Troubled advertiser talks in a Riviera paradise
CANNES, France — The top hitters in media and advertising descended on the beaches of southern France last week, lounging on yachts and sipping wine and frozen rosé slushies as the sun sparkled on the cerulean water of the French Riviera. They networked and cut deals at parties in chic hotels — the type where rooms cost $500 a night.
But even in paradise, it did not take long for conversations at the annual industry conference to inevitably turn to the frustrations of the advertising world.
Since the previous Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, marketers have grappled with inadvertently funding intentionally made-up news, hate sites, and racist and terroristrelated videos on YouTube. They have been targeted on social media by partisan consumer groups based on where they place their ads. And they are demanding more transparency and accountability from digital outlets, especially Facebook and Google, which continue to dominate the online ad market.
“I’m hypersensitive right now,” said Kathleen Hall, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for global advertising and media. “As a marketer you always think about risk, but it wasn’t necessarily the first thought. I think now you have to be much more sensitive to the idea of risk and how anything might be construed as a political statement or endorsement or issue-based support.”
The notion of “brand safety,” the industry term for ensuring that ads do not show up on or adjacent to objectionable content, remained a concern of executives here. Kristin Lemkau, chief marketing officer of JPMorgan Chase, said during a discussion that Chase had yet to return to YouTube, which faced an advertiser exodus in the spring after ads for brands like AT&T were discovered on videos promoting hate speech and terrorism.
“The answer, and I think they agree, is just to raise the bar on monetization,” she said.
While YouTube has since announced that channels must have 10,000 views before being considered for automatically placed ads, Lemkau said she was not sure that was high enough. In order for Chase to return, she added, “we would have to be able to make a judgment about every channel and every creative, and I’m willing to pay a premium for that.”
Hall said that in today’s polarized media environment, people were “judging and assuming your values are represented by your media placement.”
“I’m kind of obsessed,” she said, “with what’s the right balance between people’s freedom of choice, the media’s freedom of expression and our freedom to reach.”
While the annual festival is ostensibly about honoring the best marketing work from the past year — State Street’s statue of a girl staring down the Wall Street bull won several awards — it was physically dominated by technology companies. Attendees could visit branded swaths of sun and sand called Facebook Beach, YouTube Beach, Pinterest Pier and #TwitterBeach, or ride a bright yellow Snapchat-branded Ferris wheel.
Hoopla aside, several advertisers said they were taking a harder line with such outlets, though they were eager to continue working with them. Google and Facebook, in particular, are trying to assuage advertisers’ concerns around objectionable content.
Others are more concerned with creating standards for determining how effectively ads reach people online and being able to compare metrics across platforms — basically, what a Facebook video view is worth versus an ad viewed on Snapchat.
“When digital media was a small part of overall advertising, I think we were learning and developing,” said Keith Weed, chief marketing officer of Unilever. “But now it’s starting to become the biggest part of advertising, and I think in that context, we need to make the industry more efficient.”
Still, while marketers are more outspoken, the giant online advertising outlets continue to reign supreme — and attract hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing.