The lion grows up

In case you missed my last post, I’m writing you this week from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

It’s my first time at the festival and my first impression is that all the clichés are true. On one hand, it’s all too much—the spectacle, the competition, the over-the-top parties, the self-promotion, the celebrity cameos, the postcard setting along the French Riviera, etc. On the other hand, it’s inspiring to see the world’s best work, to hear from marketing’s top-thinkers, and to get away from your day-to-day responsibilities long enough to dream about the future of the brands you oversee. 

Cannes veterans talk about the festival with an insider’s shorthand. But as a first-timer (and for those of us who haven’t had a chance to attend) it’s helpful to understand a little bit about the history of the festival and how it became the “Oscars” of the marketing world.

The festival was born (perhaps appropriately) from envy. In the early 1950s, members of the Screen Advertising World Association looked at the International Film Festival that had been staged in Cannes since the late 1940s and said, “advertising films deserve their own show too.”

The first festival was held in Venice, Italy in 1954 and it attracted 187 entries from 14 countries. There were two categories: TV and Cinema. 130 people attended, according to event archives.

Who was the big winner at that first festival? This toothpaste commercial from Italy: 

During the early years, it alternated locations (Monte Carlo, Venice and Cannes all hosted) before Cannes became its permanent home in 1984.  

It wasn’t until the early 1990s that the festival programming expanded to include seminars and added categories beyond film. With the addition of press and outdoor categories in 1992, the “film festival” was rechristened an “advertising festival.”

As the years rolled on, and advertising’s footprint morphed from traditional media to the hydra we have today, additional categories were added: Cyber (1998), Media (1999), Direct (2002), Radio and Integrated (2005), Promo (2006), Design (2008), PR (2009), Film Craft (2010), Effectiveness (2011), Branded Content and Mobile (2012), Innovation (2013), Product Design (2014).

There are also now two-day mini-festivals for Health and Innovation that extend the festival’s reach. 

To say that the festival has grown over the years is an understatement.

The numbers for this year’s weeklong festival are staggering: 40,133 award entries, more than 12,500 delegates from more than 95 countries (and many more non-registered attendees are floating around town). There are 130 official seminars -- and that doesn’t include the hundreds of additional sessions sponsored by agencies, brands and vendors. The festival will almost certainly surpass the record 542 million Twitter mentions set last year. And there are more numbers that tell the tale. 

Cannes is such a big, sprawling beast that it spawns numerous “How to Survive Cannes” articles every year in the days leading up to the festival. 

Another telling number: 25%. That’s the percentage, according to Cannes organizers, of registered attendees last year who were marketers, like myself. If my presence is any indication, that number is going up this year. While Cannes may have been a private party for agency creatives back in the day, there is no doubt that brands are reveling alongside them these days. 

I’m looking forward to seeing what we all learn together this week.

Seek innovation, not perfection

Later this week, I will not be sitting here: 

Instead, I will at the Cannes Advertising Festival observing, learning, and bringing lessons back from the most innovative work in the world to inspire my marketing department.

This will be my first time attending Cannes, so naturally I’m very excited about it. 

Beyond the rosé and the beaches (I hear that’s what they do in France, but I don’t drink) what I’m most excited about are Frito-Lay’s submissions to this year’s festival -- especially because they are all ideas borne out of a personal philosophy of mine:

“Imperfect action trumps thoughtful inaction.”

It’s a maxim that isn’t often followed in the marketing industry, but should be. Don’t wait around to make something perfect when you’ve got something great that you can run with today. 

Think about it. You usually know whether an idea is going to be great or not the minute you hear about it. So why spend countless hours iterating, perfecting, tweaking and over-thinking when you can perfect it as you go? The marketing landscape is littered with great ideas that never saw the light of day because perfection was the team’s goal, rather than success. 

You can’t have success if you don’t put something out there. 

