A Cannes Lions Jury Presents: The Art of Branded Entertainment E-Book

• Herausgeber: Peter Owen Publishers
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A special, première release of this groundbreaking book on the art of advertising and brand management to coincide with the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. A collection of essays from jurors on the 2017 Lions Entertainment award. Drawing on years of experience and expertise, working for brands such as Mini, Coca-Cola, Lego, Google, Skype and Intel and for media and advertising giants such as Bartle Bogle Hegarty and MediaCom, the contributors provide a fun and far-reaching study of the evolution of branding and the future of advertising. Live television viewing is decreasing as audiences choose to stream television shows and films via catch-up, YouTube, Netflix, iTunes and other digital platforms. With that shift, intrusive commercial advertising breaks are quickly losing their power as the leading way in which brands communicate with viewers. For the past five years the Cannes Lions international Festival of Creativity has been grappling with how the entertainment and marketing worlds can collaborate in fresh and innovative ways, rather than unsophisticated product placement. In 2017 twenty specialist jurors considered a wide range of ideas submitted in the relatively uncharted category of branded entertainment, regarded by many as the future of advertising. For days they deliberated on what made an entry more or less successful. This book conveys their comprehensively debated conclusions in a series of stimulating essays authored by each juror. Contributors to The Art of Branded Entertainment: Monica Chun, President of PMK.BNC; Jules Daly, president of RSA Films; Ricardo Dias, CMO of Anheuser-Busch InBev's Grupo Modelo in Mexico; Samantha Glynne, Global Vice President of Branded Entertainment at TV production giant FremantleMedia; Carol Goll, ICM Partners Global Head of Branded Entertainment; Gabor Harrach, the New York-based film and TV producer and former Head of Entertainment Content at Red Bull Media House; Marissa Nance, Managing Director for Multicultural Content Marketing & Strategic Partnerships at Media Superpower OMD; Toan Nguyen, partner at Jung von Matt/SPORTS; Luciana Olivares, CCO of Latina Media in Peru; Marcelo Páscoa, Head of Global Brand Marketing at Burger King; PJ Pereira, Founder and Creative Chairman of Pereira O'Dell; Misha Sher, Vice-President at MediaCom Worldwide; Pelle Sjoenell, Bartle Bogle Hegarty's Global Chief Creative Officer; Tomoyo Suzuki, CEO of Stories International; Jason Xenopoulos, Chief Vision Officer and Chief Creative Officer of VML.

Leseprobe

‘The supremacy of interruption-based advertising is over. But what happens next? PJ Pereira and the other experts help us to understand the consequences of the radical shift through The Art of Branded Entertainment.’

– Dr Bjoern Asmussen

Senior Lecturer in Marketing, Oxford Brookes University

‘A must-read in case you want to answer “senator, we run great content” instead of “senator, we run ads during a congressional hearing”.’

– Fernando Machado

Global Chief Marketing Officer, Burger King

Peter Owen Publishers

Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL, UK

Peter Owen books are distributed in the USA and Canada by Independent Publishers Group/Trafalgar Square

814 North Franklin Street, Chicago, IL 60610, USA

Copyright © 2018 Monica Chun, Jules Daly, Ricardo Dias, Samantha Glynne, Carol Goll, Gabor Harrach, Marissa Nance, Toan Nguyen, Luciana Olivares, Marcelo Pascoa, PJ Pereira, Misha Sher, Pelle Sjoenell, Tomoya Suzuki, Jason Xenopoulos

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.

The moral rights of the authors are hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The authors have made every effort to cite their sources and attribute copyright where necessary. Any omissions brought to the publisher’s attention will be rectified on a reprint or new edition.

Paperback ISBN

978-0-7206-2058-0

Epub ISBN

978-0-7206-2059-7

Mobipocket ISBN

978-0-7206-2060-3

PDF ISBN

978-0-7206-2061-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design: Moses Kelany

Typeset by Octavo Smith Publishing Services

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Left to right: Pelle Sjoenell, Marissa Nance, Jason Xenopoulos, Carol Goll, Gabor Harrach, Al MacCuish, Samantha Glynne, Luciana Olivares, Jules Daly, Monica Chun, Tim Ellis, PJ Pereira, Misha Sher, Amanda Hill, Steven Kalifowitz, Toan Nguyen, Tomoya Suzuki, Julian Jacobs, Marcelo Pascoa, Ricardo Dias

Cannes Lions actually started in Venice in 1954 as an advertising film festival with a single group of people looking at 187 entries from fourteen countries. Almost seventy years later the festival has grown somewhat. It moved to the French Riviera, incorporated new forms of advertising and increased the number of its juries to more than twenty groups of people from all over the world.

