The ad industry may come to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for the awards, but if David Davies has done his job right, the quality of the educational sessions will be one of the main reasons they stick around.
Davies, managing director of content for Cannes Lions, squeezed in a speaking opportunity of his own last month when he visited Montreal for the annual C2 conference. While there, he spoke with Marketing about one of the biggest challenges for Cannes Lions attendees: finding time for all the experts who will be taking the stage next week.
“We know that the people who enjoy the festival the most are the ones who have planned it in advance the most,” he said. “The problem is, they’ll have their assistant or their teams logging them into lots of meetings. If you’re not careful, your diary will already be filled before you get to France.”
That’s one of the reasons Davies and his team made sure the latest version of its app launched earlier than usual, so that attendees could block out specific areas of interest based on their business needs. Davies also suggested attendees allowed for a certain degree of serendipity, noting that last-minute choices sometimes yield surprising results. While TED and other conferences have a very well-defined formula and tend to gravitate towards certain specialists, Davies also said he doesn’t have a particular profile for a Cannes Lions speaker.
“I think if you get too detailed about what the particular mix is, you start to deny people access, and I try not to do that,” he said.
Besides traditional sessions that look at creativity and marketing in general, Cannes Lions will include a two-day track specific to the legislative and other challenges within healthcare. The Innovation track, meanwhile, will delve into the best practices around the tools now available to marketers across various platforms.
“That is becoming very close to the core festival, because clearly technology is becoming a day to day reality in marketing and communication,” he said. “The question is how to make sure that the conference is not a sterile, data-only sort of event, or equally an old-fashioned creative event that isn’t enabled by all the advances you can have from data and technology.”
Also new in 2016 is a two-day look at Branded Entertainment, which will explore integration across everything from music to TV and beyond.
“Brands are under more pressure to find content that cuts through to consumers successfully, and entertainment companies are increasingly under structural change where they’re looking for new partners,” he said. “Cannes is the environment to have that discussion.”
Those disparate educational areas means Cannes Lions doesn’t come out with a main theme, such as C2’s “The Many,” Davies explained.
“One of the exciting things about Cannes is I don’t know what the themes will be. We facilitate the industry talking to itself to a certain extent. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of that.”
