Month: June 2018

To eliminate some of the guesswork from its social media campaigns, Viacom has turned to machines.

Over the past year, a seven-person data science team in Viacom’s ad sales group has been building a pipeline to collect near-real time information about how its social media posts perform. This way, the entertainment giant can predict how many social posts it will need to reach audience goals and what kinds of posts to use in each campaign.

Using the product, Viacom set performance benchmarks for different kinds of social media posts by platform and all its brands, which include Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central. Viacom evaluates everything from branded content campaigns to posts designed to drive tune-ins to tentpole shows like MTV’s Video Music Awards with the benchmarks. The data pipeline, which pulls information from social platforms sometimes as frequently as every five minutes, is also designed to give Viacom’s departments easy access to the data.

“We see a lot of inefficiencies in the way things are done,” said Matthew Moocarme, a senior data scientist for Viacom, who gave a presentation on the effort at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience x Science event on June 12. “Right now, the goal of this is to report back on how well we’ve performed [on social].”

Viacom operates social handles for everything from its channels to its shows to the individual characters in them, like SpongeBob SquarePants. It runs over 400 YouTube channels, 430 Facebook pages, 60 Instagram handles and 100 Twitter handles. Viacom publishes hundreds of times per day on each platform, except for YouTube.

Viacom uses the posts for a variety of purposes, including driving traffic to its websites, social impressions for advertisers and awareness of its own programming. Internal brand marketing agency Viacom Velocity markets the content Viacom’s brands produce, and social media platforms are a key distribution channel.

Moocarme said that prior to the creation of its internal system, groups like Velocity and the ad sales group his team reports used third-party benchmarks to see if their social media content was working. But those third party solutions all had their own shortcomings; some third-party tools, for example, make it difficult to use third-party tools to determine how much paid promotion affects content performance.

The pipeline has already helped unearth insights that inform Viacom’s campaigns. For example, the company uses the technology to determine when to use influencers to drive content. The technology can tell within eight hours of a post’s publication whether it will perform well relative to its expected results.

“At all our tentpoles, we have these dedicated social war rooms,” Moocarme said. “If you know you have to produce another post, you want to know with as much time as possible.”

Although Moocarme and his group run analyses for different stakeholders inside Viacom, they can use it to conduct their own experiments and create their own models, too. That’s part of a broader push to make data more widely available across the organization. Several weeks ago, the company also launched a data marketplace that gives Viacom executives an ability to browse the data sets available across the organization, sample them and request them more efficiently.

“Our ethos within the data science team is innovation and automation,” Moocarme said. “That means automating the boring parts.”

The post How Viacom uses artificial intelligence to predict the success of its social campaigns appeared first on Digiday.

From selling branded beers to producing series for streaming platforms, British soccer publisher Copa90 is looking to diversify its revenue streams beyond advertising.

Ahead of the FIFA World Cup, which begins in Russia on June 14, Copa90 partnered with the London-based Two Tribes Brewing Co. on a new Copa90-branded Match Day IPA. Copa90 is also looking to grow revenues from consumers by selling T-shirts and caps (through a partnership with apparel maker Talisman Caps) and producing live events for soccer fans.

Diversifying its revenue is a primary focus area for Copa90, which has raised more than $22 million — at a current valuation of more than $93 million (£70 million) — from investors including broadcasters such as Turner International and Liberty Global, and Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda’s sports marketing firm Infront Sports.

Roughly half of Copa90’s revenues today come from branded video series and documentaries the publisher produces for clients such as Heineken and Adidas, said Tom Thirlwall, CEO of Copa90. An additional 25 to 30 percent of revenues come from traditional video sponsorships and ad revenue. Beyond advertising, a fifth of the company’s revenues come from content licensing to broadcasters and digital distribution platforms, which is the newest revenue stream and is growing fast, the exec said.

Thirlwall’s goal is for commerce and other direct consumer revenues to account for 10 percent of the overall business by the end of 2019 and 25 to 30 percent of the business by 2020. With Copa90 just starting to get into this area, direct-to-consumer revenue accounts for a small fraction of revenue today.

“There are a lot of vanity metrics out in the market,” said Thirlwall. “We’re only interested in building a genuine and engaged fan base — and from that fan base, spin out new commercial models of the business, which a motivated fan base would migrate to.”

Over the past 12 months, Thirlwall said Copa90 has worked to gain a more comprehensive understanding of its audience by market — research it plans to use to grow new forms of revenue.

