Cannes Lions: will advertising ever again be about the people it serves?

The winners of this year’s festival highlight that advertising, in its rush to prove that it is pro-technology, has become anti-people

Cannes
‘Cannes claims to be a festival of creativity but it’s a difficult case to make that creativity is what is being celebrated on La Croisette.’ Photograph: Eric Gaillard /Reuters

Most people in advertising agencies work ridiculously long hours against impossible deadlines, so a week letting off steam on the French Riviera is no bad thing. Of course the Cannes Lions festival is a ridiculous affair – it should be, and its grotesqueness is part of its charm. A more serious question is whether Cannes is really celebrating creativity at all – and what that might mean for the future of the advertising industry.

Notice I say industry. I could have said “the craft” of advertising, but those days are gone. Ever since the big takeover deals of the 1980s and the emergence of mega-sized holding companies, the notion of craft has been slowly snuffed out of advertising. Craft is one thing you can’t process. Craft is one thing you can’t industrialise to the point of maximum efficiency. It is by its nature idiosyncratic and relies heavily on the conditions around it. In recent decades, as media agencies have been spun off from the full-service agencies, content, carefully crafted for its context, has died a quiet death.

Cannes claims to be a festival of creativity but it’s a difficult case to make that creativity is what is being celebrated on La Croisette. What is really celebrated is media, and the power it now holds over creativity.

Facebook and Google are by far the biggest brands on the beach. And no wonder: not only do they own some of the world’s biggest media platforms with the widest audiences, they are also massive brands and make some of the most famous creative. So, they are media owner, agency, creative agency and client. These media giants are the international advertising industry now.

The thing that made Cannes special in the past was that it celebrated advertising for consumers. As an international festival celebrating international advertising, the mediums of most significance were always film and TV. Of course, with the advent of digital that has changed, but that’s just a small shift that any celebration of creative ideas should be able to accommodate.

The bigger impact has been in the mentality of agencies regarding the kind of content that they produce and the criteria we set when we judge it to be creative. TV ads with their mass mainstream audiences reminded the industry of what humanity has in common. Ad agencies produced stories so universal in theme, yet nuanced in their execution, that the work could capture the hearts of the public as well as the heads of the juries. Advertising was judged to be great when it connected with its audience. And the audience were perceived to be real people, with real motivations and desires, and with real lives that advertising could enter to make its claims, partly because it served the people it spoke to. Can we really say that this year’s winning campaigns at Cannes were created to serve the people they supposedly speak to?

Where is any thought of the consumer in Truffle Pig? (Or maybe that name describes how the advertisers picture the consumer?) With little in common beyond commercial incentive and an meaningless team name, its four proponents appeared on a platform like something from the last round of X-Factor bootcamp: the stage at which Simon Cowell puts together a band made up of performers who aren’t quite worthy of the finals on their own.

The advertising industry must embrace new technologies as much as consumers have done, and weave them into its world. But it is kidding itself if it thinks advertising and technology approach creativity in the same way. Technology is creative because it originates: it invents and it brings completely new processes and services to our daily lives.

Advertising is creative because it familiarises; it normalises, it habitualises, it reinforces our existing attitudes and beliefs. To quote Edwin H Friedman: “Communication does not depend on … articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them”.

Despite there being a lot of talk at Cannes about how advertising creates culture, it’s just not true. Advertising reflects culture, that’s how and why it connects with people it serves. Laudable Lion-winning campaigns such as #LikeAGirl, from Always, and Sport England’s This Girl Can make a splash because of the current conversation within our society about gender equality and the empowerment of women. Those ads are tapping into that brilliantly.

Advertising has never been about originality; it is about familiarity.

The way in which it is creative is akin to the way Samuel Johnson talks about writers: “The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new”. That’s the power of advertising too. When Apple won a Media Cannes Lion for its iPod Silhouettes campaign, there was something familiar about it. It was the Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec dancehall poster art. The creative idea had a humanity that not only connected us to each other, but also to familiar ideas in the past. Technology doesn’t tend to do that.

The irony is that advertising is a better connector of people than technology but it has ceded this ground to the ad tech companies. This year when Apple won an Outdoor Grand Prix for its World Gallery, it was merely for showcasing the phone’s technology. The Shot On An iPhone campaign tries to deliver humanity through the lens of inspiration but it’s really just about what the device delivers. Where’s the human insight in that?

In its race to understand and keep up with technological developments, advertising has foregone the idea that what it is creating is for someone. It seems that the number of account planners at Cannes increases every year. Why are they going? You won’t uncover any consumer insights there. Spend half a day going round Tesco with a family and cook a meal with them, or go and listen to the chatter in a pub. If you want to understand consumer attitudes, go where the people are, not where the industry is.

The question for the future, then, is this: will advertising ever again be about the people it serves? Will award-winning creative ideas ever again demonstrate a trace of the people they are meant for? Probably. As global populations become more integrated, as technology becomes less magical and more invisible over time, and as we start to value creative expression in the face of more and more automation, the attitudes towards creativity and communication will change.

My hunch is that over the next five to 10 years elements of craft, care, co-creation and community will put people back into the advertising picture, and advertising will regain some humanity. Perhaps a small but significant sign of that from this year’s festival was the Cannes Creative Effectiveness Lion (which is for work that works) being awarded to John Lewis. Awarded for the Bear and the Hare campaign, of all of the work on display this year, it was the most human of all.

Tracey Follows is a futurist and the founder of anydaynow.co. Follow her at @tracey_lou

To get weekly news analysis, job alerts and event notifications direct to your inbox,sign up free for Media & Tech Network membership.

All Guardian Media & Tech Network content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled “Brought to you by” – find out more here.