Cannes Day 3 – a round up of all the best digital bits

Live from the Cannes Lions Festival, our UTalkMarketing founder Niall McKinney brings all the hot-off-the-press digital happenings.

The second golden age of TV

Time Warner brought out the big guns in an effort to convince us that despite all the hype about social media, TV is definitely not dead. Jeff Bewkes (CEO) and legendary writers Aaron Sorkin and David Simon (The Wire) led the small screen lovefest.

The argument was:

– Audience fragmentation is a good thing because it allowed more targeted programming to be made

– On demand and multi-platform video create opportunities for programme makers to producer more complex, linear plots, as people watch TV in a different way

– Higher quality programming that creates a better environment for advertisers to create content in. Though there was no evidence offered of this.

Whilst it was great to see two writers talking enthusiastically about TV’s prospects, they did not present the most technologically savvy front with Sorkin saying “before the movie (the social network) I knew facebook about as well as I knew a carburettor”. He has now deleted his Facebook account!

The next stage of digital hypergrowth is mobile says Google

The new chairman of Google Eric Schmidt, in conversation with Andy Berndt, VP of Google Creative Labs.
They discussed Google’s recent superbowl advert, which Schmidt described as the day “hell froze over” but seemed reluctantly happy when they calculated that the incremental search traffic generated from the ad meant the spot paid for itself. “And people like it chimed” Berndt.

On the likely future growth of digital globally, he saw the key drivers as:

– The continued and increasing power of computing devices – Moore’s law

– Continued rise on broadband penetration, and increased in speed and increased number of connection points (via mobile) particularly in developing markets

– Rise of social connectivity

All of these factors are growing at double digit rates, and the future opportunity for digital can be calculated not by looking at these factors individually but by multiplying them.

This set up a discussion focused on the future opportunities for digital. Key for Schmidt was mobile devices, which will be “30x better in 10 years and 1000x better in 20 years”. Another key trend was more data to sort through saying “If more and more information is proliferating, especially from UGC, then search will become increasingly important. Consumers need to sort through 48 hours of youtube videos being uploaded per minute.”

He saw Intelligent devices (intelligent agents in reality) that understand personal and geographic context providing the answer to the problem of excess content, and Google’s future on delivery an ecosystem that provide the advertising solution.
One question I have is then, if mobile + search is the future of advertising, wouldn’t search functionality for your email on an android handset be a pretty good first step? (disclosure: I own a Nexus S which can’t do this).

Finally they talked about four “super-platforms” which are all growing fast (and obviously competing against each other). The four were Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon. Schmidt said that future disruption of this four was “highly likely”.
Facebook advertising is more than a massive audience with a very bad ad format.

Carolyn Everson, VP of Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook tried to persuade us that the opportunities for advertising on Facebook transcend a small box on the right hand side of your status page.

She presented two main strategies for overcoming the limitation of the format:

1. Don’t see it as an ad. See it as the start of a conversation. “A ticket for a rock concert doesn’t look exciting but it represents something really exciting)

2. Start using Facebook Sponsored Stories. Sponsored Stories are delivering between two times and seven times the level of engagement of Standard Ads. (Question: how much of this is novelty value?)

Emerson also acknowledged that there was an enormous amount of work to be done on Facebook and measurement, and trailed research they are working on with Nielsen for release later in the year.

Finally, check out a very useful resource at Facebook Studios.

And finally, live demo’s can still go wrong even if you work for the geekiest company in the world. Kudo Tsunoda attempted to redefine the geeky reputation of Microsoft employees by appearing as the Anti-Bill Gates, fronting some serious facial hair and sunglasses. All did not go well, with a Kinect Demo failing to work live on stage. Happens to the best of us. His Kinect powered powerpoint was cool though.

Also, a tremendous presentation from RGA on their vision on the future of agencies and how they will work with clients. More on this tomorrow….

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