For instance, Copa90 is developing a dozen long-form video shows that it’s pitching to major streaming platforms, with the aim of having three to five projects commissioned and in production by 2019. In pitching to platforms, Copa90 is touting how engaged and active its audience is, through video completion and sharing rates.

“That is what’s playing particularly well in the market: We are not simply a series producer, but a series producer with an established brand and a detailed understanding of our fan bases in different, key geographical areas,” said Thirlwall.

A diversified revenue portfolio has become top of mind for media companies looking to lessen their reliance on advertising and distribution platforms that they have no control over. Other video publishers in Europe, including Tastemade, Kyra TV and Jungle Creations, are placing a greater emphasis on commerce and other direct consumer revenues.

With the World Cup approaching and with fresh funding from Dalian Wanda, Copa90 this summer is kicking off its plans to expand to new countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and China. The publisher will use more than 300 creators around the world to produce videos tied to the World Cup. This includes more than 30 Hispanic creators through a partnership with NBCUniversal’s Telemundo, which is broadcasting the tournament in the U.S. Overall, Copa90 has more than 1,400 creators in its network.

“One of the great things about having [this creator network] around the world is that we can quickly establish and take the temperature, and get an understanding of whether a territory expansion works for us,” said Thirlwall.

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On any given day, it’s not unlikely for Tom Sly, vp of revenue, national media, at The E.W. Scripps Co., to hop on the phone with one of the company’s many contacts at Google. It could be someone from the ad side who’s helping the local broadcaster improve its programmatic ad yield; comb through its audience to see what its heaviest users are interested in; or make video ads play smoothly on Newsy, Scripps’ OTT news channel. It’s the unsexy work of modern publishing, but Scripps says the level of support Google provides is unmatched by any other company.

“The level of support we get is outstanding,” Sly says. “They’re always reaching out, always trying to help us.”

Through mounds of grants, training and in-house expertise, Google’s effect on the publishing business is pervasive, separate from its role as a distributor of content and manager of its digital advertising.

There’s the Google News Lab, which provides training to journalists, often in its own technology. The Digital News Initiative committed $170 million to fund European news organizations; it was expanded to the U.S. this year, with another $300 million in funding. It has its invite-only, secretive gathering of digital news leaders, Newsgeist. (Facebook, too, is putting money into journalism, as part of a $14 million News Integrity Initiative started in 2017 to fight fake news.)

All this comes with deep unease. Google and Facebook have become publishers’ biggest competitors for digital advertising, having hoovered up two-thirds of the digital ad pie. Publishers are aware of this elephant in the room. But the oft-heard argument is there’s more to gain from embracing Google than not.

“We talk about the duopoly, and no question, they’ve taken share out of local and national markets,” Sly says. “They’re saying, ‘Yeah, we’re part of what changed it, but we’re here helping as well.’”

Google has done a good job of convincing publishers that it shares their interests. First, it’s understood that Google’s massive search ad business depends on having a healthy news ecosystem to supply it with content people will search for. Google also strikes an open, collaborative tone. A council that includes industry veterans alongside Google staff reviews the DNI submissions. Newsgeist feels like an industry conference, not a Google showcase; it’s also co-hosted with the Knight Foundation. Major projects like Accelerated Mobile Pages and Subscribe with Google grew out of working groups with publishers. The explicit message: We want to work as a team to solve the industry’s problems.

“I think they genuinely want a healthy ecosystem,” says Andrew Pergam, vp of video and new ventures at newspaper chain McClatchy, which also gets help from Google in many forms, including subscriptions. “As long as we’re not compromising their own business, we feel comfortable leaning into it. Those relationships are important, and when you look at the way traffic flows around the news ecosystem, you can’t ignore that Google is a major player. I’d much rather we build the relationship together than avoid them.”

Another criticism is that while Google’s largesse makes it one of the biggest supporters of journalism, it’s not necessarily fundamentally changing the trajectory of that business. Grants supporting journalism, news and information have hovered around $200 million per year from 2011 to 2015, the most recent year data was available, according to Foundation Center, a nonprofit that tracks philanthropic giving. So far, Google says the DNI has awarded 461 recipients in 29 countries a total of $111 million. If spread equally, that would average out to $240,000 per recipient. Google parent Alphabet recorded $111 billion in revenue in 2017.

The scope of publishing’s predicament is huge by comparison, though. Newspapers’ share of U.S. advertising revenue, for example, declined 7.1 percent from 2016 to 2017, more than any other type of media, according to PwC and the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Columbia University’s Emily Bell has argued that to really help the publishing industry, Google should give them billions of dollars.

