Paul Yole: Back to simple truths. Thank God
Paul Yole has attended the Cannes Lions Festival as a delegate every year for the past 10 years. Here he gives his take on two of the Sunday seminars from this year’s Festival.
I used to delight in telling first time visitors to Cannes, “nothing great ever happens on the first Sunday.” Unless you count the odd magnum of Minuty.
But things have changed. Sunday is the new Monday, so I dragged myself along to listen to Nir Wegryn from BrandOpus and acclaimed artist Ori Gerst talk about how perception, not fact, creates reality.
I wish I hadn’t bothered.
It’s an important subject and these are two brilliant people, but I’m afraid it was all too intellectualised for me. The odd bit of Latin was mixed in with stuff about Goya and Manet. All of this clouded the message that to affect behavior we need to affect beliefs. Imagery is therefore more potent than rational facts and functional benefits.
The session with Mark Pytlik of Stinkdigital and Professor Byron Sharp was in stark contrast. Sharp presented a simple articulation of his Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science research that dispels some myths about how we work.
Watching Mark, it did occur to me that by not wearing white sand shoes to work I may have limited my career development in this digital age. So I was reassured when the Professor asserted, “The thing that alarms me about digital is the religious nature of it, the zealotry.”
Get in there!
Reach, he explained, is not optional. Brand growth comes from light buyers and your brand is not especially important to them. So you need mass marketing. True.
Where digital comes in is with its ability to reach different people at different times and places, thus providing incremental reach.
Sharp also refuted the suggestion that young people’s attention spans are getting shorter. Let’s face it, if you can binge watch GoT, attention is not an issue.
If you haven’t read Byron Sharp’s book, ‘How Brand’s Grow’ it is a must read. The original one can be found here and part 2 here.
And while you’re at it have a look at Ian Leslie’s article in the FT which provided a great summary of Sharp’s message.
The key as always is great creativity, because a great idea has the flexibility and legs to provide multiple messages across multiple media.
And great creativity, ladies and gentleman, is what this Festival is all about.