Cannes Lions and the King of the Data Jungle
What helps you understand the whole elephant?
Cannes Lions was all about finding out which data will be King of the Jungle.
When heading to the south of France I was thinking about the whole media ecosystem through another animal analogy, the parable of the blind men touching an elephant, where each one of them is touching a different part of the animal and, because of what they are touching, think it is something different.
After attending the conference for the first time last week, I’ve realized that this is a pachyderm with even more parts than I thought possible, with publishers, creators, agencies, tech companies and others all hoping their own view becomes the dominant one.
The views on what *should* happen are particularly interesting because the industry is in flux, with the impending demise of third-party cookies that is still being talked about years after it popped up on the horizon. Those cookies gave us a workable understanding of what was happening online by gathering a lot of information on people and their personal data, which is definitely an important part of the elephant though not compliant with privacy and not telling the whole story.
Everyone from agencies to publishers is now hoping that their starting point on the elephant is the right one for understanding the whole thing.
Finger”print”
“Quad is a Midwestern company and there is a real sense of transparency, wanting to do the right thing,” Josh Golden, Chief Marketing Officer of Quad, told me over breakfast at the company’s apartment.
With its headquarters outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Quad is in fact different from a lot of larger agencies because of its background in printing. Huge numbers of publications, from The New Yorker to shopping catalogs, pass through its presses. It’s a volume that Golden, who is also former president of Adweek magazine, tells me reaches 89% of U.S. households.
Mailbox data may seem very 20th century, though it is also something very concrete. In a world where all parties in the ecosystem want more clarity about why their money is being spent where, having a (excuse the pun) paper trail of concrete, human-understandable data can be very valuable.
“The household mailbox is the most resilient piece of information you have. Now we’re reverse engineering it for the digital side,” Golden’s colleague Howard Diamond, Chief Growth Officer of Quad’s agency Rise, said.
The idea is that by starting with a set of data that is solid and offline, you can get a better understanding of online behavior and business. Quad’s emphasis on “household” data for advertising strikes me as interesting because in some ways it seems similar to a big push from publishers on their “first-party” data, like email addresses or story preference that they get from users directly through their trusted relationship of outlet and reader.
But then there are what seems like a million companies out there in the “AdTech” space saying that it is actually their data, or their way of combining lots of data points together in some novel way, that is the answer to all your problems. There are trends like viewability of ads or biometric data or attention data. You can stuff a thousand pieces of data in a box much like financial traders stuffing subprime mortgages into a product and then having it rated AAA. It’s unclear which data, on which channels, of which type, will actually prove to be valuable.
Content cohorts
I met Renn Turiano, Senior Vice President and Head of Product at Gannett, when he was on a panel at the Yahoo! beach on making sense of a “fractured media ecosystem.”
“There are a lot of replacement strategies [for cookies] that are in the works right now, some sponsored by Google and from others as well. We think that as an organization, of course we'll lean into all of those, and we'll follow whatever the market follows in terms of what the ad community chooses to embrace,” he told me in a follow-up interview.
“But we're not going to leave it there. And we're not going to wait for all that to happen to us. We're pushing forward with strategies that we hope will develop more and more direct relationships with consumers.”
That direct, trusted relationship with the audience is unique, and even more so because publishers also create and control the articles being read, which is what many people go online for in the first place.
“If you understood all the attributes of a piece of content, as well as you hoped to understand the attributes of the individual consuming it, then you'd really be in business. So you could definitely create as many nuanced and certain subset cohorts of content that you like,” Turiano said.
Content itself is an unavoidable, essential part of the elephant. The question then is what else you can do with data on content, and how it can be extrapolated to get you to understand other parts of the elephant.
“At Amazon they say, ‘We can get gender in three clicks’ from an anonymous user. And that's because of everything that they know about the referrer, when they come into the domain, and everything they know about each thing that they chose to click on,” said Turiano, who was formerly a creative director for the online marketplace.
Lions and elephants
There are many places to start from, but my time at the festival left me convinced that not all starting points on the elephant are created equal, and that ideally, like the real lions the Cannes awards are named after, you respect the full elephant rather than trying to take a piece out of it.
There is data about platforms and all sorts of data about people, but to paraphrase Walt Whitman, people contain multitudes. You can be a mom in the morning, a c-suite executive in the afternoon and an indie rock fan in the evening. Content and data about content is the thing that can help you see the whole picture, with all its nuances.
If you’re interested in understanding the entire elephant, rather than just carving out a niche in it, content is the only place to start.