“It’s not real money for Google,” says Tony Haile, former CEO of Chartbeat and founder of ad-blocking startup Scroll, “but it’s very real money for publishers to solve some of the key problems that have been created by the fact that publishers are being outcompeted in their main revenue streams, and Google is one of the main players in that.”

Google’s response is that it sees its role as enabling publishing by providing training and tools to innovate on its own.

“The best way for us to build positive relations is do whatever we can to drive that industry to ongoing success,” says Richard Gingras, Google’s vp of news. Gingras is a powerful ambassador to the publishing industry, having had a longtime involvement in digital news, including a long association with Salon Media Group, and his ability to influence product at Google gives him credibility with publishers. “And given Google’s interest in the open web, that’s the only way we achieve that,” he says. “And have better relationships with the publishers. In that order.”

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Gary Vaynerchuk‘s communications company VaynerX has launched a new company to help marketers better analyze their campaigns across platforms. 

Called Tracer, the marketing data aggregation and reporting platform pulls in and visualizes a company’s media spending from all major platforms. The tool also can show ad verification, analytics partner data and offline conversion data, and it allows other custom labeling, the company said.

A team within VaynerX developed Tracer in May 2015 and has been using it for all media clients of digital agency VaynerMedia, including its sister company, lifestyle publisher PureWow. Earlier this year, VaynerX made Tracer a stand-alone company with 19 people working out of VaynerX’s headquarters in New York City’s Hudson Yards. Now, Tracer wants to license the platform to other agencies, publishers or businesses. 

There’s no guarantee in the success of an agency profiting from selling its own software. As Neal Arthur, managing director of Wieden+Kennedy New York, said, developing intellectual property is a “side job,” and it’s “really hard.” Indeed, media-buying aggregation software already exists, such as within Salesforce and other visualization tools like Looker. Many marketers still rely on a combination of tools and people typing into Microsoft Excel, though. For Vaynerchuk, it was time for his agency to create and use a better solution, going so far as to compare his venture to social media colossus Facebook.

Data aggregation platforms have been created, “but so were social networks. Facebook did it a lot better and built fucking Facebook,” Vaynerchuk said. “This is about measuring media efficiencies and creative. We saw the incrementality of the product as a market fit and knew that the smartest people in media buying today could understand the value.”

Jeff Nicholson, VaynerMedia’s chief media officer, and Leighton Welch, chief technology officer, started building Tracer shortly after joining the agency in 2015. Welch was inspired to create a new solution in part from hearing how a friend of his had to “wake up at 5 a.m., log in to 10 platforms, pull all the data down, manually aggregate it and send an email” for his marketing job, he said. 

Both Nicholson and Welch have dealt with wasting time on managing multiple platforms in their previous marketing roles.

“I’ve spent billions of dollars of other people’s money, and a majority of people in the world still use Microsoft Excel to solve their data problems,” Nicholson said. “What we did is solve the problem that [platforms] don’t speak to each other, and they never will, but every advertiser in the world needs to understand them.”

Tracer integrates with Google (DoubleClick, YouTube and AdWords), Facebook Marketing and Amazon Marketing Services as well as Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Moat. It also can link to visualization tools Chartio, Looker and Tableau. What Tracer doesn’t do is automate buying. Buyers still need to use the marketplaces within individual platforms or other third-party tools.

Mondelēz International, one of VaynerMedia’s clients, has been using Tracer to track its digital campaigns in North America for all of its brands. Jennifer Mennes, the snack company’s director of North America media, said her team has benefited from being able to examine cross-channel in real time.

“The real-time reports generated allow the teams to drill deeper into their data to make quicker investment allocation and optimization decisions in partnership with VaynerMedia,” Mennes said.

VaynerX wouldn’t provide the pricing of Tracer, saying it will be tailored to the client and available in a annual retainer and percentage model.

Tracer plans to stay invite-only for the next six to 12 months and choose three to five clients. As to whom those clients will be, Vaynerchuk said he could see any of the Fortune 5000 joining the platform. Tracer was also spun out of VaynerX so that they could sell to other agencies without a conflict of interest.

“Definitely for the Fortune 5000 media spenders who spend real money on digital and are trying to understand the difference between Facebook, Snapchat, Google, Amazon,” Vaynerchuk said. “We’re not against working with certain agencies. Individuals, it might be too expensive, but the Kardashians, some of the YouTube stars, the Beyoncés of the world — it’s not inconceivable.”

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Stat, the 2-year-old health care news site, is trying a bold experiment in direct consumer revenue. The publisher is charging viewers $10 to stream its first documentary film, “Runnin’,” starting June 14.

