Opening A Cannes of Worms
Do the Cannes Lions Signal that Gaming Has Arrived in the Marketing World?
The ad industry loves it’s boondoggles – some tentatively associated with the general idea of buying/selling advertising yet able to draw marketers based on the presence of big brands and media properties (CES, SXSW, etc.), others that are solely focused on advertising, such as The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. The festival this year has been informally lauded as being the first to represent a return to normalcy after the pandemic (to the extent that anything that occurs at Cannes Lions could be described as normal), yet still had a bit of abnormal flair: The debut of a gaming category.
The inclusion of gaming is a good example of the duality of Cannes: The industry both looks to the recent past to pat itself on the back for what is considered to be the best executions of the past year (e.g. the awards), while assembling a smorgasbord of of talks, panels, and otherwise around the awards to ostensibly discuss the future. While personal conflicts disallowed me from attending Cannes this year, I recently joined a panel here in the states where the topic was (more or less) on the future or marketing. I made a proclamation there which largely expresses my general view towards innovation in Adland: The advertising industry loves innovation, but hates change.
In measurement science any number of more or less empirically serious techniques can be deployed to understand the efficacy of a given activation or campaign, yet lacking comprehensive cross-channel measurement (a topic too meaty to give justice here, though suffice it to say I’ve characterized it as a “pipedream” for the last decade and a half where the industry has been discussing it) many brands are merely turning back to the same media mix models they’ve used since the Regan administration to dictate budget allocations. The end result is that the most headline-grabbing or interesting work that happens within marketing is also some of the least well funded (if funded at all), sporadic, and least influential in terms of baseline marketing activities for any given brand or agency. An Adland cynic (hi!) might note that Cannes celebrates works that are outliers in terms of both creativity and alignment to core marketing strategies.
To be clear, this is not a critique of Cannes Lions so much as the innovation/change gulf in advertising more generally. This very gulf is a common issue for new channels or platforms in advertising, which at points have crafted entire strategies to break out of “innovation budgets” - a fun-sounding budgetary bucket that also happens to be very small and therefore not terribly conducive to growth or building bigger partnerships. It is this same issue impeding investment in gaming among marketers, as it was with social years ago (a place where some will recall I was on the front line for many years), but with an added layer – it’s not altogether clear what activating in gaming even means.
Is it Twitch? Hosting an esports event? Running some ads in some games? Building a game? Or merely plopping your brand assets into an existing game?
We can’t entirely blame marketers - it’s not super clear to those of us in the gaming industry either. Fortnite Father and overall technology industry firebrand Tim Sweeney recently talked about how much he hates advertising in games…but loves branded integrations. Always good for a more balanced take, Alex Lee at Digiday noted the divide between programmatic ad-tech led integrations into games vs. customized integrations more aligned to what is typically found within environments like Fortnite.
What is at the center of this debate is the split between gaming “media” (we will use this as a catch all for mobile advertising, ad-tech, and other more turn-key points of entry) vs. customized integrations akin to branding partnerships and in-depth integrations (e.g. your virtual concerts, branded vehicles in games, etc.). It is along this split that we find the innovation vs. change dichotomy in gaming: Brands may love the “innovation” of these large-scale brand partnerships, but they tend to be expensive (from both a time and capital POV), not terribly scalable, and largely goaled against metrics which don’t always have a clear connection to business impact (such as “free media coverage”). Conversely, lower-touch yet (arguably) higher reach/cheaper media activations largely through mobile games have not quite lit the collective imaginations of marketers afire. In short, to the extent that marketers are interested in gaming, it is typically at the “innovation” level, which doesn't do much to change how brands and agencies think about gaming as a serious part of a cogent plan.
Back on the sunny shores of the French Riviera, this differentiation is pretty clear. The Entertainment Lions for Gaming entailed 5 categories containing 17 tracks. A few items become immediately apparent: First, what constitutes branded or sponsored content/partnerships within games seemed to have quite a bit of definitional overlap:
B04 Brand Integration for Games. The seamless integration of a brand into a game or gaming platform, enhancing the overall gaming experience and delivering tangible business results. Including, but not limited to, one-off stunts and events, temporary environments or permanent brand installations within existing or new gaming platforms.
D01 Brand Partnerships, Sponsorships & Collaborations. Strategic partnerships and collaborations between gaming brands and non-gaming brands that leverage gaming experiences, branded content and entertainment to meet specific business goals and mutually benefit everyone involved.
Those words are certainly different yet…I can't quite figure out the difference between the two. Nonetheless, they constituted the most popular tracks, with 127 submissions between the two and the lion’s share (it was right there, let me have this) of gold/silver/bronze awards within Lions for Gaming. Meanwhile, the “Mobile” tract, which is home to basically all of the “media” opportunities within gaming, had all of 15 submissions and only a single “shortlist” to show for it…even the token “metaverse” category (B02 Live Service Games, New Realities & Emerging Tech) faired a bit better with 17 submissions and a single shortlist. And yet, mobile is one of the most important sectors of gaming - in addition to being the largest, the means through which consumers transact with apps allows for more surface area for marketers, though such executions are not those that get attention (or awards).
Advertising wonks might accuse me of mischaracterizing the point of the Lions. These awards go to the best creative visions, not necessarily the best media executions. While great media plans can be completely derailed by poor creative, a good creative marketing execution doesn’t necessarily need a masterful and/or robust media plan to support it (though I’d argue it is a waste). What is being awarded in this sense are brands that use the medium of gaming in an innovative way rather than what constitutes an effective campaign through gaming. However, both of the otherwise very similar categories noted above give a direct nod towards efficacy as a criteria (“delivering tangible business results” … “meet specific business goals”). Moreover, the Grand Prix winner wasn’t really a brand using the medium of gaming, so much as a more traditional multi-part campaign promoting a game.
The Entertainment Lions for Gaming were thus an important step forward in positioning gaming as a legitimate marketing channel, and a potent example of where conversations in game marketing are stuck in the mud. My point is not that the large-scale branded executions favored by the likes of Tim Sweeney and awards judges alike are not worthwhile - quite the opposite, I tend to be a huge fan of them to the extent that they tend to improve the gameplay experience. As I’ve noted before, painting opportunities in broad strokes belies a lot of nuance, but the goal should always be to preserve (and ideally, augment) the gaming experience. Whether you want to call that "advertising" or "brand engagement" is just picking nits.
And yet, opportunities in gaming are often painted in broad strokes that tend to belie the power and potential of entryways beyond deeper integration (not even considering that there is likely a natural “saturation point” for these types of integrations). This is also not to say that all media opportunities are premium and beneficial - many of the scaled options are either with larger publishers in a discrete set of games or ad networks/in-game ad-technology companies which may be only as good as the games they can incorporate into their networks. And yet, a more sophisticated conversation around these considerations exists only in pockets - we don’t know how to think about game advertising, in part because we don’t understand games, and by not understanding games we don’t fully understand or appreciate the possibilities. The conversation shouldn’t be integrations or media in gaming, so much as integrations and media within gaming - the balance of which to be determined by strategic goals.
Change can be frustratingly slow, and in this light the gaming category at Cannes was not a signal of games “arriving” within the marketing world, so much as signaling that the real work to effect change must now begin.
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