Art, science, and advertising: 2 days at the Cannes Lions 2016

I am just back from two days in Cannes for the 2016 edi­tion of the Lions, the Inter­na­tion­al Fes­ti­val of Cre­ativ­i­ty: two days of meet­ings, dis­cus­sions, and sun too!

In the mid­dle of a week ded­i­cat­ed to cre­ation in all its forms, there were two days dur­ing which everybody—advertising agen­cies, busi­ness­es, media, soft­ware pub­lish­ers, and so on—had one mantra nev­er off their lips: cre­ation and data. From now on, art and sci­ence are insep­a­ra­ble in cre­at­ing unique expe­ri­ences. The idea is to delight your audi­ences, to hold their atten­tion (and here I come back to my old mot­to of “return on atten­tion before return on investment”).

I heard Sky Media, AOL, and Sapi­ent Nitro—media from one side and agency from the other—explain, using many exam­ples, that to suc­ceed, they are set­ting up cross-func­tion­al teams that bring togeth­er cre­ative data sci­en­tists, strate­gic plan­ners, and tech­nol­o­gists, and are break­ing orga­ni­za­tion­al silos to refo­cus on the indi­vid­ual customer.

WPP, Pub­li­cis, DDB, and many oth­er agen­cies and com­mu­ni­ca­tion groups also described how they are cur­rent­ly trans­form­ing them­selves to adapt to the mas­sive change that rep­re­sents the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of art and sci­ence, and to exploit the many new cre­ation oppor­tu­ni­ties that come with it.

The Slow Down GPS Sapi­ent Nitro, the per­fect com­bi­na­tion of design and technology

An exam­ple? Sapi­ent Nitro recent­ly cre­at­ed a “Slow Down GPS” app for an insur­er. This GPS app analy­ses the driver’s loca­tion, speed, and near­by sites, and pro­vides rec­om­men­da­tions based on this data—for exam­ple, to reduce speed near a school. To do this, Sapi­ent Nitro had a cre­ative team, some tech­nol­o­gists, and some data sci­en­tists work togeth­er on the project to iden­ti­fy all the tech­no­log­i­cal ser­vices that could be imag­ined in line with the customer’s DNA (ensure safe­ty, pre­vent acci­dents), to pro­vide real val­ue and, of course, offer a beau­ti­ful com­mu­ni­ca­tion device.

In short, this is the begin­ning of a new world, where cre­ative direc­tors work hand-in-hand with IT man­agers to imag­ine tech­no­log­i­cal and com­mu­ni­ca­tion innovations!

And you, what do you think of this emerg­ing trend?