Yet, despite all the knowledge shared, the conclusions and perspectives developed in the judging rooms, this is the first book ever published by a Cannes jury.

My guess is that some may have thought about it before, but the amount of work it takes to organize the ideas from leaders scattered across the planet must have always discouraged our predecessors. In our case, the irresponsible bravery to overcome these obstacles came from a sense of responsibility. The field we discussed together is too important and our discussions way too inspiring to be left with us alone as we haunted the hallways of the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès. That’s why not only the authors but everyone else around us who supported the plan deserves to be excited to see this tome out in the world.

Starting with the relentless team who wrote each of the individual chapters – some more than one. Those who endured my rain of emails, calls, messages and obsessive revision requests: Sam, Ricardo, Gabor, Marcelo, Monica, Carol, Misha, Jules, Toan, Tomo, Pelle, Jason, Luciana and Marissa, I hope in the end you are all as proud of the result as I am. Al MacCuish, Amanda Hill, Julian Jacobs, Tim Ellis, Steven Kalifowitz, as members of the jury who couldn’t join us on the writing, I hope you feel your thoughts and contributions are represented, too.

Also, we have to thank Terry Savage, Phil Thomas, Jose Papa and Lisa Berlin from Cannes Lions for putting together this extraordinary group of people and Tiffany Spoden and her team for keeping us on track during our endless debates.

Getting the book produced also required the help of a lot of people. From Pereira O’Dell we have Moses Kelany, who designed the cover art with the support of Owen Bly, plus Denise Corazza, Russ Nadler and Christina Hadly, who helped manage the complex legalities of a book with so many authors. Jasmine Gothelf, from FremantleMedia, has put together the index of case studies at the end of the book, which the team at VML South Africa – Ernst Lass, Hans Liebenberg, Hayley Montgomery, Hannes Matthysen and Loki Magerman – have then turned into a website our readers can now visit to find all the work mentioned in these pages.

Finally, to the team at Peter Owen – Nick Kent, Antonia Owen, Sam Oates and Simon Smith – who kept the focus on the potential of this project and not on the challenges we would face to get it done, our sincere gratitude.

That’s the full crowd behind the first book from a Cannes jury. People whose passion and enthusiasm compensated for our naive notion that maybe we could get this project off the ground, when no one else had dared before. To all of you, my most sincere thank you.

We are all firsts together.

PJ Pereira

FOREWORD

Imagine if none of us had ever seen a commercial break. Not one. They haven’t been invented yet. Then someone comes with a pitch: ‘So, Mrs CMO, we’ve had an idea. To get your message heard we will pay content channels to pause the series your audience is watching, play our ad then let them go back to the normal programming!’

Which brand in their right mind would ever want to associate themselves with such a terrible user experience?

The only reason why we still do it is because there are enough of us out there, old folks who haven’t totally realized things don’t have to be that way. The awakening is happening, though, and there is actually an entire generation who, like the fictional CMO above, has never seen an advertisement until recently.

It happened to me, actually.

It was like being shaken, literally. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, the fear of a big earthquake is a real thing, so by the time my eyes were open the sheets were pulled over to the other side of the bed. Four inches from my nose was the face of my son Francisco. He’s eleven, and that matters. He still had his hand on my shoulder from trying to wake me up with such urgency.

‘Dad, you gotta get out of advertising.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because it’s so annoying,’ he replied.

Kids have that ability to state the obvious with such candour and simplicity that it makes it impossible to ignore.

Which brings us to France, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where I met the co-authors of this book.

Cannes Lions is arguably the largest and most prestigious competition of brand ideas in the world. In 2017 alone it received more than ten thousand paying delegates, including lots of chief marketing officers and advertising executives eager to refresh their ideas. In the halls and rooms of the Palais des Festivals we find them mixed with creative minds of all sorts, technologists and deal-makers of many nationalities, squeezing themselves in to watch the winners in twenty-three categories, including ours, Branded Entertainment. At five years old, and having had several name changes along the way – Branded Content, Branded Content and Entertainment and, finally, Branded Entertainment – this young category is considered by some to be the real future of the festival and the industry.

