Anthony Freedman: Cannes Diary

Anthony Freedman, CEO of Host was Australia’s representative on the Cannes Lions  Branded Content & Entertainment jury. Freedman, along with most of the Australian and NZ jurors, reports exclusively for CB.

Branded Content and Entertainment is still a very new category, this being only its second year, so naturally there was a great amount of discussion about what exactly constitutes content.

A number of entries prompted the jury to ask itself,  ‘great idea but where is the content’ or ‘is that content’, as well as many questions around the specific definitions of some sub categories, in particular experiential events and offline media.

Beyond that what was also interesting to someone who is new and only ‘part time’ in the branded content world, is how developed the industry is, especially in the US. This is not the future, it’s very much the present.

Whilst Australia has had some success with brand-funded programming and now a growing number of content and entertainment projects that are playing out online, there is nothing I can recall on the scale of many projects that I have seen over the last week.

Feature films, web films and series with production values that are every bit the match of the best unbranded content, experiential events with the world’s top artists, are very much now part of brand’s marketing toolkit and this is an exciting new dimension to our industry.

Interestingly though, much of what makes branded content stand out in judging is of course much the same as the way that any other category would be evaluated. The quality of the idea, the integration and role of the brand, the quality of its execution and some evidence of real world impact (although as was said on many occasions, “This is not the Effies”).

On Day 1 when we sat as a group of 15 people with hundreds and hundreds of entries to evaluate, the task seemed daunting and somewhat arduous. But as pressing buttons on a tablet, turned into discussion and debate it became a real pleasure.

I cannot think of many scenarios that would allow you to spend 5 uninterrupted days with 15 people with that seniority and experience, from all over the world, talking about outstanding work.

And more than that, in this category, the room is full of people with a great diversity of roles and backgrounds. People from creative agencies were in the minority although many had spent some time in one at some stage in their career. But there were just as many who had grown up as Producers in programming and feature films, journalists, media executives, and so on.

Ultimately I am proud of the work we saw and selected as Lions winners. They were smart, brave or ambitious and generally all three. And I feel whilst some could have been and were entered into other categories, many could only be described as Branded Content or Entertainment which to me says we now clearly have another industry within our industry.