When David Cohen first attended the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity about a dozen years ago, it was as a “digital media guy and I was so honored to go to an environment where was all these creatives and the best creativity in the business.”

Fast forward to the present and Cohen, like other advertising and media professionals, is glad to see a slimmer, more focused Festival, the President of North America for Magna Global explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“As we all know, Cannes has morphed quite a bit over the past 12 or 15 years. It’s become much more about technology and data and the creativity using that. I’m excited this year that Cannes has kind of contracted a little bit.”

Likewise, Cohen and his industry peers “are getting much more concentrated with the number of people that we’re bringing to Cannes” along with “lots of our clients.”

He expects to see a refocus what Cannes is all about, “which is the most creative work in the business across media, data and tech and messaging and storytelling.”

With a shorter schedule of activities this year, Cannes should be more suited to substantive conversations. “Everyone is in the same place for a limited period of time, so we get a lot accomplished both with clients and with partners,” Cohen says.

Asked about the progress of creative versioning of advertising messaging, Cohen notes that IPG Mediabrands has “an entire practice” focused on dynamic creative in the form of its Addressable Content Engine (ACE).

“We’ve spent a lot of time focused on the media side of the equation and not a ton historically on the messaging or the creative side of the equation.”

ACE is designed to match message relevancy with media reach. Plans and content are tailored to the right person, in the right place, the right moment and in the right voice.

“We now have the tools and the technology to actually think about templative creative, to think about versioning in a much more efficient and effective way,” Cohen says. “That is an area of innovation that we’re excited about over the next couple of years.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

By Steve Ellwanger on    @steveellwanger