The half-hour documentary offers a tough look at the opioid epidemic’s impact on Boston-area town Somerville. Stat tried but (unsurprisingly, given the subject matter) had no luck getting any ad sponsors, and doesn’t have the connections to get distribution with a big platform like Netflix. So Stat, which is owned by Boston Globe Media Partners (also parent of The Boston Globe), decided to just put the documentary on its own site and ask people to pay.

“We spent tens of thousands of dollars over a year and a lot of effort putting this together,” said Rick Berke, executive editor of Stat. “What we’re hoping is that people will see this ambitious effort as a way they can support Stat and our multimedia journalism now and in the future.”

Stat launched in late 2015 and a year later, launched a $299-a-year Stat+ paywall, aimed at people who work in and around health care. About 40 to 50 percent of the content sits behind the paywall. Angus Macaulay, Stat’s chief revenue officer, wouldn’t say how many subscribers Stat has, but said subscription revenue has grown by two and a half times since last year and should represent 40 percent of all revenue by the end of the year, the rest coming from advertising.

Lots of publishers are scrambling to grow consumer revenue, but it’s usually through online subscriptions or membership programs. Crowdfunding for specific journalism efforts is getting more common, though. Mother Jones and The Guardian have had success raising money from individual donors to help fund coverage of specific topics. Asking people to give for a tangible project can be a good way to get first-time donors involved, but it’s important that the organization makes sure the support doesn’t stop there and encourages people to invest long-term in the outlet, said Mary Walter-Brown, CEO of the News Revenue Hub, which helps media startups develop membership plans.

Dan Fletcher is a former journalist and Facebook exec who went on to launch Beacon, a startup that helps crowdfund journalism. He said  people usually funded something because they wanted lots of people to see it — not that they wanted to see it themselves. Most of the funding tended to come from a few big donors, which is an argument for giving people flexibility in what they give.

“I think there’s a lot of experimentation left to be done in this space, but I’d think about an impact model rather than an access model first,” he said. “Allowing viewers to put in $10 and having a key clip from the documentary be served as a Facebook ad to 1,000 people, for example, would better get at the funder’s motivation.”

Berke said he has no set expectations for sales. (Stat’s not making the film free for Stat+ members because it’s complicated to make the film free to some people and not others.)

The film has already gotten some local buzz. It premiered at the GlobeDocs Film Festival in October, where it won the audience award for best short documentary. Stat had a couple of screenings, in Boston and Somerville, that sold out.

Stat can somewhat afford to keep revenue expectations low, though. The film’s costs were low, having been produced in-house, mostly by Alex Hogan and Matthew Orr. However, any revenue it makes will be offset by some promotional costs. It’s throwing a free screening in New York City on June 13 to drum up interest in the film. Stat also is promising to give 25 percent of the gross revenue to the Alex Foster Foundation in Boston, a charity that helps people with addiction and their families. A 10 percent cut will go to Vimeo, the platform that’s hosting the video for streaming purposes.

Stat is likely to put some money behind paid social content to promote the film, but a lot of its promotion will be unpaid, using its social accounts, newsletter subscribers, its website and promotion by corporate sibling Boston.com.

Regardless of how much revenue the documentary brings in, Berke sees it as a potential avenue for monetizing future video journalism projects, especially those that don’t have natural advertising appeal.

“Everyone’s trying to figure out a way to monetize video,” he said. “No one that I’ve seen has really found the formula for online video. It’s driven by the journalism, but if charging people works, that’ll empower us to do more ambitious multimedia projects.”

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In an effort to win over skeptical advertisers, Snapchat says its ad-tracking abilities are comparable to what brands get from much bigger rival Facebook.

“Snapchat’s measurement is on a par with Facebook,” said Andy Pang, head of research and measurement for the mobile messaging app in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “In a much shorter period of time [than our rivals], we’ve got to a stage where we’re providing the market with the tracking, verification, viewability, reach and resonance tools they want to evaluate our performance on.”

A partnership being announced June 13 with ad tech company LiveRamp is Snapchat’s latest attempt to prove its doubters wrong. The two are launching a tool called Offline Sales Impact that will match data on Snapchat users with data from one of the U.K.’s largest supermarket loyalty programs in an attempt to measure Snapchat ads’ impact on packaged goods sales. Snapchat wouldn’t name the U.K. retailer (two agency sources said it’s Sainsbury’s), but said early tests on several campaigns for products including Cadbury & Oreo-flavoured chocolate bars achieved an average sales uplift of 4 percent.