In the last ten years the evolution of marketing has been documented by the juries working at the Palais during the festival. A look at past winners will show when the industry started to incorporate technology, design, PR and media thinking into the work and the stories we tell, not just in the way they are distributed but also how they are conceived and told; it will show how we absorbed formerly alien techniques to generate new expressions of creativity and fresh ways of telling our stories. And that’s always good – except it wasn’t enough. That’s what my son Francisco wanted me to understand with his seismic shake-up.

The most fundamental change in our business didn’t come from our own hands, wasn’t borne out of new formats or disciplines. It came not from what we have been doing within our field but from its upside-down, from consumers, tech-visionaries and the entertainment ecosystem who suddenly realized the cornerstone of our trade, buying people’s time, doesn’t make any sense if the owners of that time aren’t the ones trying to sell it. According to Nielsen’s ‘State of Traditional TV’, between 2012 and 2017 television viewing in the eighteen-to-twenty-four age group in the USA dropped by almost ten hours a week, reaching its lowest ever ratings. In the space of five years, close to half of this age group’s traditional TV viewing time has migrated to other activities or streaming.1

Suddenly, the bizarro world is us.

Cue all the on-demand services out there: from YouTube to Netflix to Twitch to iTunes … As they expand and, in their gruesome march, eliminate the places where advertising used to exist, they also leave us with little choice other than to become the content ourselves. Our work is either worth pressing ‘play’ (instead of the newest show, video game or YouTuber video), or it will just disappear into the shrinking parts of the media where ads can still be bought.

And it’s not only the audience that is shifting. The talent (and therefore the quality) is migrating, too. Look at the 2017 Emmys, for example. Of the twenty-six statues given that year, half went to platforms with no advertising support whatsoever, and, of the remaining thirteen, five went to Hulu, which is only partially supported by ads. If Hollywood ceases to need advertisers’ money to justify their annoying breaks, brands will lose their voice, their most important opportunity to be heard; or, at least, the voice we got so used to being able to count on.

If Cannes is the frontline in the battle for advertising and its promotional warriors, the Branded Entertainment category is our resistance, our hope. The exploration of this new territory is where brands have to compete for an opportunity to be heard against all the ‘unbranded’ content on the planet, the highest creative bar we have ever had to face. A space that is not only difficult to inhabit but uncertain. A universe architected from the inside, developed as we explore it. Understood as we judged. What are the limits, the rules?

It was up to this group of twenty people to decide. Not because we are the wisest and most knowledgeable but because we were the ones in that room. Don’t get me wrong; every individual in this group is highly accomplished, and combined we had accolades that would last for generations. But what made our choices important wasn’t our pasts but the fact that we sat there and watched. Every single entry. In its entirety. For days, with quick breaks to eat and sleep. Then we let our guts and our brains tell us which ones stood out, and then we discussed.

It helped that from the start we agreed we weren’t there to teach anyone but rather to listen, to learn on behalf of the industry so that we could share what we saw and felt as we browsed through thousands of ideas created by the best agencies in the world. That helped us to keep our goal in sight and pick a list of winners that inspire and teach us how to get better at what we do.

This book is the result of that experience, the essence of what we learned.

In order to outlive 2017, though, our conclusions couldn’t just relate to the winners we picked that year. After the festival was over we took all we discussed, everything we absorbed and concluded during that week then applied them to winners from previous years and even to campaigns that had never won. We set ourselves a mission to adjust our insights so that they can apply to any work aiming to attract the time of the consumer; now, in the past or the future. A ‘branded entertainment DeLorean’.

I hope you like it.

The book opens with Part 1: The Need, which focuses not on the emergency of experimenting and moving towards less intrusive ways of messaging but on what branded entertainment can do for a brand based on all the work we have seen. Starting with Ricardo Dias, CMO of Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Grupo Modelo in Mexico, and Gabor Harrach, the New York-based film and television producer and former Head of Entertainment Content at Red Bull Media House who dive together into the definition of this space and what it adds to the marketing mix. Still in Part 1, Marcelo Pascoa, Head of Global Brand Marketing at Burger King, takes an in-depth look into what it means for the industry to have to earn time instead of simply buy it. Finally, Monica Chun, PMK•BNC’s COO, shares her perspective of how branded entertainment isn’t only the content itself but, often, the news it creates.

