I read Amir Kassaei’s tweet:
"Today's smartest advertising style is tomorrow's corn." #DDB #canneslions—
Amir Kassaei (@AmirKassaei) June 16, 2013
(he’s our global chief creative officer at DDB) and then saw this cartoon from Tom Fishbourne:
He writes:
Authenticity and transparency are two of the biggest marketing buzzwords right now (and have been gaining steam for a while). Nearly every case study and talk coming out of Cannes last week seemed to reference authenticity as a theme.
Transparency and authenticity are likely a theme because as an industry we’re starting to realise three things:
- To be good conversationalists, you have to be a good listener – for brands, this means listening to people and giving them what they want
- Consumers may not want a “conversation” but they probably want, on some level, reassurance that what a brand is doing and saying comes from a good place (it usually does)
- Our clients are some of the most passionate people about their brands out there. Sometimes our job is to give them a platform, some training and direction before getting out of the way.
As I’ve said before, although in the context of media units, what’s new is usually effective vs its predecessors until everyone else catches up. Perhaps the same could be said of trends – the effectiveness starts the trend and once its a full-blown trend, it becomes the norm. Which, in this case, is a very good thing. Transparency. Authenticity. Good people doing good things for good reasons.