Snapchat has tried to show the impact of its ads on in-store sales before, using Oracle’s data in a similar partnership with a U.S. retailer. Like Oracle, the Acxiom-owned LiveRamp partnership gives brands in the U.K. a way of gauging their ads’ impact using a credible third party.

More third-party measurement is on the way to the U.K. Snapchat’s marketing mix modeling partner program also arrives June 13 after having launched in the U.S. last summer.

The hope is the additional metrics pushes brands and their agencies to spend more on Snapchat’s ads by giving marketers access to third-party measurement data from companies including the data arms of Dentsu Aegis and Publicis. Advertisers will have access to Snapchat’s measurement experts and campaign data for modeling.

Snapchat’s thinking is, if it can offer metrics like add to cart, start checkout, sign-ups and more to marketers via the marketing mix modeling program, its ads will be more comparable to direct-response alternatives on, say, Facebook and Instagram.

But Snapchat’s metrics require a long-term approach to media spending, which Deborah King, head of social for Essence in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said most clients aren’t yet prepared for.

As innovative as Snapchat is viewed among advertisers, it is still a footnote on many media plans. Brands still want more effectiveness from the app’s ads before they buy more of them , according to interviews with media buyers from iProspect, Essence, Byte, Roast, Ralph and 4C Insights.

Pang said Snapchat has advanced, but acknowledged that it’s been hard for buyers to keep up. It went from only offering four measurement tools to advertisers 18 months ago to having more 14 they can pick from now. “We have evolved as a business so rapidly that it’s sometimes quite difficult to stay on a similar level to the people in our organization,” Pang said.

The recent updates won’t satisfy everyone. Some ad executives will say the changes don’t let them calculate the return on ad spend, which is different from tracking return on investment. This limitation could be a drawback for brands hoping to measure the quality and value of the sale alongside the lifetime value of a customer. Advertisers also can’t get unduplicated reach and frequency across multiple campaigns or a specific time frame, based on Snapchat’s pitch.

Snapchat’s reputation with brands is shifting. For every new spender like eBay on the app, there’s another like Adidas considering whether to spend more on it. Snapchat is catching up with other platforms that are better known as performance marketing vehicles, agency execs said. Clients at digital agency Roast, for example, use Snapchat as a performance channel because it typically drives a lower cost per click than platforms like Instagram due to the lack of competition. Advertisers at other agencies are starting to see consumer goods companies and entertainment think about running performance campaigns as it gets easier to know if those ads worked. Seb Redenz, head of paid social at iProspect, said clients are giving Snapchat a chance, with test campaigns underway to determine how cost per action on Snapchat compares with the competition.

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Platforms played integral roles in helping publishers scale audiences. Now, they’re helping with publishers’ subscription ambitions, with new product features and programs to educate publishers just starting to pursue consumer revenue.

While publishers are heartened by these steps, many are wary. Not only do platforms have a history of changing their minds about how their products work, they are also limited in their ability to help publishers’ subscription efforts. Here is a rundown of what the platforms have done and the gripes that publishers still have with them.

Google
As the platform with the longest, most complicated history with publishers, Google also is the furthest along in helping them with subscriptions. On March 20, it announced Subscribe with Google to help publishers grow subscription revenue by letting users subscribe in two clicks, with publishers keeping 85 to 95 percent of the revenue. Subscribe with Google launched with 17 media outlets, including The New York Times and Le Figaro. Subscribe with Google is part of the Google News Initiative, which includes News Consumer Insights, a layer of analytics designed to help publishers sign up potential subscribers.

The issues: While Google provides publishers with subscribers’ names and email addresses, it holds on to the customer’s credit card information, making it harder for publishers to upsell people on other products like events or additional subscriptions. It also doesn’t support donations or memberships. A Google spokesperson said the company “is not looking to ‘own the customer,’ but rather to enable publishers to better drive engagement with their users and increase the likelihood of subscription renewal.”

Subscribe with Google also doesn’t yet integrate into some publishers’ existing paywall tools, which effectively forces publishers to choose between abandoning a current solution or trying to run two tests at the same time, which clouds the picture of their effectiveness. Google stressed that it’s working on integrating into third party tools.

While there’s an expectation that this will change, some publishers expect there to be a limit to how much Google will give up.

“They’re very rigid about breaking that data down beyond anything that’s global,” said Christian Hendricks, the president of the Local Media Consortium, a trade group that has members participating in Google’s and Facebook’s programs. “It isn’t as transparent as you’d like it to be, but that’s natural. How much would we be willing to give of the data that we have that’s proprietary to us?”