Part 2: The Art of Branded Entertainment addresses the core theme of this book, and it opens with challenging how brands have been thinking about their presence in entertainment experiences. Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s Global Chief Creative Officer Pelle Sjoenell together with Jason Xenopoulos, Chief Vision Officer of VML and Chief Creative Officer of VML Europe, Middle East and Africa, share their observations of what happened when advertisers shifted from product placement to what they call ‘brand placement’ – a core idea that influences all the chapters that follow in this section of the book. Next we go back to basics with Tomoya Suzuki, CEO of STORIES, who looks at how branded entertainment needs to reincorporate the core principles of storytelling from Hollywood in order to have a better context surrounding their brand ideas. In fact, one of these principles was clearly so important that we decided to give it its own chapter, ‘Amping the Tension’, by Pelle Sjoenell. And if tension is important in scripted stories, it’s even more fundamental in unscripted ones. Gabor Harrach tackles a desire expressed by so many marketing professionals who seem to believe that the only way to do it nowadays is to show the real world. Based on his personal experience as a documentarian, he shares his perspective on how a brand can stand out with reality-based stories. Finally, Luciana Olivares, CCO of Latina Media in Peru, shares her inspiring perspective on how the creators’ motivations and emotions, especially anger, can become a way to turn brands and causes into content that changes the lives of the audience.

Part 3: Opportunities Ahead addresses the unexplored voids under-represented among the winners and the overall standouts in the industry, starting with Misha Sher, Vice-President at MediaCom Sport and Entertainment, who sprints into how, despite sports being the ultimate form of entertainment, brands don’t seem to be chasing excellence in this field; or, if they are, then they don’t participate in the competitions, which is also a missed opportunity that hurts the industry as a whole. This is followed by Toan Nguyen, partner at Jung von Matt/SPORTS, on how we not only need more sports but a greater variety of sports, notably eGames, a competition that currently attracts a massive audience and some sponsorship but still seems to lack the creativity invested in its older physical sibling. Then comes Marissa Nance, Managing Director for Multicultural Content Marketing and Strategic Partnerships at media superpower OMD, on how to add more research, media and distribution science to the art of branded entertainment.

Finally, Part 4: The Business, is dedicated to the business of branded entertainment. It opens with Jules Daly, President of RSA Films, dissecting the Hollywood way of making stories popular, followed by ICM Partners’ Global Head of Branded Entertainment Carol Goll who asks what’s in it for the stars. Brands have their needs, as do consumers, but it is when initiatives also take into consideration the needs of the artists involved that the partnerships can really flourish. The opportunity of scale, going from local to global, from campaigns to seasons, is the theme of the next chapter, in which Samantha Glynne raises important questions to help brands and agencies learn how to build their audiences in the same way that the entertainment businesses does. Jason Xenopoulos comes back on next for his encore, analysing how some of the biggest winners in our competition hail from hidden corners of bigger marketing operations or from marketers and countries that don’t usually have the biggest budgets in the world – ‘brand ninjutsu’, as he calls it – only half a surprise, considering that boldness and innovation often comes from the most underscrutinized processes and the most focused groups of people.

And to round it all off, me, PJ Pereira, co-founder and Creative Chairman of Pereira O’Dell and President of the Cannes Lions 2017 Branded Entertainment jury. I will wrap it up with the backstage perspective of how some of this year’s entries and previous winners adjusted their businesses to allow ideas that appear so much more expensive than they could theoretically afford.

Cut. Reset.

I know, it’s a lot – of information, nuance, analysis, forecasting … Ideas generated after a week locked in a dark room watching brands trying to keep us entertained, then a few months digesting what we found. So, take it slowly. Look around. Think. These pages aren’t meant to be read in one sitting, and many chapters mention the same case studies because they deserve to be analysed from multiple angles instead of just taking individual winners and looking in depth at every angle of each – there are other resources and better places to do that than in this book.

If our goal was to learn on behalf of the industry, then this is our homework, our project, dissected to allow ourselves and you, the reader, to have the widest perspective ever put together on paper on what’s behind, beside and above the nascent idea of branded entertainment; an anthology of thoughts and questions to help guide you on your own enquiry. What is the right balance between my brand’s message and the fun it’s supposed to provide? How do I craft ideas that stand out in the entertainment landscape that has much more – I mean, way more – money than any brand? Or do we have to? Can we partner? Co-own? Pilot something that can grow by itself later? What can we do without the limitations of time or real estate but with the marketing responsibilities our ‘competitors’ in entertainment don’t have to carry? Should we go long form, longer form or stay short where we can reign strong?

