Cannes is revving up and the hotels in town are filling up with attendees. As part of our work at Cannes this year, we’ll be bringing you numbers that matter from Cannes and using them to color the trends, conversations and experience that attendees are having at the convention and beyond.
To begin, we’ve broken down the sessions offered at Cannes to understand how this year’s program is focused. The big picture:
Viewed through the lens of its sessions, this year Cannes is even more focused on introducing and exploring technologies than it is about branding or advertising as such – no surprise, but a remarkable testament to the depth with which new consumer-facing technologies have made themselves indispensable to the execution of advertising.
There are also a large number of sessions dealing with “forecasting.”The ability to predict the future behavior of an audience in response to brand or agency tactics is now a critical part of the creative and deployment process, essential to the success of campaigns, but the subject is complex. Those agencies that see the power and opportunity that predictive analytics represents are competing to educate clients and attendees.
Other details that leap from the data:
- Four sessions discuss using crowdsourcing in R&D – indicating that it is a development that creatives are embracing, if uneasily
- The most frequently discussed technology is Social Media with 12 sessions, followed by Mobile with 8 sessions
- Innovation was a popular buzzword, appearing 8 times in titles or descriptions of sessions
- Social good is a significant marketing tactic, with four sessions devoted to the subject
Bringing global markets to the attention of Cannes attendees is big this year, with 10 sessions overall, of which 6 discuss emerging markets, especially Brazil and Asia. Brazil is featured in 4 sessions overall.
We will be bringing you many more of the numbers that matter from the Cannes Lions Festival this year. If you have any questions or would like us to dig up a particular number or statistic for you as part of our coverage, please send your questions to [email protected] We look forward to hearing from you!