Facebook
Facebook is about 10 months into a test with 13 publishers, including Bild, The Boston Globe and The Telegraph, that allows Facebook users to sign up for publisher subscriptions directly inside its platform; publishers keep all the revenue and reader data. About three months ago, Facebook also announced a Local News Subscriptions Accelerator, a three-month project to help publishers grow digital consumer revenue.

Other product tweaks have helped publishers forge the direct connections that may lead to more subscriptions. In April 2017, Facebook made it possible for publishers to solicit email addresses for newsletters via Instant Articles. As of May, publishers had gathered 10 million email addresses using the feature, according to Facebook. Over 1,900 publishers have used the Instant Articles email address feature in the last month, Facebook said. 

The issues: The subscription sales test requires publishers to use Instant Articles (though publishers’ existing mobile paywalls also work inside Facebook). Publishers that walked away from Instant Articles because of its limited monetization prospects might be unwilling to reinvest in the article format for an uncertain return. And there’s the question of whether Facebook users are valuable enough to target with subscriptions in the first place, or whether they are mostly flyby, low-value readers.

Amazon
In April 2017, Amazon, a longtime driver of print subscriptions for magazine publishers, announced Subscribe with Amazon, which lets publishers sell digital subscriptions directly inside Amazon’s site; launch publishers included News Corp and (unsurprisingly) the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post. For video-focused publishers with OTT ambitions, Amazon has also become a crucial platform for attracting subscribers: By one estimate, Amazon accounts for 55 percent of the video subscriptions those publishers have claimed.

The issues: Like many other companies, publishers gripe about the lack of audience and customer data they can get from Amazon. “The only demand you can respond to is the demand of Amazon saying, ‘Send me more,’” said Jim Fosina, the founder of the subscription marketing consultancy Fosina Marketing Group. There also have been reader complaints about how well the product works, and issues that arise with the product are funneled to Amazon rather than the publisher, limiting the publisher’s ability to forge relationships with readers. An Amazon rep said the nature of the complaint determines whether Amazon or the publisher fields it.

Apple
News aggregation app Apple News has become a leading source of referral traffic for some publishers, and publishers can sell subscriptions directly inside it. As with products sold through its app store, Apple takes a 30 percent cut of subscriptions sold through Apple News. Apple lets publishers ask readers to provide personal information when they sign up for a subscription this way.

The issues: Apple doesn’t offer engagement data on its subscribers, making it difficult to anticipate who might be at risk of churning. Publishers trying to monitor the subscribers they get through the Apple App Store have to use separate data warehouses to watch their engagement. Apple declined to comment on the record, instead referring Digiday to privacy policies on its website.

And, in keeping with its strict privacy policy, Apple offers extremely limited opportunities to target ads to people that install its apps.

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Woeful tales of lost luggage, cavorting on yachts, slopping rosé down shirt fronts, traipsing miles to out-of-town hotels barefoot, and dealing with French transport strikes. It’s all in a day’s work at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

The festival is one of the most lucrative weeks for the city. “I was in the [hotel] Majestic one evening and there was a furious ringing of the bell. I asked what it was for and was told that the hotel was celebrating as it was the most amount of takings in one day ever — even more than the Cannes Film Festival,” recounted the global marketing director of a WPP agency.

But when such a big crowd of media and advertising industry executives schlep to the French Riveria for rosé-infused networking and the back-slapping that comes with awards ceremonies, mishaps are inevitable. It wouldn’t be a trip to Cannes without them.

One ad tech executive recalled someone confessing that they’d had to take an “enormous dump” on a yacht that had run out of toilet paper. “He tells me he now packs his own,” added the exec.

Here are some other Cannes disasters from veterans.

Coping with taxi strike woes
“Myself and a former colleague had an early-morning return flight and were told we would struggle to get to the airport as the roads could be blocked due to taxi strikes. We tried to order an Uber helicopter, but they were all pre-booked. That’s when we started to panic — how the hell would we make our flight? We managed to book a hotel close to the airport and decided to leave immediately to beat the taxi strikes and roadblocks. We begrudgingly left the party to travel to this hotel, and arrived at just past 1 a.m. The fun really started when we tried to check in and the receptionist said they had no confirmation of our booking and we should return to wherever we had come from as they had no beds for us. We somehow negotiated with the chap to let us sleep on the reception floor of the hotel…from a luxury yacht to sleeping on a cold floor — a standard 24 hours in Cannes.”
— senior ad tech executive

When colleagues misbehave and you get blamed
“I turned up once to find that my fellow ‘leaders’ had had us all barred from the apartment we’d booked due to unacceptable behavior and complaints. We had to convince the owner to give us a second chance, as we were the better behaved group.”
— founder of a digital agency