I’ve talked about the 70/20/10 principle on this blog before. Originally covered in the Harvard Business Review, the principle refers to a balanced approach to innovation where 70 percent of a company’s efforts should be focused on core activities, 20 percent to adjacent ones (validated risk), and 10 percent towards transformational ideas. 

At Frito-Lay, we have applied this principle to marketing, and we have empowered our agencies and the marketing department to bring more 10 percent ideas. These are ideas that aren’t fully formed nor perfected, but they are different, game-changing, and great the moment you encounter them. 

I charged myself and our leadership team to approve more of those ideas and charged my teams with getting them quickly out into the world once approved. Modern marketing departments need to be full of idea makers, not idea iterators. 

This is how you are going to win in the digital world. Everyone is a creator. There are no boundaries. 

We are fortunate to have agency partners like Goodby Silverstein & Partners, OMD, TMA and Ketchum who also fully embrace this new world – they did it with Crash the Super Bowl early on – and they continue to do it as we explore new marketing territory. 

The most validating aspect of all this is the fact that all of our submissions to Cannes were 10 percent ideas. 

Enjoy a few of them below, and look out for more missives as I post from Cannes in the coming days.

Tostitos Chip Kelly 

Every Chip Gets a Dip Tostitos Campaign. Watch the ad here.

Doritos Boldest Radio

Cheeteau, the wonderfully cheesy fragrance that Chester Cheetah graced the world with on April Fool’s Day. See the ad below; see the Cannes Lions video entry summary here.

YouTube’s Legacy: The Rise of the Consumer Creator

Last week marked the 10-year anniversary of the first video uploaded to YouTube. 

Whether that feels like just yesterday or forever, and honestly it feels like both, it’s hard to imagine a world without YouTube and its stars. YouTube has risen from its humble beginnings to a business so big that it's as much a household word as any brand that has been around for generations. One billion unique monthly users? Yes. Six billion hours of video watched each month? Yes. Over 100 hours worth of video uploaded each minute. Yes. All, yes. 

Dominance in every way of the online video space is even a huge understatement. YouTube hasn’t only drawn massive audiences, it has become an arena for creating stars that often dwarf those being produced by Hollywood. Michelle Phan was one of the earliest YouTube adopters to find fame on the platform. Over the past seven years, she has uploaded more than 300 beauty tutorials and her more than six million subscribers and almost one billion video views have made her a star in every sense of the word. Most interesting thing about her? She put herself out there and the people made her a star. No middleman required.

Interesting parallel to this success story is the fact that we launched one of the first large-scale consumer User Generated Content (UGC) campaigns with Doritos Crash the Super Bowl in 2007. The creative brief was simple: create a 30-second ad celebrating your love for Doritos for a chance to have it air during the Super Bowl. Pretty much in the spirit of all things YouTube.

And the people liked it. Nine years later, that consumer love has generated:

• 32,000+ Doritos ads created by consumers
• A 6-month engagement program with consumers every year (submission phase, finalist phase, voting phase, reveal on Super Bowl)
• $6MM+ in grand prize money awarded
• Last year, the winning consumer won $1MM and a job on the set of Avengers
• Submissions from 31 countries
• #1 ad in USA Today Ad Meter three times
• Top 5 ad all 9 Years per USA Today Ad Meter

New creators, new opportunities. Awarding this year's Crash The Super Bowl winner.

You could say our Doritos consumers seized the moment and have given Madison Ave a run for its money.  The dawn of YouTube and Doritos Crash the Super Bowl fundamentally altered the creators and consumer equation, with technology being the great equalizer. Every person with a smartphone is a potential creator. 

The old “one percent rule” assumed that only one percent of an online audience creates content, while an additional 9 percent modify or edit the content, and the remaining 90 percent consume it. It’s called an old rule for a reason: we’ve been in the midst of a major paradigm shift. The internet is becoming more participatory, thanks to the development of democratizing tools; and this has paved the way for a lot more than one percent to be curators and creators.

