What I learn from Cannes Lions – Stop turning media industry into a fast food nation

Native, programmatic, search, let alone all the technologies behind the media industry would cease to exist if we continue the trend of how we treat each media channels as fast food items. Selecting and picking up digital channels here and there, maybe adding a bit of favour by throwing in the latest formats, live, 360, canvas, virtual reality, influencers, we hope to somehow create a magic combo that would drive the home run. It’s like performance marketing on steroids.You may find it shocking why someone like me, who has been working in digital and digital performance media for more than a decade, would make such a bold statement, literally disrupting what everyone else is thinking how media industry should be going.Will Smith mentioned in his speech at Cannes Lions that you either evolve or evaporate. I think in the past decade, media industry, in particular digital, has been evolving at a speed that no one ever thought of a decade ago. I am not going to list out a laundry list of platforms that were not even built back in 2006. However, are we really evolving or are we evolving to evaporate?Personally, I want to shout out loud that native advertising should not be about sticking ads that look like content on a site to fool people. If we think this way, readers will shy away from reading everything and we end up killing good content together with our so-called native advertising. Native advertising is here to stay only if we can provide engaging sponsored content that are as relatable as other site content.A resonating theme among all speakers at Cannes Lions is about ideas, emotions, being relevant and relatable. People should always be the centre of all touchpoints. For example, the foundation of Airbnb is not about pricing, but about being able to connect to people emotionally, bringing back our innate of trust and having faith with one another.With the meteoric rise in digital media and now digital performance, clients are looking for a silver bullet to drive sales and conversions instantaneously. That is why more and more clients are looking at performance marketing as the Holy Grail to solve all of their problems.Throughout this process, we lose sight of listening to our target audience with integrity. Even with the use of DMP, DSP, online influencers, YouTubers, we are just still doing one-directional messaging to our target audience, hoping to use any online footprints left by our audience to help force feeding messages that we think they would like to them.With the offering of first, second, and third party data from DMPs and publishers, many would question why finding the right audience would still be an issue, given that pretty much every step is being tracked online.However, if you look deeper, you notice that that the data is only as good as what we put in. Facebook can only get the data of what people do on Facebook and the same applies to Google, who can only collect as much information as they can when you use various Google properties directly or indirectly through DoubleClick and their AdSense network.Also, with the current EU Cookie law and the increasing adoption of "Do Not Track" function on mobile devices and ad blocking software, it will continue to create hurdles for us to get an accurate portrait of our audience. What we end up having is a skewed view of what a person actually looks like. We fail to take into account what they actually do beyond the selected media platforms.Am I such a pessimistic person that seems to dismiss all changes that our industry has been embarking on? No, actually, I am utterly impressed by a lot of start-ups at the Unilever Foundry 50 at Cannes Lions. They push the boundaries and show innovative ways to leverage user generated content (not simply through paid partnerships or influencers), going beyond the basic online market research, social media monitoring and listening, dynamic creative solutions.They develop solutions to tap into the real-time responses from our target audience. Though still in novelty, I have great hopes that they can be used to help find more real time insights about your audience and identify new interactive ways to create content, display banners.Before we jump into recommending the next ‘it’ thing in digital media to marketers, whether it being programmatic, search, native advertising, latest ad formats or tech platforms, I challenge marketers to take a step back and spend resources to listen to their target audience and create a two-way dialogue through media channels with them.In short, as the jury panel of Cannes Lions Media says, media is not just about buying paid media, media plans or hashtags, it is about using the media to connect.The writer is Antony Yiu, head of digital of North Asia and head of search & performance of APAC at MEC.