Do It HQ at the Church’ for Nike

Momentum Worldwide, New York and Momentum Canada, Toronto

Digital Craft Lions
Grand Prix
‘Address the Future’ for Carlings
Virtue, Copenhagen

TOMORROW AT CANNES LIONS

There’s so much more on tap. Wednesday features panels from Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman about raising the bar on the small screen, a talk about what should be communicated when the average video view is three seconds, and Cheryl Sandberg on the main stage. Stay tuned!