We, marketers and agency people, are living through the most profound reinvention of what we do in generations. We may not have all the answers yet, but if instead of trying to force our theories we let the best work speak, clarity will eventually happen.

This book presents the perspectives of this unlikely group of people who ended up locked in a dark room in France for a week in a relentless debate of what was great and what was just good, then trying to understand why. An experience that deeply changed the way we look at work, and we hope that it will impact on yours, too.

The chapters ahead belong to each author individually. They come from what we saw together but also from our own individual experiences as marketers, creatives, media, talent agents, publishers, networks, sports and games specialists and technologists. The opinions, therefore, are different, sometimes dissonant, but we believe that to be a good thing. By allowing the voices to stay independent we can have a more accurate depiction of the nuances of such a rich process – including the global aspect of it, since each contributor comes from a different place: South Africa, the UK, Brazil, the USA, Russia, Mexico, Peru, Japan and Germany.

The opinions here come out of work that has already been done, work that has been seen, judged and archived. They may teach, maybe even guide, but never fully apply to the next challenge landing on your desk. That is your job. We just hope what we learned and the work we picked, for the awards and the book, are a good warm-up to what you have to do next when it’s your turn to push this industry forward.

Happy reading.

PJ Pereira

President of the Cannes Lions Entertainment Jury, 2017,

San Francisco, 2018

1. Nielsen’s ‘The State of Traditional TV: Updated With Q2 2017 Data’ https://www.marketingcharts.com/featured-24817

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword PJ Pereira

PART 1: THE NEED

Digitally Born Killers (or What Branded Entertainment Can Do for Brands) Ricardo Dias and Gabor Harrach

The Battle of Time and the Fallacy of the Short Attention Span Marcelo Pascoa

The News It Creates Monica Chun

PART 2: THE ART OF BRANDED ENTERTAINMENT

From Product Placement to Idea Placement Pelle Sjoenell and Jason Xenopoulos

Back to Basics: Principles of Storytelling Applied to Branded Entertainment Tomoya Suzuki

Amping the Tension Pelle Sjoenell

Everyone Wants a Documentary (or Don’t Be Afraid to Live Your Truth) Gabor Harrach

Feeding Our Anger Luciana Olivares

PART 3: OPPORTUNITIES AHEAD

Where’s the Excellence in Sports? Misha Sher

The Future of Entertainment: Hollywood, Sports and Gaming, Gaming, Gaming! Toan Nguyen

Art, Meet Science Marissa Nance

PART 4: THE BUSINESS

The Hollywood Way Jules Daly

What’s in It for the Stars? Carol Goll

Ideas That Scale: How to Create a Global TV Format Samantha Glynne

Advertising Ninjutsu and the Secret Art of Operating in the Shadows Jason Xenopoulos

Think Like a Marketer, Behave Like an Entertainer, Move Like a Tech Start-up: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Three Cannes Grands Prix PJ Pereira

About the Authors

Index of Works Cited

Branded entertainment is:

Entertainment produced by brands

Advertising you don’t want to skip

Marketing made to be sought and not designed to interrupt entertainment

Advertisements that are both a good financial investment for brands and a good investment of time for audiences

Advertisements that attract their own audience instead of buying time to be watched or played

Part 1

THE NEED

DIGITALLY BORN KILLERS (OR WHAT BRANDED ENTERTAINMENT CAN DO FOR BRANDS)

Ricardo Dias, Anheuser-Busch InBev

Gabor Harrach, Consultant, formerly of Red Bull Media House

Call us brand detectives. As we began writing this chapter, something happened in the world (or in the skies above us) that might change the impact of branded entertainment for ever: Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket was launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida; its payload Musk’s personal red Roadster, an electric sports car built by his other brand, Tesla. Its humble mission, to orbit the sun (and Mars) for hundreds of millions of years. Strapped inside the Roadster is the so-called Starman, a mannequin in a branded SpaceX spacesuit.