Walk of shame
“One year I was booked a place about five miles outside of Cannes. It’s always a nightmare to get home at night, so I ended up walking the five miles back home at God knows what time — but without my shoes. Somehow I lost them, and I still don’t know how. They just never turned up. No idea what happened to them.” — MD of a digital agency

Dual-carriageway horrors
“The year when everyone got choppers because of the strikes, the people that did make it the airport had to drag their bags over the dual-carriageway to walk to the airport. The memory makes me shudder.”
— agency marketing director

Yachts mishaps
“It was Thursday of Cannes week and an end-of-term feeling filled the air. To celebrate, I appropriated a speedboat with some clients to travel to a charming little restaurant on an island off Cannes. Wearing some ill-chosen flip-flops, I descended clumsily from the boat onto a scenic rocky shore and broke my toe. While the injury itself was soon soothed by the application of much rosé, the longer-term reputational impact of sustaining the “most-Cannes” injury in history lives with me to this day. Trust me when I say that little sympathy can be gained from speedboat/island related injuries.”
— PR agency CEO

Yacht band practice
“It was the year that Ireland played Italy in the World Cup. The score was 1:1 and we all got battered. I nicked a Vuvuzela, which is one of those South African horns, and managed to make it onto one of the yacht parties where I played it as loudly and as passionately as I could. Apparently I didn’t listen when I was asked to stop, so they chucked me off the boat.” — senior ad tech executive

Food shortage
“I remember feeling sorry for myself when I found the main eatery in the Nice airport had been cleaned out by hungover locusts devouring everything. There was literally nothing left. I watched with envy as a guy munched his way through a dry baguette which was the last thing in the shop that was edible. The airport was just full of a bunch of hungover middle aged execs who’d been on it hard all week.” — senior ad tech executive

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Over the years, the terrace at the Carlton hotel, located smack in the middle of the bustling Croisette in Cannes, has become somewhat of a totem pole for the Cannes Lions festival itself. From the early morning to the wee hours, the terrace is the place to schmooze and be schmoozed, hunt and be hunted. The Palais des Festivals might be the hub for creativity, but the Carlton emerged as the nerve center for deal-making. There, over bottles of the ubiquitous rosé, executives schmooze, talk business and recruit. In short, the terrace is the Gutter Bar for grown-ups.

Origin story
In 1984, the Lions festival permanently moved to Cannes. At the time, it was mostly a regional creative festival for television and cinema advertising. There were a few things missing: seminars, panels — and Americans.

Rick Boyko, former chief creative officer, Ogilvy & Mather, former managing director of VCU Brandcenter: I started going to Cannes in 1987 and went for about 21 years every year. Back then, the Carlton wasn’t even open in the evening. Only lunch.

Bob Garfield, longtime advertising columnist and ad reviewer: When I first went to Cannes, Polk was president. Basically, it was a long time ago.

Boyko: The big bar wasn’t even there. Everyone went to the Martinez and the Gutter Bar. And if you didn’t like beer or hard liquor, you were out of luck.

Rob Schwartz, CEO, TBWAChiatDay New York: I think it arguably became the place way before us ad people showed up. I mean, the Carlton was Cannes Film Festival. Think of Hollywood, the French New Wave, Grace Kelly.

Boyko: A small band of U.S. candidates and reps started to move to the Carlton. Some people one year, either 1991 or 1992, just went and bought bottles of Champagne and rosé, and sat out there to shoot the shit.

Garfield: The Americans went to the Carlton in those days, not the Majestic. It was the chi-chi place for Americans. It was the first choice. I spent most of my early years there. It reminded me of going to sleepover camp. The senior campers who had been there before were basically dismissive and condescending of junior campers. It was “Mean Girls.”

Boyko: There was a small group who got together after the events of the evening when everyone else was down at the Martinez. You became entertained every night. Terrific Champagne. [Legendary director] Joe Pytka would just put bottles on a table and have glasses delivered, and tell stories. There was no service. It was our place; nobody knew it was open because there was a velvet rope at the steps.

Heyday of creatives
By the 1990s, the festival, with the addition of categories like the Cyber and Design lions, had become much more international. There were also more seminars, and the awards had become much bigger, meaning that everyone who was anyone on the creative side of the ad industry had to show up. The Carlton slowly became more than a bar — it was a meeting place for anyone in the know.

Jeremy Miller, chief communications officer, McCann: For my first year, it was 1999. Cannes at that point was mainly creatives, and production and press. There weren’t clients, and there weren’t media agencies.

