Cannes and the Marketing Model of the Future
Simon Francis
There will be no shortage of discussion points at Cannes:
- What is the new agency model?
- What is the real threat from “consultancies”?
- How can holding companies reinvent to better serve clients?
- Media transparency and the use of data
- Media owner duopolies
- Idle gossip about advertising company leaders and their peccadillos
- AI driven devices designed to revolutionise agency work
- Creativity may even get a mention.
However, there is one topic that should be the centre of the discussion as it throws the others into shade, and that is “What is the marketing model of the future?”
Will new ways of marketing and organising marketing be discussed, awarded and celebrated? Will it be the main topic of conversation because it will impact all businesses in the marketing ecosystem? Probably not.
Even the ANA (USA Association of National Advertisers) and WFA (World Federation of Advertisers), who both have forums, may focus on other matters. And yet, marketing companies must change. If they do agencies and tech companies follow. It has seemed (at least to us at Flock) that for a decade marketing has followed media, tech, and agencies, and that perhaps this may have led some organisations somewhat astray! The companies that marketing has followed have had their own tune, and many marketers have danced to it.
What we advocate for our forward-looking clients keen to uncover new models of marketing is to follow a simple process:
A) identify your future customer sets and their influencers
B) define their needs of and from marketing
C) work out the marketing skills you require to meet their needs
D) decide what skills you wish to house internally, how you will gain them (train, recruit, acqui-hire etc) and organise them
E) decide what skills you wish to out-source and how to arrange it (this is your Agency Ecosystem)
F) define what technologies, data and processes will enable the new marketing model
G) test with use cases and execute.
This process and some hard work can rebase marketing led companies on their path to growth. It ensures agencies and tech play an appropriate role, in service to the consumer.
We can’t be at Cannes this year, as we’ll be implementing a new marketing model for one of our global advertiser clients. We’re sure that people will be talking about the Agency Ecosystem Reviews we are conducting, but that misses the larger topic of the new marketing models that drive the agency ecosystem. New skills, new organisation design, new processes, new data, new technologies – all these drive a new model of marketing. The agencies are only one component.
If you’d like to create a new marketing model, centred on consumer, with the future in mind, and you are bored of Cannes chit-chat then give us a call!