CANNES — These days in ad land, it seems like the only topic in town is data. The transformative potential of data-driven tools has spawned a plethora of advertising technology platforms, allowing buyers to sellers to better mediate the trading and targeting of messages.
For an industry that has always prided itself on creative messaging, this is something of a change. But, just lately, even some of the ad execs who run tech initiatives have started advocating a return to advertising’s roots.
“For the last few years, it’s been very focused on data and technology, for the right reasons,” acknowledges Starcom innvestment and activation president Amanda Richman. “But we’ve lost some of the conversation around ideas and creativity. We need to bring that back in.”
She was speaking at Cannes Lions, the annual ad business get-together in the south of France that prides itself on being the “international festival of creativity”, not science. Richman hopes this week’s event will be a “pivot point” for the change.
“At Cannes, we have the perfect opportunity to align ad-tech and creative, and have a conversation about bringing that together again, to have technology and data actually fuel that creativity, instead of it being polarising it, which has been too much of the conversation over the last few years.”
This interview with Richman is part of a series on video advertising presented by Teads. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