Ten years ago, creating a webseries that would get millions of viewers without a significant investment was virtually Impossible. You would need to build a site, configure video players, host and serve content, then begin to work on cultivating an audience. Today, a little desire and a smartphone is all one needs to become a content creator. YouTube (and likely many more to come after it) has eliminated the barriers that used to come between creative inspiration, content and distribution.  

As someone who has seen firsthand what eliminating those barriers can accomplish, I actively support it as a marketer; however, more importantly, I am truly inspired and excited by it as a consumer. 

3 Takeaways from the Ad Age Digital Conference:

Last week, I had the opportunity to take part in a panel discussion on technology and the consumer experience at the Ad Age Digital Conference in New York.  As an executive who embraces the idea of the marketing technologist, I very much enjoyed the timely topics, diverse POVs, and range of speakers. I’d like to share my favorite takeaways from the event:

• Attention Metrics – In order to address viewability concerns, the industry is beginning to look toward a new way to measure: “Time Spent.”  I would say it’s about time! As an advertiser, I was losing confidence in a proactive solve from publishers.  Other potential metrics discussed were CPH (Cost per hour) or CP30 (Cost per 30 seconds). Prediction was in the next year, we will start to see a shift across publishers and advertisers.  
• Transforming “Storytelling” into “Story Making" – More and more, brands are tapping into what consumers are creating and sharing with each other vs. pushing the story. Could not agree more. Today’s consumer is seeking active engagement with brands, and the opportunity is ripe for brands to create a much more passion-driven organic narrative instead of simply pushing out brand-centric content. More on this from Ad Age. 
• Building a Culture of Creatives – It is important for companies to foster a culture of creativity to keep up with the speed of our ever-changing content creation and consumption environment.  A good idea can come from anyone within the organization.  I am a firm believer of this approach. Would love to hear POVs on how organizations are accomplishing this.

I think it’s beyond clear that these takeaways don’t simply represent landscape or industry shifts. These are profound changes to the fundamental core of how brands engage and connect with the consumer. From this point on, successful marketing will be determined by how willing organizations are to truly internalize these shifts into their marketing DNA.

SXSW…Still packing a punch for brands?

Unless you steered clear of the Internet for the first half of March, you probably noticed more tweets and articles about South by Southwest than you ever thought possible. And of course, there was Meerkat. While it debuted a few weeks earlier, SXSW was definitely where it enjoyed its moment in the limelight (and with Twitter’s Periscope now in play, I fear that a moment is all it’s going to get). Despite its short time in existence, Meerkat’s real-time streaming has already been used to broadcast everything from protests in Ferguson and celebrity narcissism, to the swearing-in of federal government officials. SXSW definitely lived up to its reputation as the place where the conversation of the day takes place. 

Social stream-of-consciousness aside, the question I pose today is from the perspective of the brand: is there still a value to SXSW?

We certainly thought so in 2012 when Doritos unveiled a 64 ft. vending machine on the #boldstage for the first time to introduce Doritos Jacked to the world. 

… and in 2013, when Tesla coils kicked off the Doritos #boldstage, fully interactive concert experience. We turned things up once more in 2014, when Doritos brought a fully immersive experience inside the #boldstage, making consumers complete a bold challenge to enter.

However, after 3 years of going all in with the Doritos #boldstage, we sat out this year’s SXSW, pondering the inevitable question: are the brands that sponsor free shows even getting their money’s worth?  Is content marketing really the way of the future; does it build long-term brand equity? I would love to hear from brands that have been at SXSW the past few years, and compare learnings.

I’ll admit sitting out this year was tough. SXSW has always been a major awareness builder for us, but the time has come for the brand to start thinking about reinvesting attention on new emerging opportunities.  I personally oscillated between resentment and respect as I followed the brands at SXSW this year. I resented that I missed out, and wasn’t part of the action at arguably the most pop culturally relevant event of the year, but I must say I respected them too… mostly because they seem to have good taste in music.

People want to engage with ideas, not advertising

When you walk away from a 19- year relationship with college football’s Fiesta Bowl to go “pro” with America’s #1 sports property, communicating that fact can be almost as difficult as the decision itself.