Garfield: There are three spots in Cannes that are the non-invitation default gathering places. Of those, the Carlton terrace is the most gracious. You get to be sitting in a chair. And there’s a 70 percent chance that when you get your €1,200 check [about $1,421] for five beers and a bowl of chips, someone else will pick it up. And it’s full of Americans.

Michael Kassan, CEO, MediaLink: My first trip to the Carlton terrace was two decades ago. The location carried the same allure it does today. I was immediately drawn to the energetic discourse I discovered as the most creative minds in the industry came together, and it inspired me to come to Cannes year after year.

Miller: Basically, there were no tiered passes. So everyone stayed wherever they wanted. Most of the Americans stayed at the Carlton. A lot of the Europeans would stay at the Majestic or Martinez.

Schwartz: You would go over to the Carlton for breakfast so someone would see you there. If you jury a show, you could meet your jury members at the Carlton for breakfast. Then, you could do the Carlton terrace for lunch, 1:30-3 p.m., and it was quiet, and people would leave you alone. 5 p.m. is when people are there who are headhunters.

Miller: At that point, the Carlton was a stopping-off point for the evening. You didn’t hang out there all night long.

Garfield: The early days were filled with Americans. It wasn’t standing room only. There was room for the waiters to move around.

Miller: The Gutter Bar was where everyone let loose.

Garfield: For me, I spent 51 weeks a year staying as far away from ad people as I could get. One week a year I mixed with ad people, and most of it was at the Carlton terrace. It was a surreal experience for me — a combination of their contempt and their fear and their sucking up.

Miller: I think it’s simpler also that the Majestic was sleepy and the Martinez didn’t have the patio.

Schwartz: I don’t know anyone who eats dinner at the Carlton. But at 10:48 in the evening, the first gadfly lands. Around 2 a.m. they shut it down, but before that, it just grows and grows until everyone is standing on the street, almost.

Garfield: I had dinner at the Carlton once. It was delicious.

Peak Cannes?
It’s unclear when Cannes peaked. Maybe it was around the time that couple was caught having sex on the red carpet. Nevertheless, after 2005, Cannes was about more than the creatives. The technology giants had arrived, bringing with them plenty of cash and cachet to throw big dinners and parties. Creatives were still there, but so were their bosses.

Susan Credle, global chief creative officer, FCB: My first Cannes, I was uncool. It was 2006. I went Sunday to Sunday. And I went to a dinner hosted by Yahoo, and I didn’t know anyone. I ended up bumping into Rick [Boyko], and I went with him and his wife, Barbara, and he took me to the Carlton after.

Schwartz: Now, it’s shoulder to shoulder, butt to butt, chest to chest. The thing is, nobody pays for anything. I always thought maybe it was [former WPP CEO] Martin Sorrell paying for stuff.

Credle: Until I started running a company, I never paid for anything at Cannes — except my room, I guess.

Garfield: At one point, one guy came by my dinner table to punch me. He was shitfaced, so he missed. He didn’t have a whole lot of hand-eye coordination. It was because I’d given a commercial he did for Pepsi 3 1/2 stars.

Schwartz: I don’t drink. So I have an unskewed view of things. I’ve witnessed things that happen on the terrace. For the most part, what I will say is people are genuinely happy to see other people in the business. They are great moments of camaraderie.

Credle: I think the Carlton is just happening because the Americans get to Cannes, and everyone just stays on East Coast time all week. So everyone’s just awake.

Miller: My worst year was where these creatives punked me and said my room number, and I got charged thousands of euros for all their drinking.

Credle: The Carlton can be a magnet if you’re staying there. You think, “I just need to get past the entryway without seeing someone. I just need to get to the room.”

Kassan: The Carlton terrace is a thing, not a place. There are few single locations where you can find as wide a range of senior marketers, agency heads, media moguls, content creators and technology trailblazers congregating within arm’s length of each other, from all over the world. You are going to see bottles and glasses of rosé on the tables, but one never knows from a distance if they are merely props or sustenance.

Boyko: It’s now become asinine to the point where you can’t move, you can’t get a drink. You have to hand piles of money to a waiter to even pretend you’re there.

Garfield: It’s hard to give you an accurate portrayal of what happened there because I was always drunk.

Credle: There is an understood rule that phones don’t come out. And you don’t post. There is a code of honor. What happens on the terrace stays on the terrace.

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The post ‘What happens on the terrace stays on the terrace’: The definitive oral history of the Carlton terrace appeared first on Digiday.

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