Rob Doubal on Presiding over “the Baller Category” at Cannes Lions

Rob> I thought I'd have to prepare for this, read and learn and be really serious and earnest. And then I met the group, and they were like, "Yeah, we'll just go with our guts. It's gonna be cool." If you have a jury which is correctly assembled to represent loads of different voices and specialities and talents, it's the perfect team, and you don't actually have to prepare that much. You just have to pick the best work and it'll be obvious to all of us. 

So I'm not preparing that much in all honesty. Looking at the work takes its time. Then it's just checking in with the jury. And then I think it'd be much nicer for us as a group to decide what we want to do and how we want to approach it. If I go all Zen I think that will become obvious once we look at the work and meet each other. So I'm preparing organically.

Rob> I would go even further than that, to say that this is definitively the baller category this year. And that's probably because of the way the world has been changing and business has been changing and growing. It's had a big bounce back from covid – people not having the opportunity to watch sports in real life meant that there was a pent up desire to witness and experience sport again, physically. But also during that time, there was loads of innovation in how you could view sport. A lot of the ways that sport was being watched changed. And so now you've got both of those things coming back.

It's a growing industry. It grew 5% last year. I think it's supposed to be 600 billion by 2027. So it's one of the big ones. If you look at sport and health as being more aspirational than ever before with younger generations, plus the superstars coming out of it, plus the idea that sport may have been a distraction from some of the other tough things going on, you've got like three reasons why sports entertainment is becoming huge business. And I think it will continue to grow. 

I just hope that the creative can really reflect the big changes that the business is going through. For example, long-form Netflix shows like ‘Formula 1: Drive to Survive’ and the tennis one, ‘Break Point,’ which are widening audiences. You've got Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney buying Wrexham and that being one of the biggest business stories of the year. And then you've got esports there as one of the biggest growth markets. What's going on in the business of sports is so interesting and I hope the marketing work around it reflects that. It's an amazing space.

Look at Argentina. I was just thinking about the effect of sport on the psyche of a country, in terms of their economy booming because of winning the World Cup. It's a really interesting and baller growth category. 

Rob> I'll do two - one business and one more cultural. On the business side, because of its popularity you've got big business players and rights managers, tournament organisers. In growth sports, you've got examples of LIV Golf, where loads of money's being chucked at forming another division and which might cut people out. You've got Barstool Sports going right back to the source and creating its own games, which are a bit more accessible, you could argue, but maybe culturally a bit more divisive. And then you've got new games being created totally as in the smaller basketball formats. Those are all really interesting but they are leading towards ownership of it - who's who's getting locked out and is the money sitting somewhere and is it getting fed back to either the players or the fans who are supporting it? There's quite a lot of politics around ownership and people getting their value for what they represent. 

Which then leads naturally into perhaps the biggest Zeitgeist of our times, which is around inclusion, equality and representation within sport. I do feel a good groundswell of change happening, especially more locally with women's sport and what some brands are doing, which is fantastic, but still so much work to do. My partner Lolly searched for who was playing in the FA Cup the other day and said "there are no games today". It was the women's FA Cup that day. There's still a lot of ingrained biases in how these sports are developing, but I think in most places some really good steps have been made and there's still more to be done. I imagine there'll be discussions around that.

Then entirely generic to the categories (I think it'll even creep into this one), the role of AI will be tough to not talk about, in terms of work creation, because it's on everyone's mind. 

Rob> Then there's laws changing to protect players from injury. At one end of the scale you've got debates around whether we should be banning headering or tackling below a certain height in rugby, for the protection of the players on one end of the scale. And on the other end you've got Barstool Sports going off with getting more people to beat each other up. So there's kind of a weird divide at the moment. It's becoming a bit bipartisan – sport's Roman-style gladiatorial aspect, but the duty of care to people going into sport and suffering from long term injuries. I think that that might come up. 

Then general acceptance of sports. Will esports be in the Olympics, etc.? Discuss... What is a sport?

Privilege as well, in the type of sports only being accessible to certain types of people. There are certainly sports that have been principally played by the privileged

Rob> It's almost an awkward question because you can assume that most specialists are in competition at the moment, naturally. That's why it's a difficult one. However, if you view it in a macro context, advertising and some of its associated disciplines are having to fight a common enemy of tech/media companies, and that's facing into AI. I would argue now is really the time for this industry to prove the value of what we do. I don't mean in an overly defensive way, but to pull together to say the difference that creativity can make to business in the face of an AI future. Which shouldn't sound too Ridley Scott, but it is a very serious thing. It's a compelling story for media companies to pitch up and say, "Hey, you're going to have these eyeballs, this conversion, and it's all going to be done by AI to maximise the efficiency . Would you like to press the button?" Versus pure creative thinkers understanding people, being able to shift like humans and create something which can outperform that. I think, if there was ever a time for people to pull together, it's now. 

It is not human versus machine. It's just the value of taking creative leaps to business problems that can deliver inordinate gains rather than programmatic games. We all know that the most famous work has a big halo effect. Or the value of a long-term brand platform that you develop over time for 50 years. The quantification of that is something we should all have an interest in, in the face of an AI future.

Rob> This one is clear to me. It's basically voice. Apart from it being right, the more we can hear from people's different takes on the world, the richer creativity will always be. 

I was reading a couple days ago in the New Scientist that the limit to AI development is either human feedback of whether it's getting wrong or right, or incredibly high quality first-party data, which is people's lived experiences. At the moment, all the AIs are just learning off the dross off the internet, whereas actually, the most valuable thing will be understanding humans and their experiences.

We keep getting top-down dreams realised of how the world should be. But I think we've only done 5% of the listening to the cultures and backgrounds around the world. Even mixing Eastern and Western philosophies (if you want to get me as if I'm talking at four o'clock in the morning). There's so much work to be done in understanding humans and what they need and what they will need in the future. I had heard it said that we're spending billions on understanding AI. We should be spending that billions on understanding people at the moment, before we get it wrong. On any project it works as a direct correlation: the more of a diversity of voice which has gone into that project or product, the richer it is. You appeal to more people. And you can only do that by listening. That's between departments, between companies. There will be common problems and benefits to understanding what all businesses need in relation to that. 

Atomic soup, which is something we do at McCann once a week, is exactly that. It's an hour-long session with a theme or a subject which seems pertinent to culture at that time. We will have 100 to 200 people from the agency or other agencies, and external people. We discuss the topic, it's a safe space, and everyone will simply speak from the heart, say whether they care about it or not, why they care about it, what the future of it is, how it's gonna affect our culture. It is a no-judgement space and you really learn a hell of a lot in that short hour. I think it's one of the richest parts because you can feed ideas in, you can improve them, or you can say nothing and write it down. Whatever you want. I think it's helped us be more inclusive.