How do you announce something as epic as “Tostitos is now the official chip and dip sponsor of the NFL” and match the magnitude of that message with your actions?  It couldn’t simply be on TV, or even online. This had to be one for all the senses. It had to be all encompassing. It had to be an experience. Thus, Tostitos Party BLVD was born.

The concept: American Ninja warrior meets the ultimate party games.

From Wednesday through Sunday at Super Bowl 49, party met sports as Tostitos challenged fans to complete in a series of larger-than-life tailgate games, while capturing their team spirit with slow motion video, and helping them get their snack on with new Tostitos products.  The BLVD spanned two city blocks, and established itself as the ultimate party destination in downtown Phoenix.  Fans tested their speed, agility and humility as they tackled a variety of backyard party games, including:

• Slingshot Blitz: A party game favorite reimagined as an arcade-style experience complete with surprising special effects. 
• Double Dipper Dunk: A duel-themed twist on the classic dunk tank, this game invited participants to hit a target opposite them with a football, to “dunk” their opponent into a massive bowl of Tostitos dip.
• Mega-Mecha Cornhole: The biggest and baddest game of beanbag toss anyone could ever imagine – a true test of man vs. machine. 

To fuel the competitive spirit, we outfitted participants with wristbands embedded with RFID technology to track their scores and power a “Giferator” that showed images and videos of them showing off their skills.  We also captured real time user-generated #PartyBLVD tagged images and videos to populate an online content hub.

Because a true party isn’t complete without guests who can bring the fun, former San Diego Chargers running back, LaDainian Tomlinson, arguably one of the greatest players of the game (and a guy who knows a thing or two about an awesome tailgate party) and Chip Kelly, Head Coach of the Philadephia Eagles, joined the festivities. They interacted with fans, provided tips to game players, and even got in on the action themselves, challenging participants for top honors.

The “Big Games” may only have lasted a short while, but the bragging rights were forever, and I’m not just talking about the fans. With 1 billion fun-filled impressions generated, we know that people aren’t simply aware that Tostitos is the official chip and dip sponsor of the NFL. They’ve fully engaged with the “idea” of what Tostitos + NFL truly means. And that’s a game well played!

#PARTYBLVD Fun Facts:

Creating of these games took over 1000 man-hours of custom fabrication and painting. 

• The dip jars were 14' wide by 13' tall – large enough to hold 86,633 standard sized jars of salsa.
• You’d need a Tostitos chip that was 6 ft tall to dip this jar of salsa.
• The Pepsi cups were 3 ft tall and 2.5 feet wide at the top, which means they could hold 430 liters of Pepsi. 
• The Double Dipper Dunk game platforms incorporated a two-story drop. Custom engineered and machined trap doors were designed just for this. 
• An entire semi-truck was needed to transport all the foam needed for the padding and pit. 
• At max pressure, the Mega Mecha Cornhole cannon could fire a beanbag over 80 feet – just enough distance to score the extra point after a touchdown.

Check out the timelapse video of Tostitos Party BLVD being built:

... and here are the games in action:

Before I sign out, I wanted to acknowledge the hard work, vision and creativity of my team members Jeff, Tyler, Pablo, Dana, Neha, Liza, Troy, and Christine, without whom these larger-than-life dip jars, cannons and slingshots would not have been possible.

Observations from Super Bowl 49

WOW… what a game that turned out to be! For a guy like me, it’s hard to pick which floored me more: the game itself, or the record rating of 49.6, which beat last year (47.6), as well as the previous high from New Orleans (48.1). 

Aside from Katy Perry’s “flamin’ hot” entrance, dancing sharks, a heartbreaking call (depending where your team loyalties lie), and an insurance ad that left people speechless (momentarily at least), the most noteworthy thing about year’s Super Bowl was how much more digital-first it was than ever before. I think we can all agree on one thing  -- “watching” the Super Bowl no longer means what it used to.

