1) Money seems to be moving away from the advertising industry, and agencies are facing competition from every side. Many of my colleagues and friends have left agency jobs to work directly for clients and marketing consultant firms. Google and Facebook continue to Hoover up some of our talent.
I think this is a trend that will continue to accelerate, but at the moment, we don’t tend to play in the same spaces as Facebook and Google. For instance, we rarely face off against them in a pitch situation.
2) The Audi VR Sandbox by the MediaMonks https://www.mediamonks.com/vr-ar/work/audi-enter-sandbox. Often, people use technology to complicate things. “Enter Sandbox” uses technology to simplify a useful and playful idea that shows off the car’s features. Visitors create a track in the physical sandbox, and then “drive” the new Audi Q5 in VR around the space to test the car’s off-road capability. When I saw the work, I wished that I had created it.
And a great idea paired with a film that resonates is always going to break through: The inspirational musical trailer “We’re the Super Humans,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IocLkk3aYlk which promoted Channel 4’s broadcast of the 2016 Summer Paralympics Games in Rio, certainly fits the bill. Incidentally, Cannes’ 2017 Film Grand Prix winner was created by in-house unit 4Creative, not an advertising agency.
3) The Lego Movie was the ultimate branded entertainment advertisement—a 90-minute commercial about the spirit of play and invention starring… the product. We try to create these abstract concepts that have these connections to brands, and here’s this great story that’s epic and ambitious, yet simply about the experience of playing with Lego. And it’s the gift that keeps on giving with this year’s Lego Batman Movie.
4) It’s going to get interesting. Publicis Groupe, our agency’s holding company, is disrupting the industry with the launch of Marcel, a new AI-based platform that’s designed to connect our 80,000 global employees, enhance decision-making and improve creativity for our clients. It’s an ambitious project, and we plan to skip Cannes and other 2018 awards show to concentrate on this venture.
5) I’m not really devoting much attention to analyzing the results of awards shows—I pay more attention to the work my peers are sharing and celebrating. There’s been a tendency to reward the art of our industry and not the business results. Naturally, I love the craft, and all my friends work in the post-production side of the business. I believe we need creativity to solve business problems, but it can’t just be art for art’s sake. If our work isn’t getting business results, we won’t be working much longer.
6) Team One opened an Artificial Intelligence lab in 2016 to explore the possibilities of the creative uses of machine learning. I see a huge opportunity to use this technology to create experiences that defy our clients’ expectations and create magic for consumers. We made a short film called An Artificially Intelligent Director https://youtu.be/XZbcxsHb4Y0 to chronicle our process of creating a movie that was conceived, directed and edited entirely by machines.
We’ve also increased our headcount, investments and efforts in the immersive virtual and augmented reality fields (VR and AR). Team One was one of the first agencies to introduce these technologies to clients and new business prospects, and we’ve had a great deal of success using them to present thought leadership ideas and create consumer-facing work. They have been especially popular among our premium and luxury brand clients, which are all about presenting authentic, superior experiences.