It happened live on YouTube and everywhere else. It was a breathtaking demonstration of technological and marketing power. It was also beautiful (you know it, because you saw it). David Bowie’s Life on Mars? played from the space car radio while our blue planet rotated slowly in the background. And it seemed that this song was written for exactly that magical moment. Days later we and countless others still watched the Starman live on YouTube. The images seemed to pick up where Red Bull’s space jump left off in 2012. Was this a marketing film that would last millions of years? Was this a test flight or a real space mission? Or was it just a power demonstration by Elon Musk, because he could? It’s probably all of the above. And it taught us a forceful lesson: not only is the threshold for marketing stunts now higher than ever (literally) but also the boundary between branded entertainment and the reality of a brand seems to have shifted to an extent that marketing itself becomes the brand. Only a day after the successful space car launch Tesla reported ‘its biggest [quarterly] loss ever’.1 However, Tesla’s stock price continues to soar like Elon Musk’s rockets. And only a few weeks later the energy-drink maker Red Bull announced a mission to the moon for 2019, featuring Audi lunar quattro rovers. The moon mission will be aired live across multiple devices and in various forms. Not even the sky seems to be the limit any more.

In this chapter we will look at the role branded entertainment plays as part of an increasingly complex and shifting marketing mix. We investigate a mysterious void that turns customers away from traditional advertising and commercials, and we try to identify the culprit behind the void.

Who or what kills advertising as we know it? Please buckle up. It’s quite a ride.

Our detective story starts in Cannes. For most of the year, it is a sleepy resort town on the French Riviera with sandy beaches and palatial hotels, but once a year it becomes ground zero for all things (and everyone) advertising – our crime scene.

The need

‘We decided we are not here to teach the world, to teach you guys, what we think branded entertainment was,’ said jury president PJ Pereira at the 2017 Lions Entertainment award ceremony in Cannes while more than two thousand delegates anxiously focused on him. ‘We didn’t pick work that matched what we had been pitching to our clients and that we were trying to get sold during the last few years. We were here with a very humble attitude to learn on behalf of all of you and to try to understand not what branded entertainment is but what it is becoming.’

The two authors of this chapter were part of this journey, learning and investigating to get a grasp on the elusive yet fashionable but still evolving term ‘branded entertainment’. Along with PJ and our co-jurors, we spent the better part of a week in a dark, windowless jury room deep in the bowels of the massive concrete structure known as the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès de Cannes – in the middle of June on the French Riviera! The jury rooms are notorious for their freezing air conditioning and even colder food. (Sorry, Cannes Lions, but both rumours are actually true.) At the very least it kept our heads cool and our minds sharp during the sometimes heated debates. When we left the jury room we had found a few hints and clues to the big question. But to fully understand what branded entertainment is becoming we had first to explain its need and answer two fundamental questions:

Why

do people from all over the world and almost all demographics increasingly ignore content that is being forced upon them (be it by publishers, advertisers or traditional television)?

What

does branded entertainment ultimately achieve for brands? (Having worked for content-loving brands like Anheuser-Busch and Red Bull, we might have some answers but even more surprises for you.)

At the end of this chapter we offer a few ideas on how to create great branded entertainment. For an in-depth blueprint, please look forward to Part 2 of this book, ‘The Art of Branded Entertainment’. Or, to put it in the language of our detective story, it’s all about the motive, the means and the opportunity.

Let’s start by looking at why so many of us have a motive to avoid advertising.

On-demand lifestyles

The way we consume content is closely linked to our lifestyles. We live in an on-demand economy (or shared society). We move around town on demand (Uber, Lyft, Zipcar). We date (Tinder, Bumble, Raya) and listen to music on demand (Spotify, Apple Music). We have the house cleaned on demand (Handy, Hux, Whizz). We eat on demand (Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Caviar). We watch content on demand (YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video). There’s a convenient app for almost everything. We rate services and value experiences and have less time for anything unwanted, random or coincidental. We’re accustomed to paying for exactly what we want and when we want it and increasingly refuse to pay for anything (including TV channels) we don’t need. We increasingly cut the cord from cable TV companies and use ad blockers, creating a void and leaving traditional advertising platforms behind. PJ is not the only industry professional who felt the seismic shake-up close to home, as he has described in the foreword to this book. Ricardo, one of the authors of this chapter, also experienced how the distaste for commercials has already engulfed his own family members, especially the younger ones, the ones who are ‘digital natives’ or, in an even stronger and more fashionable term, ‘digitally born’.

What happened to my cartoon?

