3 things you need to know – Cannes day 3

Brands with purpose

Brands can no longer sit idly by, they must get involved, according to Coca-Cola’s Wendy Clark. Speaking on a panel on creativity at the Microsoft Beach, Clark said businesses such as Coca-Cola are fueled by “prosperous communities and economies” which they rely on to generate profit.

With that in mind, brands must do all they can to ensure they are addressing the big challenges facing the world. Hence why Coca-Cola has a target of becoming water neutral by 2020.

“A world with no water can’t have Coke,” she said. “The world’s challenges are epic and people and brands have to get involved. Brands cannot get a pass on this anymore.”

Jamie Oliver also used his talk at Cannes to call on brands to promote healthy eating and improve the health of their customers. Speaking to Marketing Week, he particularly called out supermarkets, which he thinks could do so much more to give people better access to healthy foods and education on nutrition.

He cited the example of Woolworths in Australia, which has set an aim to lower childhood obesity by 5% in the next five years. He wants more brands in the UK to lay out clear targets.

“It doesn’t mean just spending a load of money that you’ve skimmed off the top and given an agency to market out there. It’s talking to teachers and giving teachers the cash, the support or the tools to celebrate food to make their customers better customers and spend more money on the right things which their business will love. That is investing in the future. There’s still lots more to be done,” he added.

Twitter’s excited about video

Down at the Twitter Beach in Cannes, Twitter was outlining why automatically playing videos in its feed benefits consumers and advertisers alike and shared the most popular tweets so far at the festival.

Twitter has made a shift, for both consumers and advertisers to auto play video, which is how Vine has worked since it launched. Joel Lundenfeld, vice president of global brand strategy, claims this has resulted in a “huge uplift” in video views.

He said: “On the consumer side we see seven times more video completions then we saw before. For advertisers we only charge when the video is 100% viewed, instead of charging when one pixel shows up, it’s 100% viewable for three seconds.”

Lundenfeld says it’s something that advertisers are thanking the company for because as well as only charging for 100% viewable adverts, advertisers also benefit from the share ratios being high on video.

“The conversation that erupts around video is the most compelling aspect,” he said. The ‘speak beautiful’ campaign with Dove, which aims to turn negative conversations about body image into positive ones and also won a Cannes Lion award, received strong reaction. Twitter says that the moment the #SpeakBeautiful commercial was launched, there was an eruption of tweets.

Video also seems to be popular with delegates in Cannes as Twitter revealed that the number one retweeted and favourited tweet, with the hashtag #CannesLions, wasn’t from the many celebrity talks happening at the festival but from Vine star, Cody Johns, who was on stage at Twitter’s beach house creating a stop motion Vine.

How to make better creative

It was a day to be on the beach, with the latest in The Economist’s “Wake Up” series of talks tackling the idea of how to create better creative.

While digital and data offer marketers huge opportunities to engage with customers, creativity must remain at the heart if the “golden age” of marketing is to be achieved, according to P&G’s Marc Pritchard. Key to great creative is a number of things, including diverse teams, taking both a global and local approach and making sure human don’t get in the way of creativity.

“We sometimes talk too much about technology and changes in media and not enough about the ideas and insight that drives the work.”

Alison Dew, Dell’s global marketing vice president

Speaking separately, Coca-Cola’s Clark also said brands must not get too bogged down in defining creativity and what is effective. She judged the creative effectiveness Lion this year, which went to Volvo Trucks for its “Epic Split” campaign, and said that as “creative and effectiveness are in the eye of the beholder” they just had to judge the “most engaging results”.

“All of the work we gave awards to was stuff that made us jealous. Bodies of work we wished our brands could have done,” she said.