The Broadcast Has Gone Broadband
The most noticeable difference was that much of NBC’s broadcast of the game didn’t involve broadcasting. 

• First-ever free streaming to laptop, PC, or tablet
• Instant posting and curation of the ads to a Tumblr page as they aired
• First-ever livestream of the halftime show

This marks the beginning of a redefinition of the Super Bowl “stage” and “moment,” since audiences can no longer be considered “captive” as they jump freely from platform to platform. 

Tech Takes Advantage
This change in content consumption and engagement is why we saw tech media brands like YouTube and Facebook leaning in with new offerings.

• YouTube hosted for the first time a YouTube SB Halftime Show, with YouTube stars, fake spots, stunts and other entertainment to lure attention (and future marketers). I am anxious to see how much viewership it attracted versus the 118 million who tuned into the Pepsi Katy Perry Half time show on NBC.
• Facebook, interestingly, conducted real-time tracking of user posts during the game, and used that data to offer hyper-targeted ads to advertisers.  Again, a first. But I have to wonder if this is truly a scalable game changer or if it merely adds more meaningless second-screen clutter. 

It’s the Game Around the Game
For us as advertisers, capitalizing on our large SB investment has now clearly become more about the social world surrounding the big game, than the in-game time itself. This is exactly why we saw so many brands leaking teasers of their ads. In fact, last year:

• 45% of Americans sought out ads before kickoff
• 160 MM Super Bowl ad views were recorded on YouTube before the game even began

Of course, our Doritos team had to bring some levity to the mad rush to release ads early. In signature Doritos style, as always.

Hacking the Super Bowl
Let’s face it, “teasers” have become table stakes. The best advertisers attempted radically different creative strategies to break through. 

• Bud Light built a life-sized Pac-Man experience in LA and used pics and videos of the set to promote their spot, “Coin,” in which one unsuspecting dude was invited to play.
• PepsiCo launched a reality show featuring Food Network star Anne Burrell, and eight culinary students in a cooking competition.
• Hacking or Crashing the Super bowl is something, we on the Doritos team have pioneered for the past 9 years. Doritos consumers were engaged for 5 months leading up to game day. The engagement we got from asking consumers to create the ads, narrowing down the 10 finalists, and then asking the consumers to vote on the ad that should air on Super Bowl Sunday has always made it a stand out “hack” of the super bowl. http://crashthesuperbowl.doritos.com/finalists

The 10 Crash the Super Bowl finalists at the Doritos suite getting ready to find out in real time who the winner was.

• Carnival and GoDaddy borrowed a page from the Doritos playbook and employed voting to engage audiences around their Super Bowl efforts. Carnival had fans vote on one of four spots to air, and GoDaddy had people vote on the name of a puppy in their ad (“Buddy” won). 

Getting Serious
I also noticed a creative trend with brands getting more serious, making a statement to the Super Bowl audience rather than eliciting a laugh. In social media, the strategy of these brands was to start real conversations about real issues. 

• Toyota had an ad this year called “To be a Dad” which strikes a more serious, emotional chord. 
• Dove had a spot called “Real Strength,” a recut of a Father’s Day spot with a new hashtag. 
• That aforementioned insurance ad from Nationwide warrants a mention here too, since it forced everyone to think of their own child dying. 

As I take these observations back with me to Dallas to derive new insights and strategies, I can’t help but welcome this changing landscape and the challenges it brings. We may have lost the traditional paradigm of audiences “glued to the TV set,” but in the long run, being able to transcend platforms and engage on their terms means to me that the experience can only become more real, which only creates stronger, more genuine connections. 

