Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [90]
Only later was I ashamed of the fact that I laughed. Like so many other Super Bowl commercials, it was a one-off, another quick hitter from the school of shock. It didn’t build meaningful brand equity, or make me feel smarter or better about the world.
It certainly didn’t tap into or even hint at whatever the zeitgeist may be these days.
But Charlie Brown did. Charlie Brown beat Stewie and Underdog and finally won. And unless a giant Lucy is lurking around the next corner, waiting for the sequel, Coke won, too.
* For the 2009 Super Bowl, despite the worsening economy, NBC Universal got close to $3 million per thirty-second spot, or $100,000 per second.
Part 3
The Merchants of What’s Next
In Search of Advertising’s Future in Cannes
Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
—Marshall McLuhan
End of Days or Just a Really Long Night?
The future of advertising is hunched over in the center of Boulevard de la Croisette outside a tiny yet unthinkably crowded café on the French Riviera at 4:18 a.m., hands on tanned yet wobbly knees, uncertain whether she will succumb to the excesses her industry has bestowed upon her and puke, call it a night, and stumble back to her overpriced, mega-agency-sponsored hotel room or gather her wits, her stomach, and her constitution and rally to take her skills to another, more exciting place where the party is just getting started.
This was my first night, a Sunday, at the 55th Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Every June, thousands of industry insiders congregate in Cannes for a chance to schmooze, drink, postulate, speculate, celebrate, copulate, pilfer clients, and ride the celebrity coattails of the renowned film festival that preceded it. But this year many of the record ten thousand delegates have come to Cannes in search of something more. They’ve come to figure out whether the young woman in the street is a metaphor for the state of advertising or simply someone who has had one too many Cosmos at Cannes’s infamous Gutter Bar (a.k.a. 72 Croisette).
Depending on whom you speak with in Cannes, which seminars you take in (Rupert Murdoch or Tony Bennett?), which parties or galas you attend and on which side of the Croisette—with the big-agency muckety-mucks on the veranda at the Carlton InterContinental or bumping and bumping (there wasn’t enough room for grinding) to music spun by a U.K.-imported deejay at a digital production company beach bash across the street, where the average age is considerably younger—advertising is either at the end of its days or on the threshold of a creative revolution not seen since Bill Bernbach transformed the business in the 1960s.
Most of the anxiety in the $670-billion-a-year global industry, of course, revolves around the emergence of digital advertising and the corresponding audience erosion in the so-called traditional media of TV, print, and radio. Is advertising as we know it about to be hijacked by a coterie of Google/Microsoft/Yahoo!/ AOL-controlled algorithms? According to the Yankee Group, 25 percent of all current media consumption is online, and by 2011 annual online media spending in the United States alone will double to more than $50.3 billion. This has advertisers and agencies seriously rethinking the mega-agency model and questioning the very future of the thirty-second television spot that has been the foundation of branding since the days of Milton Berle.
At one time America created the most entertaining and effective advertising, and its stars were the arbiters of branded cool. But now, at least for one week every year, Cannes has become the center of the advertising universe. With delegates representing more than eighty-five countries, Cannes most accurately reflects what has truly become a global industry. It also doesn’t