Pereira - A Cannes Lions Jury Presents: The Art of Branded Entertainment

The supremacy of interruption-based advertising is over. But what happens next? PJ Pereira and the other experts help us to understand the consequences of the radical shift through The Art of Branded Entertainment.

Dr Bjoern Asmussen

Senior Lecturer in Marketing, Oxford Brookes University

A must-read in case you want to answer senator, we run great content instead of senator, we run ads during a congressional hearing.

Fernando Machado

Global Chief Marketing Officer, Burger King

Peter Owen Publishers

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Copyright 2018 Monica Chun, Jules Daly, Ricardo Dias, Samantha Glynne, Carol Goll, Gabor Harrach, Marissa Nance, Toan Nguyen, Luciana Olivares, Marcelo Pascoa, PJ Pereira, Misha Sher, Pelle Sjoenell, Tomoya Suzuki, Jason Xenopoulos

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.

The moral rights of the authors are hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design: Moses Kelany

Typeset by Octavo Smith Publishing Services

Left to right: Pelle Sjoenell, Marissa Nance, Jason Xenopoulos, Carol Goll, Gabor Harrach, Al MacCuish, Samantha Glynne, Luciana Olivares, Jules Daly, Monica Chun, Tim Ellis, PJ Pereira, Misha Sher, Amanda Hill, Steven Kalifowitz, Toan Nguyen, Tomoya Suzuki, Julian Jacobs, Marcelo Pascoa, Ricardo Dias

Cannes Lions actually started in Venice in 1954 as an advertising film festival with a single group of people looking at 187 entries from fourteen countries. Almost seventy years later the festival has grown somewhat. It moved to the French Riviera, incorporated new forms of advertising and increased the number of its juries to more than twenty groups of people from all over the world.

Yet, despite all the knowledge shared, the conclusions and perspectives developed in the judging rooms, this is the first book ever published by a Cannes jury.

My guess is that some may have thought about it before, but the amount of work it takes to organize the ideas from leaders scattered across the planet must have always discouraged our predecessors. In our case, the irresponsible bravery to overcome these obstacles came from a sense of responsibility. The field we discussed together is too important and our discussions way too inspiring to be left with us alone as we haunted the hallways of the Palais des Festivals et des Congrs. Thats why not only the authors but everyone else around us who supported the plan deserves to be excited to see this tome out in the world.

Starting with the relentless team who wrote each of the individual chapters some more than one. Those who endured my rain of emails, calls, messages and obsessive revision requests: Sam, Ricardo, Gabor, Marcelo, Monica, Carol, Misha, Jules, Toan, Tomo, Pelle, Jason, Luciana and Marissa, I hope in the end you are all as proud of the result as I am. Al MacCuish, Amanda Hill, Julian Jacobs, Tim Ellis, Steven Kalifowitz, as members of the jury who couldnt join us on the writing, I hope you feel your thoughts and contributions are represented, too.

Also, we have to thank Terry Savage, Phil Thomas, Jose Papa and Lisa Berlin from Cannes Lions for putting together this extraordinary group of people and Tiffany Spoden and her team for keeping us on track during our endless debates.

Getting the book produced also required the help of a lot of people. From Pereira ODell we have Moses Kelany, who designed the cover art with the support of Owen Bly, plus Denise Corazza, Russ Nadler and Christina Hadly, who helped manage the complex legalities of a book with so many authors. Jasmine Gothelf, from FremantleMedia, has put together the index of case studies at the end of the book, which the team at VML South Africa Ernst Lass, Hans Liebenberg, Hayley Montgomery, Hannes Matthysen and Loki Magerman have then turned into a website our readers can now visit to find all the work mentioned in these pages.

Finally, to the team at Peter Owen Nick Kent, Antonia Owen, Sam Oates and Simon Smith who kept the focus on the potential of this project and not on the challenges we would face to get it done, our sincere gratitude.

Thats the full crowd behind the first book from a Cannes jury. People whose passion and enthusiasm compensated for our naive notion that maybe we could get this project off the ground, when no one else had dared before. To all of you, my most sincere thank you.

We are all firsts together.

PJ Pereira

Imagine if none of us had ever seen a commercial break. Not one. They havent been invented yet. Then someone comes with a pitch: So, Mrs CMO, weve had an idea. To get your message heard we will pay content channels to pause the series your audience is watching, play our ad then let them go back to the normal programming!

Which brand in their right mind would ever want to associate themselves with such a terrible user experience?

The only reason why we still do it is because there are enough of us out there, old folks who havent totally realized things dont have to be that way. The awakening is happening, though, and there is actually an entire generation who, like the fictional CMO above, has never seen an advertisement until recently.

It happened to me, actually.

It was like being shaken, literally. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, the fear of a big earthquake is a real thing, so by the time my eyes were open the sheets were pulled over to the other side of the bed. Four inches from my nose was the face of my son Francisco. Hes eleven, and that matters. He still had his hand on my shoulder from trying to wake me up with such urgency.

Dad, you gotta get out of advertising.

Why? I asked.

Because its so annoying, he replied.

Kids have that ability to state the obvious with such candour and simplicity that it makes it impossible to ignore.

Which brings us to France, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where I met the co-authors of this book.

Cannes Lions is arguably the largest and most prestigious competition of brand ideas in the world. In 2017 alone it received more than ten thousand paying delegates, including lots of chief marketing officers and advertising executives eager to refresh their ideas. In the halls and rooms of the Palais des Festivals we find them mixed with creative minds of all sorts, technologists and deal-makers of many nationalities, squeezing themselves in to watch the winners in twenty-three categories, including ours, Branded Entertainment. At five years old, and having had several name changes along the way Branded Content, Branded Content and Entertainment and, finally, Branded Entertainment this young category is considered by some to be the real future of the festival and the industry.