The annual gathering on the Croisette has always presented independent agencies with a particular challenge: how to be noticed in a town temporarily populated by holding company executives with larger yachts and more comprehensive bar tabs.
This year's festival, which opens next week, will offer the usual opportunities for smaller shops to make their case to marketers who may be growing weary of the conglomerate model. The pitch, in various forms, tends to emphasize attention — the founders-in-the-room, calls-returned-promptly variety that becomes harder to guarantee once an agency has been absorbed into one of the large holding companies.
Whether this argument gains traction depends, as it always has, on the particular needs of the client and the particular restlessness of the chief marketing officer in question. Some brands arrive at Cannes perfectly content with their arrangements at Omnicom or WPP or Publicis Groupe; others come looking for something that feels, for lack of a better word, smaller.
The independent shops that tend to fare well in these conversations are the ones that have done the advance work — identifying which brands are in review, which marketing chiefs are new to their jobs, and which holding company relationships have begun to show strain. (This last category is rarely advertised but seldom difficult to detect.)
The festival's formal programming will include the usual panels on creativity and effectiveness, but the real business, as veterans of the event know, happens in the less structured hours — at dinners, on terraces, in the backs of cars heading to the airport.
For the independents, Cannes remains what it has been for decades: an expensive week that may or may not yield a relationship that justifies the expense. The math is never certain, but the pilgrimage continues.
Original story published in adage.com: "How independent agencies can win new business at Cannes - Ad Age"