A few years ago Ricardo and his family went to his home country of Brazil for end-of-year festivities. They chose Trancoso as their destination, a beautiful yet remote beach in the northern part of the country, very close to where the Portuguese first settled a little over 500 years ago. Even though the hippie-turned-chic beach had progressed dramatically over the last two decades, their rental property did not have an internet connection, so his four-year-old’s content craving had to be met in the good old local TV broadcast – a first for her.

On their first night, while Ricardo and his wife were having dinner with their friends, their daughter was enjoying her coconut ice cream and watching a Brazilian cartoon on TV in the family room next door. All of a sudden she shouted, ‘Daddy!’ He immediately ran over, thinking something must have happened, to find her looking at him, pointing at the TV in disgust. She then asked him, ‘What happened to my cartoon?’ He looked over to the TV and back at her and reluctantly broke the news: ‘This is a commercial, sweetie.’

The void

Notable dictionaries describe a void as ‘an emptiness caused by the loss of something’.

Let’s translate this into marketing lingo. The void is ‘the absence of an audience caused by the loss of interest of consumers in advertising’. This results in the audience leaving traditional distribution platforms such as cable TV, a process described as ‘cord-cutting’. Others, like Ricardo’s daughter, are too young and too ‘digitally born’ even to remember linear television. They are ‘cord nevers’.

Both having worked for major brands in the past ten years, we had no choice other than to develop strategies on how to engage the developing void crisis.

Engaging the void

When thinking of brand communication, marketers have to keep in mind what their consumers – loyal and potential – want from them. It is now clear that people no longer want to be interrupted. They don’t want to have products pushed at them while their time is being taken away. However, one thing has not changed over time: they do like being entertained.

Our logical conclusion: branded entertainment needs to fill the void. As with so many other recipes for success, this sounds much easier to do than actually getting it done.

With an abundance of entertainment options nowadays, consumers are still on the hunt for a product that resolves a specific need. Because people still like to hear from brands, there is opportunity in making their time valuable. However, consumer habits are changing faster than ever, leading to elusive audiences.

Let’s try to paint a more detailed picture of this mysterious void. Since almost all marketers are now storytellers, we keep approaching it like a detective story. Changing lifestyles have created a motive for the void. But it is technology that provides the means and opportunity for the consumer to kill traditional advertising by avoidance.

Avoidance by technology

An entry from our detective’s notebook: easy-to-obtain technology has enabled media avoidance owing to many factors, and some of the following are culprits:

Shift to mobile across global markets

Ad blockers

Ad-free media platforms (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Spotify)

The DVR (digital video recorder) effect

The void in numbers

We didn’t come to Cannes to judge creative work by the numbers. We watched the work as it is and then put its impact in context.

You didn’t buy this book to get filibustered by statistics. You’re looking for insights and clarity.

But this is a detective story. And we need to put two and two together. So let us measure how technology helped the consumer avoid advertising and extend the void.

The consumer-research platform eMarketer surveyed the growth of the void and cord-cutting. In 2017, before the year was even over, 22.2 million adults in the USA had already cut the cord on cable, satellite or telco TV services (that’s up a frightening 33% from 16.7 million in 2016): 94% of consumers skip TV ads completely, and 236 million desktop browsers and 380 million mobile browsers were using ad-blocking software by the end of 2016 (up 38% from a year prior).2

Media fragmentation

If this testimony wasn’t alarming enough for advertisers and publishers, let us take a look at the collateral damage that media fragmentation is bringing about to the traditional advertising model. Currently, there is an abundance of choices in entertainment and media, with weekly emergences of new distributors and content creators.

There used to be half-a-dozen major studios competing in Hollywood. Now several dozen streaming services and production entities have disrupted and fragmented the film business. The same fragmentation happened in the TV and music industry. Where a handful of serious competitors once dominated the market, a multitude of new competitors are now fighting over audience and revenue.

We wonder, is the newly emerged, easy-to-obtain technology the elusive, digitally born killer of the old advertising model, or does it merely play the part of an enabler for the real killer?

Overstimulated communities

Throughout the industry there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of content consumed as well as produced, with non-ad-supported platforms increasingly winning over more viewers. Reportedly, the video-streaming service Netflix will invest $8 billion in creating original content in 2018 and add to the total of more than 500 scripted shows already developed and produced in 2017.

Of the many millions who are watching the content (and this development) there is one group with a particularly keen interest in the fragmentation: the brands.

Brands don’t want to fall victim to the overstimulated communities and have their messages lost in the void – too much is at stake.

Many brands believe that to remain relevant the move from an interruptive advertiser to one that attracts an audience is inevitable. There are quite a few examples of brands that became successful entertainers. The list starts to shine a light on what branded entertainment can do for brands.

Over the past twenty years LEGO has transformed itself from a traditional toymaker into a media powerhouse. Its beloved toy characters rival Disney’s on the small, large and digital screens.

At the beginning of the century the German car-maker BMW stunned the advertising world with a series of action-packed short films by notable directors such as Guy Ritchie, Tony Scott, John Frankenheimer, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-wai and Neill Blomkamp, which put high-performing BMW automobiles at the centre of the action. Fifteen years later the film series made a comeback starring Clive Owen.

Marriott International produces content for next-gen travellers, most of which is produced in-house. Not only do they produce social media content for about nineteen global hotel brands and a personalized online travel magazine (Marriott Traveler) but they also make TV shows (The Navigator Live), short movies (Two Bellmen, French Kiss), web series on YouTube and Instagram and a virtual reality (VR) experience in partnership with Facebook’s Oculus Rift. One of Marriott’s movies apparently resulted in $500,000 in hotel bookings in the first sixty days alone, the Marriott Traveler drove 7,200 room bookings in ninety days and the brand’s interactive website is leveraging a built-in audience of 40 million visitors monthly.

Red Bull is not only known for its state-of-the-art movies, documentaries and digital content (the brand’s YouTube channel currently has almost 7 million subscribers, more than 7,000 videos and more than 2 billion views), the energy-drink maker’s media arm is also a successful publisher (The Red Bulletin) and has built its own digital content platform (Red Bull TV).

Digitally born (ad) killers

The further we investigate, the more likely it becomes that young digital natives’ viewing habits and disruptive commercials aren’t the only culprits to be blamed for the void and demise of traditional broadcast and cable TV. In the spirit of our detective story, let us look for other suspects.

The search starts with Gabor’s first career in broadcast TV. Having worked as a television producer for more than ten years, he barely watches TV any more, with the exception of live sports. But it’s not the commercials that annoy him – they can actually be quite fun. And as a Gen Xer, he’s not digitally born – although, as kids, he and his friends had to create their own computer games because none was available or affordable. The main reason traditional TV has become disruptive and looks and sounds so dated to him is the fact that almost the entire content of today’s TV is formatted so that it fits exactly into the spaces between commercial breaks – be it TV dramas, comedies, entertainment and reality shows, even made-for-television documentaries and news magazine shows. Everything is packaged like a kids’ meal in a fast-food restaurant. Every act structure is basically the same and revolves around standardized commercial breaks. And if this isn’t enough, there are endless recaps about what happened last time (or just before the commercial break) as well as countless, obnoxiously repetitive teasers to promote what else we must watch on this TV network. As a final assault, this already indigestible mix is frequently interrupted by local news breaks and severe weather warnings. It’s the combination of these that is disruptive and makes the so-called linear TV experience more and more unbearable, especially in comparison to the smooth delivery of on-demand streaming platforms.

Nobody wants to be a suspect. Many stakeholders in the TV and production community, including some of Gabor’s former colleagues and friends in broadcasting, may now cry out loudly in protest. They may point out their creative achievements in contemporary format development and successes in modernizing the TV experience for the twenty-first century. But the audience increasingly doesn’t think so. And digital natives are disconnecting from linear TV altogether.

In our notebook the evidence and numbers keep adding up. Between 2012 and 2017 TV viewing by Americans aged between eighteen and twenty-four dropped by almost ten hours a week, or by roughly one hour and twenty-five minutes per day.3 Instead, during the first quarter of 2017 the same demographic spent an average of 2,226 minutes consuming online videos via PC and 414 minutes watching mobile videos per month.4

Suddenly the group of suspects for causing the void has become a whole lot bigger. It’s not only the people who cut their ties with the platforms or the ones who never engaged with them because they are too young and digitally born; it’s not only the perceived annoying and disruptive commercials and display ads but also the people who create linear content and television experiences.

And, as in any classic detective story, the real killer might not only be among us, the killer might actually be us. By birth, behaviour or association – are we all digitally born killers?