Beth Ann Kaminkow, Debbi Vandeven and Kaleeta McDade: Insights & Learnings from Cannes

Welcome to our final segment, Inside the Jury Room at Cannes. I am Beth Wade, Global CMO at VMLY&R, and I am excited to be joined today by these amazing creative experts who have served on many award shows and very recently Cannes itself. I would love to start, just have you introduce yourself and the most recent jury that you've been a part of.

Hi, I am Beth Ann Kaminkow. I'm the Global CEO of VMLY&R Commerce and CEO of VMLY&R New York, and I just had the pleasure of being the President of the Creative Commerce Jury.

Hi, my name is Kaleeta McDade. I am Chief Experience Design Officer for North America, and I had the pleasure of being at the Creative Business Transformation Jury.

Awesome. Thank you guys for being here today. We're going to dig in and just talk a little bit about the experiences, the insights, the learnings, and, Kaleeta, I'd love to start with you.

Sure!

So you were a part of Creative Business Transformation, as you said, which is somewhat of a new category, and it has a little bit different in the sense of maybe, shall we say, KPIs that you're looking for and how you're going to award the work. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, absolutely. It's probably the worst-kept and best-kept secret because it's the place where you can actually look at creativity at scale. And so the thing that we looked at when it came to Creative Business Transformation that a lot of people are unaware of is we literally broke down what is creative, and we said, 'Does it make you jealous? Do you wish you had thought of it? Was it amazing? Have you never seen it?' Business, true creativity changes business, and so how did it return on investment? There's ROE, return on engagement, return on investment, so many different ways to look at how creativity can be brought to life. And then transformation, what was that from-to? Where did the brand start? Where did they end? Because it's so easy to say you transformed, but was it lasting instead of being ephemeral? So there were so many things that we thought of, and when we looked at Creative Business Transformation as a new category, we wanted to ensure that whatever we voted for was very representative of where we thought this kind of new category was going to go.

That's amazing. So you said new category, which is great. We have even a newer category, and, Beth Ann, you were the jury president this year for Creative Commerce, which was a change because we dropped the E. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what it meant to be the jury president there?

Yeah, so there had been a few years of this e-commerce category, and actually, if you think about it now, in the hindsight of having creative commerce as the category now, it really shows you how narrow the e-commerce was. Very digitally focused only and originally about a channel, whereas we opened up the opportunity to look at a just much broader range and spectrum of work, also KPI-driven, as most of Cannes is, but we were really focused on the commercial value being driven by the work. But where creativity and commercial result comes together to create this incredible moment in commerce that we've never really seen before. So the work was really wide-ranging and I think establishing what we will see in the future as we were really looking for also work that was going to inspire people for the next decade, that would have more meaning as the years build on.

Was there anything that surprised you that you saw in the work that you were judging?

Yeah, I think there was ... First of all, it was really good. I called it the honeymoon period. Right after I judged the first day of work that I did, I went to bed, and I was like, 'Oh, my God, there's so much. How are we ever going to start to narrow this?' But then you start to get more deliberate about criteria, and you start to really think about, 'Okay, what's going to make this category different? What is the true value of the commercial result that it's driving?' But it's like that idea of commerce is truly at the heart of the idea. So you can see that the whole kind of center of gravity and the anchoring of the work is really about commerce. And commerce, again, is a very well-defined but spectrum of work, and if you go check out in Cannes, the work, you will see what we're talking about in terms of that range.

I love it. We'll make sure we're checking it out, and we had a few other jurors from around the world that talked a little bit about their insights, their learnings, et cetera. I'd love to play a few videos of those and get you to react. First up we have Dimitri, who is CCO of VMLY&R Paris. Let's play Dimitri.

All right. Did any of you get a tattoo?

No.

No, no, no. That's no tattoo.

Okay, fair enough, but what Dimitri said is that they had a central question, and, Debbi, I know you feel strongly about this. Talk to me about when you're participating in a jury, when you're president, how do you get everyone to focus?

Love it, I love. Okay, let's play another video. We have Mel, who is also giving her insights.