Bringing Art & Science to #SB49

“Active” Art
To generate awareness and excitement for Tostitos Party BLVD across the Phoenix metro area, and get people talking about the biggest party in America, we unveiled larger-than-life Tostitos art installations in two of the most highly trafficked malls in the area. The installations drive engagement by inviting the consumer to ‘complete’ the art. To promote sharing and conversation across social media channels, consumers are also encouraged to take pictures and share their “masterpieces” with the #PartyBLVD hashtag for a chance to win a year’s supply of chips and dip.

iBeacon location sensor

Mobile FTW!
Tostitos is also one of the first brands to incorporate seamless mobile engagement through the use of iBeacons. Through iBeacons placed at the art installations, the ASU campus, light rail locations, sports bars and other high traffic areas, we are pushing coupons and promotions triggered by users’ locations to drive awareness of PartyBLVD. 

Kudos to my team members Ashwin, Liza & Dana, a.k.a. the Frito-Lay “bold” marketers, for pushing the 10 in “70-20-10” (70% tried & tested, 20% validated new, 10% inventing-the-future “new”)

Road to #SB49…CES to Super Bowl

Yes, 2015 is indeed here and we are all up and running as marketers. And the first quarter has been hectic, going from the first ever College Football playoffs, to CES, to the Super Bowl. I believe that the College football playoffs were long overdue. But it has been interesting to see the impact of the “New Year’s Six” on the incumbent BCS Bowl title sponsors. What is the role of the 75-odd bowl games moving forward? Three of the four sponsors walked away from renewing their contracts.  We were one of them, as the title sponsor for the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. We have had a great relationship with the Fiesta Bowl committee for 19 years, so it was a tough decision all around. For us, it was about consolidating our brands around Pepsico’s #1 sports investment, the NFL.

I did not make it to CES this year. But a couple of things struck me watching the coverage from CES. It is no longer just geek heaven (former engineer and proud card-carrying member of Geekology, here). Marketers are keen to the fact that CES is where today's consumers come to find inspiration, experience innovation, and witness invention. It has essentially become the world’s fair for a marketing technologist. CES is where you start getting an inkling of what the public will want in the next couple of years and the impact that it will have on our brands. 

Mobile dominated this year's coverage. Safe to say game, set, match to mobile. Mobile is now our first screen -- it has finally arrived! Hardware is getting even cheaper and more capable. We are in the 3rd wave of the S curve. Devices are merging. TV/Phone/Camera/Watch/Tablet/PC....what is what? No doubt this is going to accelerate creativity and innovation. 3D is going through a 2nd generation update, both in 3D graphics and 3D printing. Tech was always cool, but thanks to Apple’s rebirth it has now crossed over to “chic." 

The amount of  high-end wearable devices that debuted at CES was astonishing. I remember reading that the Swiss watch makers were not feeling threatened.  Interesting... if I were in their boots, I would be shaking. I am going to go out on a limb and predict that the Millennial and Gen Z generations will pick smart devices over the designer watch that “only” tells time.

Tostitos RFID wearable tag in use at #partyblvd

Thanks to my daughter,  I am getting familiar with Snapchat. And I have to tell you I am getting more and more intrigued with the brand storytelling possibilities that this platform represents. The “Stories” product is brilliant and its usage during the Detroit Auto Show was a breakthrough.

These are quick missives for now from the field, as my team prepares for Frito-Lay's  Super Bowl marketing activities. Gathering more thoughts from my "game within the game" perspective for my next post on the road to #SB49.

Building brands in a digital data world...welcome to era of the marketing technologist

Everyday as a marketer I wake up to a hyper-fragmented audience -- multiple social platforms, the ability to skip past our 30 sec ads, a more savvy and de-sensitized consumer. It's arguably getting harder and harder to reach consumers through traditional channels, and our appetite for technology in all forms, from digital TV to social media to smartphones is taking the blame. However, it's this same technology that has created data that has led to more unique ways to connect with consumers, and enabled the creation of immersive experiences that cross over from the digital to the physical world. These are the experiences that transcend simple awareness and win a share of heart and soul, which is what we really need to impact their consideration.

My blog aspires to explore and navigate this changing world. I will post my random thoughts on consumer, creative, strategy, data & analytics, business & life ...contextually timed. I am as anxious to share as I am to learn, so open door on feedback to my posts.