We Cannes Do It: An Open Letter Sparks Movement for an Experiential Marketing Festival

Image source: Jovan Vasiljević via Unsplash​

Shelley Elkins from NVE Agency, in an open letter on The Drum, dropped the mic and the hammer on Cannes Lions.

If you haven’t already, you should read it. If you don’t want to, I’ll crudely paraphrase it: the Brand Experience & Activation category that is supposed to celebrate experience marketing is woefully undefined, is judged by non-experience creatives, and inconsistently (sometimes erroneously) celebrates the work as being experience-first.

Her words are much better than mine. And I absolutely loved reading the subtextual passion that she has for our industry. I agree with everything she wrote…except one.

I’m less interested in having the experience category in Cannes be more faithful to our craft and creativity; I’m much more interested in creating a Cannes of our own where the experiential industry’s creativity can truly be lauded.

But first, we have some work to do.

Just like all agencies, experience agencies should reach higher for the Big Idea.

Traditional agencies, and increasingly content creators, are still viewed by brands as the originators of The Big Idea. We need to change their minds. It’s the CMOs who are celebrated at Cannes – they’re the ones who greenlit the Big Idea.

In total candour, I think that experience agencies rarely originate the Big Idea. In scanning the last five years of awards with experientially focused work, it’s clear that the agencies credited for the idea (not the execution) were not experiential agencies.

Even the old trope that experience agencies 'bring brands to life' connotes that the Big Idea is already baked in, and all we have to do is metaphorise it, make it tangible, and create an engagement with it. Rarely does bringing brands to life mean creating an entirely new idea.

Then we need to celebrate (and submit) more Big Ideas.

The Cannes Lions Grand Prix in the Brand Experience & Activation category was awarded to a campaign called 'Caption With Intention' from FCB Chicago. It’s amazing work, reimagining static movie captions for a more dynamic experience for hearing-impaired viewers, synchronised in real-time with speech, responsive to pitch and tone through variable typography, and color-coded for speaker clarity. As the submission says, the campaign was “crafted to turn an overlooked accessibility feature into an emotionally resonant storytelling tool.” This work also won a Grand Prix in the Media/Entertainment, UX & Journey Design and Inclusive Design categories. But how is it a brand experience, let alone an experiential activation?

Cannes is a numbers game in many ways. You invest big numbers to enter, you enter a lot of categories, you spend on the case studies, you spend to be on the panels, you spend on the schmoozing, the wooing, and the closing. But it’s also an awards festival that ooohs and aaaaahs over the beautiful, the courageous, the touching, the hilarious, the WTF, the inventive, and the change-making. If our work isn’t going to show up in the Brand Experience & Activation category, then we need somewhere else.

We need more places to showcase the Big Ideas of experience marketing.

In North America, the Experiential Awards from Adweek – along with the Campaign Experience Awards and The Drum Experience Awards -- provide the forum, pedigree, and creative ambition for Big Ideas in experiential. But they’re the properties of media companies and publications, not our industry’s own. What we need is a festival that lauds and celebrates, as Shelley perfectly describes, “the work that is happening in brand experience right now [that] is literally redefining and, one could even argue, reviving our industry entirely.”

I’ll stop beating around the bush: I’d like us – myself, Shelley, and all the thousands of chief creatives, strategists, producers, and visionary leaders that fill our ranks – to have our own Cannes-like festival. I mean, we’re the ones who put on Cannes! What is it but a giant experiential expo, engagement tactics galore, and hospitality at its finest? We do that.

So maybe this can be an open letter to everyone in the Brand Experience & Activation space:

Let’s make our own Cannes. I’m in. I bet Shelley is in, too. And James Wallman at the World Experience Organisation.

If you are as well, hit me up at mlenderman@gmrmarketing.com or @maxlenderman