The debut Brand Marketers’ Creative Summit brought together CMOs from the Cannes Lions ANA Growth Council and industry experts, including L2’s Scott Galloway, to hone in on the top priorities for marketers and discuss the key trends shaping the industry. We’ve selected the top ten lessons that came out of the Summit.
CEO of the ANA, Bob Liodice, urged all brand marketers to become champions of growth – it is the single, most fundamental activity of the role.
Quoting Harvard Business Review’s findings that ‘80% of CEOs don’t trust or are unimpressed with their CMOs’, Zeitguide’s Brad Grossman proclaimed that CMOs need to reposition themselves as the ‘Chief Growth Officer’.
CMOs know the brand’s consumers better than anyone else in the company. They can (and should) make themselves indispensable to the CEO by using this insight to build products and services that can deliver growth.
When it comes to technological innovation, it’s quicker (and easier) to borrow expertise instead of learning to do it all alone. WGSN extolled the benefits of seeking out partnerships with start-ups (and potentially even buying them) as a means of getting ahead of the competition.
Too often we move straight into deploying sophisticated technology without acknowledging the experience this will offer. WGSN’s Carla Buzasi emphasised the need for brands to focus on the experience they want to deliver first and foremost and then think about the technology that will enable this.
Marc Pritchard strongly emphasised the need for brands to act responsibly - this is crucial in getting customers to trust your brand and buy into what you do. Brand marketers have a fundamental role to play in making this happen.
Facebook have endured many months of negative press, government-level investigation and increasing consumer distrust but as the owner of some of the most popular platforms in the world, brands still find that it produces the greatest ROI on advertising spend, said Scott Galloway.
Predicting voice as the next transformative technology in marketing, Scott Galloway’s recommendation to brands was to become proficient in using voice today. Brands making headway with this technology now will win out later as our screen-less society evolves (and it’s happening faster than you think).
As voice search becomes increasingly popular, big tech companies such as Amazon and Google are investing in search voice optimisation development. The more attuned you are to how voice search works, and how it can work for you, the better your brand will perform. Here, Zeitguide’s Brad Grossman explains how the Marriott Hotel Group have approached SVO.
While growth is the ultimate goal, Deloitte’s Alicia Hatch said that this needs to be coupled with a focus on value-creation. Instead of performance marketing, marketers should focus on the kind of growth that creates value for customers and brings meaning to their lives.
Marc Pritchard explains how P&G is taking control of its agency model to get closer to its consumers, and discusses what ‘taking control’ looks like for one of its fasting-growing brands, SK-II.