What We Need To Change As An Industry Before 2018

Sergio Lopez, head of integrated production/EMEA, McCann Worldgroup

Change and uncertainty are once again in the horizon and on everybody’s mind. We finished the school year with a very different and controversial Cannes, advertisers pulling out of YouTube and display media, questions about in-house agency model and increasing consumer uncertainty. I really hope everybody got a good rest. It’s back to school time and it is starting to feel more like college and less like play time at kindergarten.

While we may never see further than our headlights, we can make the whole trip that way. Campaigns are more integrated than ever in the way they bring creativity to life, and it’s become the day to day of agencies. From my perspective at McCann Worldgroup – we are seeing this integrated approach increasingly being awarded over the last couple of years: Field Trip to Mars, Survival Billboard, Cuánto and Fearless Girl. It’s effective creative brought to life in many different ways and beautifully crafted.

Let Go of the Past

What I’ve noticed this year is that change brings up two challenges. On one hand it disrupts the industry itself. For a group of people whose lives revolve around providing disruptive creative solutions for our clients we sure get nervous when change knocks on our own door. Every single thing that excites me about the future from content, to immersive storytelling, programmatic, data, product development, artificial intelligence all the way to new production techniques seem to be counter to  trying to hold onto the past. In a man’s struggle against an evolving world, my bets are with the world.

Rethinking Award Categories

The other challenge is the way we recognise and celebrate our best work in award shows. The way we categorise the execution of the creative is based on past experiences, so by definition any new innovative work will be difficult to categorise in award shows that are meant to celebrate innovation. The irony is not lost on me. Nevertheless at the core of who we are as creative people I have the feeling that most of us will agree that Fearless Girl [above] is relevant and brilliant, Superhumans a piece of art and Spike Jonze a genius.

"Any new innovative work will be difficult to categorize in award shows that are meant to celebrate innovation...the irony is not lost on me."

Creativity First

When I look at the rim of the headlights and wonder where we are going and what we need to change within the next twelve months, my answer will be that I do not know. What I do know is that to stay on the road we need to put creativity at the service of brands and consumers. Creativity not just on our work, also on the way we conduct business. I appreciate that in the past we had a structured business and didn’t face some of the challenges we face today, nevertheless nostalgia and worn-out modus operandi are not the solution.

Focus On People

We should focus on big ideas that provide meaning for the brands we work for. We should focus on how people engage more with those ideas. The same people that we had to convince around the world to use television screens that were bigger, wider and more cinematic,now spend more than 4 hours a day consuming content on tiny mobile phones and, by the way,  that they prefer to watch vertical video because turning the screen was a big ask. These same people prefer a piece of content from Zoella to a million dollar television ad. These people want content that is relevant to them and the things they care about. These people are moved by a statue of a girl in Wall Street, share it with the world and make it part of our collective culture.

Let’s keep creativity at the core of who we are and how we look at our lives. Let’s constantly change everything else. At the end of the day Creativity is the only way to survive. Isn’t it?