The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity has added a new component this year, one it believes is playing a “significant role in the creative process”.
Lions Entertainment promises something different at this year’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. The new element of the annual advertising festival looks at music: artists, labels and influential moguls and how music connects brands and consumers.
Musicians connect with consumers with their music and via the fame that comes with being a successful star. This, of course, makes them ” doubly appealing as potential commercial partners”. In South Africa, one need look no further than the successful collaboration between Woolworths and Pharrell Williams.
The two-day Lions Entertainment aims to “explore those partnerships because, increasingly, they’re at the forefront of unskippable creativity – the kind that is moving away from ‘branded content’ and becoming ‘branded culture’”.
“We’ve welcomed music stars to Cannes Lions for many years now and in fact, we have just confirmed Iggy Pop and Falz as joining the line-up. But what we’re doing with Lions Entertainment is something different, more targeted and borne from the campaigning of the music industry itself,” said Philip Thomas, CEO, Lions Festivals.
“More than ever, music is playing a significant role in the creative process,” he said. “We want to bring the talent together with the content creators, marketers and entertainment companies so that together they can define the future and focus on creating outstanding creative work together.”
Cannes Lions has released a white paper, titled ‘Brands Go Pop’ in which Steve Ackerman, managing director of Somethin’ Else; Fred Bolza, VP strategy at Sony Entertainment; Julz Baldwin, deputy head of music, Most Radicalist Black Sheep Music, and Pete Beeney, global agency lead at Spotify talk about the partnerships between music and branded content, and the ultimate goal of creating a ‘branded culture’.
Bolza says while money still talks in these partnerships, the relationship now also relies on a value exchange. Because artists have direct access to their committed, passionate fans, and brands can offer extensive inroads into new markets and untapped demographics , the dynamic has changed. The result is more collaborative endeavours that deliver genuine mutual benefit, and far greater acceptance by audiences. “When Jay Z speaks to Samsung, it’s a brand speaking to a brand, and they need each other’s equity, not each other’s products. If we can find ways in which their equities, as opposed to their tactical objectives, come together, then you have the opportunity to make culture,” he says.
Brands Go Pop reports that sponsorship of the music industry has been estimated to have grown by 23% since 2010 in the U.S. alone. But while partnerships are increasing in popularity for the reasons outlined above, there’s plenty of room for development.
“It’s being underrepresented – it’s often an afterthought… The responsibility is on [the industry’s] shoulders to take it more seriously and to have a far longer term horizon on the work that they want to do instead of it being from campaign to campaign,” says Beeney. “If music is being listened to far more often than it used to, because technology has allowed that to happen, then we need to be taking it far more seriously than we have done in the past because the consumers that we’re trying to reach are.”
Technology is also helping increase effectiveness and measurability, the whitepaper reports. Ackerman says the social media engagement of a fan-base can amplify a campaign and make its success quantifiable, but only if brands are prepared to accept an element of unpredictability. “If you create a campaign that the artist really loves, you get all that extra value of them getting behind it through their own social media channels. Which throws up a lot of extra opportunities, but also potentially a lot of scary moments for the client because there could be things that are out of their control,” says Ackerman.
Shazam will talk about the creative role of music agencies as well as the increasing demand for music data tools to measure the success of an artist, while YouTube’s VP of content partnerships, Kelly Merryman, will argue that despite concerns about technology undermining artistic quality, the new media revolution is actually fuelling a creative boom. Together with Jingle Punks’ Jared Gutstadt, Grammy-winning super producer Timbaland will reveal how they are turning the music and advertising industry on their heads.
“The changing music model is one of the hottest topics in entertainment today, so Cannes feels like the perfect arena to spark real conversations around its evolution with some of the greatest minds in the industry. I’m excited to share how I’m working with Jingle Punks to change the game and reshape the existing model to completely disrupt how brands and artists collaborate. Jingle Jared and I share the same vision. We are here to take over. This is the way of the future,” said Timbaland.
Read the Brands Go Pop white paper here: Lions Entertainment WhitePaper_Brands Go Pop (1)
