Digiday+ Marketing Briefing: With Cannes Lions once again virtual, the ‘networking and dealmaking is likely the biggest casualty’

As a loyal reader, I wanted to share a special preview of one of Digiday's weekly briefings. Available exclusively to Digiday+ members, the Marketing Briefing offers analysis of the news and trends affecting marketers and advertisers, interviews with key executives, numbers to know and much more.

In this week's Marketing Briefing, I explored how marketers and agency execs are feeling about another year of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity taking place virtually.

Get a taste of the Marketing Briefing below and subscribe to Digiday+ to have it delivered straight to your inbox every week.

Marketing Briefing: With Cannes Lions once again virtual, the ‘networking and dealmaking is likely the biggest casualty’

By Kristina Monllos

Last week, the organizers of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity reversed course and announced that the festival would once again be virtual due to the pandemic. Advertising agency execs and chief marketing officers will go yet another year without sipping rosé in the south of France while wheeling and dealing as the organizers “finally came to their senses,” as one exec noted.

If you ask marketers and agency execs about another year without an in-person Cannes, you’ll hear about the hopes for the festival to return properly in 2022. While those execs expect a smaller festival overall when it does return — as chief financial officers will have seen two years of reduced travel budgets making them less likely to greenlight sending a massive team to Cannes — they say they expect the festival will remain an industry staple even if it has a reputation as a boondoggle.

As for this year, the promise of another virtual event when many execs are Zoomed out and feel like it’s impossible to unplug from daily work for a virtual event has some questioning what attendance or networking will be like.

“It’s really tough to do the networking at these events,” said Nancy Hill, founder of Media Sherpas and former 4A’s president. “It’s just not the same. When you go [to France] you’re in a completely different time zone and you’re not really worrying about what’s going on back at the office. Whereas when you’re doing virtual events, your office is the same place, you’re not getting away. Also, people are so Zoomed out.”

Without the serendipity of running into old colleagues or business partners, “the networking and dealmaking is likely the biggest casualty of a virtual Cannes Lions,” said Andrew Sexton, evp and managing director at PR agency Raven. “It may still occur in tandem with the festival, but will need to be more orchestrated.”

Carmen Rodriguez, chief client officer and partner at Gut, is a bit more optimistic: “Being physically at Cannes with clients and co-workers makes all the difference; being apart is not the same as meeting your friends and clients for drinks at the Gutter Bar or at the tables across the Carlton. But while people are probably very tired of Zoom encounters by now, virtual networking is doable, though potentially a bit challenging.”

Rodriguez continued: “I think Cannes will actually be more relevant now than ever. We all feel the need for personal connections, to celebrate the work and the talent, and to discuss subjects that will impact the future of advertising, so hopefully in 2022, Cannes Lions will be able to return in person for all those reasons and more.”

Still, it remains a question what Cannes will be once it returns in-person. “I think it will take several years for the event to get back to what it once was,” said Mack McKelvey, CEO, strategic marketing firm, SalientMG. “In the meantime, I think many are asking the question, how essential is the conference to the success of the ad industry? How will Cannes Lions come out in 2022 swinging? I’m hopeful we’ll all be pleasantly surprised.”

Quote of the week

“A lot of this testing budget and reason for diversifying is just reading where our customers are going. We have found through COVID that there’s all these different platforms where our customers are now joining.”

— Jill John, chief customer officer at direct-to-consumer furniture company Interior Define told Kimeko McCoy about the brand’s move to increase its experimental budget this year.

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