3 things you need to know – Cannes Day 1

Cannes 2015: Featuring Volvo, Mars and Heineken programmatic, here’s the top takeaways from day one at The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

Programmatic won’t save your brand as much money as you thought

For many brands programmatic is seen as a cost saving tool, enabling them to create greater efficiencies by ensuring the creative gets in front of a targeted audience. That is still the case but Heineken warns that programmatic isn’t as “cheap” as everyone thinks.

“Programmatic is cost saving but it is not as cheap as we thought. It unearths opportunities but we had to do a lot of tagging and tracking – we had to step back a bit,” said Ron Amran, Heineken’s senior media director, speaking at a TubeMogul event at Cannes.

He said programmatic cannot just be a cost saving exercise and brands should be looking to use it to make their marketing “smarter”.

“We promised a conservative number to give back to finance and we were able to save money but that can’t be the only reason [you use programmatic]. It made us smarter and more effective, we had more data to put back in to the Heineken USA engine,” he added.

At Mars, marketing is like architecture

Speaking at Cannes Lions, Mars’ chief marketing officer Bruce McColl likened his profession to another – an architect.

He said: “[As a marketer] you have to understand the rules of physics, you have to have a creative idea about what you want to build and you have to tap that into the technology available to bring that to life and manage all three independently.”

It was a good night for Volvo

The Swedish car manufacturer won Grand Prix in the promo and activation category in the Cannes Lions awards for its ‘Lifepaint’ campaign, with Grey London. It created a washable reflective spray to improve cyclists’ safety on the roads by making them glow at night.

Keeping to the cycle theme, the Grand Prix for the press category was won by City of Buenos Aires for its posters highlighting the public bike system being available 24/7.

Back to Volvo, which also won Grand Prix for direct in its campaign ‘Interception’ with Grey US. The creative looked to cut through the masses of Super Bowl adverts by using rivals ads to promote its own brand. It asked viewers to tweet in when they saw a car advert with the hashtag #VolvoContest and who they think deserves a Volvo XC60.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntMit7V27LI

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