Okay, I love the fact she's talking about accountability. She's talking about responsibility and brands. Kaleeta and Beth Ann, I would love to know a little bit about what you found in each of your categories this year as it relates to that.

Yeah, we saw a lot of trends in our category around kind of what we call values and value, which is companies are starting to look at people are buying with their purpose, right, and so how do you show up as purpose as a company? But it's not in conflict with you actually being financially creative. I think so often we think of altruism or different things when it comes to driving purpose, but in actuality, it can be very much beneficial financially, and so that kind of values and value, and then also going from category to culture. It's not about Ford being a car company or a mobility company. It's like a larger kind of remit. It's not about AB InBev being about just selling beer or different beverages. It's about also providing electricity for bars and other consumers so that you can have a tighter experience relationship. So those are some of the things that we saw in our category, and we saw that at scale, which was really something new.

Okay.

Yeah, I think building on that, we saw that you can take purpose in meaningful, authentic ways right to the moment of purchase, and you have to, actually, because you have to remind people when they're choosing with their wallets that this is the brand that they relate to, that it aligns with their values, and then you also saw it central to the creative commercial and commerce idea. So you saw ... especially when you think about target and where some pain point by audience might be, whether it's, 'We're alienating women in a certain culture and market,' so you just saw brands really stretching kind of a circular commerce idea, sustainable commerce idea, and, again, it wasn't like just for that purpose. It was part of a broader creative platform and campaign that was sustainable for their business. So I think that there's so much further that we can continue to stretch those concepts into the future.

I love that, and you both awarded, in your juries, a piece of work called Smart Fill. I'd love to play that video for everybody and then talk a little bit about why you awarded it.

All right, drastic with plastic. So let's talk a little bit. You both awarded it. Reasons why?

Yeah, so when we were thinking about it, and we talked about this before, it was the idea of you sacrificed your outside packaging, and, as a company, that can be so scary, but when you are doing it in service of being closer to the actual culture and actually, not mimicking what the culture is doing but being a part of that cultural idea of reusing, which is already so permeant within the Indian culture, I thought it was fantastic because you're exchanging this very large brand moment to be an everyday habit, and I think that's a huge change.

We loved that it was also awarded in your category because it is massive in terms of the business transformation that Unilever as a company is getting behind, and hopefully this is still just the beginning. We talked about the size of India and the population, but if it goes global, imagine the kind of real disruption that is going to cause to retail, which is why we really liked it, but we had a massive debate, actually, in our Creative Commerce category to talk about that brand moment, and I think the fact that the brand was represented so strongly in the actual point of purchase in the distribution sites that it helped a lot. I think the other thing was to have the CEO behind it and to have them go so big in commerce and in shopper and retail, to think about the category and the lift of the category as well as ... and that kind of category captainship as well as what you're doing for your individual business and products is equally important, and so I think there is a hope that they're going to be kind of setting a new standard and really disrupting the industry and showing retail a new way of going to market.

I love that, and I love that they're making the effort to continue to push this out, so that's fantastic. So we've talked a little bit about sustainability and purpose-driven. I'd like to go to Debbi. Debbi, let's talk about social impact. Where have you seen some great examples there?

An amazing piece of work. Any comments about that? Anything else you would like to add, Debbi, about social impact?

I love that. So we have time for one last question for each of you, and I would like to know from you, how would you challenge our clients, our teams, to think about creative in the year ahead?

So the first thing in my category is let's just leave kind of the above-the-line, below-the-line divisions aside and unite for the better work, and I think it does take a cross-disciplined, diverse team of specialists to come together now to think of the best work, and then we have a process called Brave, which really gets us to that point of going bigger, going braver and also getting our clients in a place where they're comfortable being a bit braver to break through.

Yeah, I'm going to build off that because I actually had one, but now I'm like, 'Huh.' 'The Medici Exchange,' it's an amazing book, but it talks about the Medici family in Italy, which was responsible for the Renaissance, and it's the idea of bringing together painters and different people and the idea of collisions happening, and that's really where creativity and innovation happen. So I think my challenge would be, kind of building off of that, would be to ... We build things vertically, and we need to go more horizontal, but we need to do it at the C-suite level because that's where you start to really see that large change so creativity at the highest level.