MALE SPEAKER: In a world where old marketing tactics don't work anymore, we need to change. We need to create a new standard. We need to ask a new question. It's about making an impact. And it's a call to change the world. Experience one of the most meaningful seminars at the 2010 Cannes Lions. With Bob Gilbreath, Jim Stengel, and the world's leading marketers. Experience how it all leads up to one declarative answer. To the definitive Burning Question.
BOB GILBREATH: My name's Bob Gilbreath and I'm the Chief Marketing Strategist of Bridge Worldwide. I'm joined in this mission by my friend Jim Stengel who was last here two years ago, almost exactly, receiving the award for Marketer of the Year for Procter & Gamble when he was the Global Marketing Officer.
JIM STENGEL: Thanks, Bob. That's very kind. It was a nice memory. And I left P&G about two years ago, a company that I love. And I've really since then have been inspired to take on this personal mission to help sort of take everything we do up to a higher level, because we see the results when that happens and we see the magic in organizations and with consumers when that happens.
BOB GILBREATH: And for me, my story is I left Procter & Gamble to go to Bridge Worldwide, a digital and relationship marketing agency, because I really fell in love with the digital medium as a way to really look differently and think differently about how business should be run and really many industries we've seen digital transform for the better and marketing's a great example of that. It's really to me the first medium where that old interruptive tell-and-sell model doesn't work anymore. You know, we can't force people to come to our websites, we can't force them to download our iPad apps, we can't force them to like our brands on Facebook. So we have to give them what we call Marketing with Meaning. And that's the topic of my recent book, The Next Evolution of Marketing, and it's really become the brand purpose of our agency, Bridge. It's what we do every day and we really believe that it's working for our clients.
JIM STENGEL: Bob and I really believe that marketing can do much more than we're doing now, and we know you in this audience this week believe that as well. And that's why we're here, to help accelerate this change that we all want and we all need and that's why we're here. But ladies and gentlemen, I do believe at this moment we really do have a very defining time, defining moment. Look at what's happened since we were last in Cannes last year. Goldman Sachs, AIG, Toyota, BP, and marketing and advertising are seen as the villains in this story. So, there's really no going back, you know, to normal. There is no new normal. There's a way forward.
BOB GILBREATH: And despite the challenges that we're all seeing, we do believe there's hope, and we believe there's hope right here. In fact, you know, I've been here since Saturday just to get a feel for everything, and I took a couple notes, have to have an iPad to do that now of course, a couple of neat quotes that I saw. One was Bob Jeffrey's from JWT on Monday talked about ideas that people want to spend time with. Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook we had here on Wednesday said, you know, technology is forcing industries to design for people, something we could take a lesson from. And just this morning, David Droga, I love this quote, "Our work can change government and society. Let's not have a recovery. Let's recreate our business." What they have in common is they're going beyond just a clever interruption and actually creating experiences, adding value, and earning engagement. What we see again and again is that brands are too often just looking for answers, some cases coming here and just asking each other, "What is the answer? What is the answer? What do we do next?" And what Jim and I really felt and why we came here today is that we wanted to encourage people to stop looking for those answers and actually take a step back, hit the reset button and ask themselves the right question, what we call The Burning Question.
And what we're going to see here is really three different chapters of a story here. How these business leaders identified a need for change, that moment when they said, "The consumer is different. We've got to adapt." Some of the new directions that they've been taking, we've, have a couple examples there of the companies. And then finally, what are the payoffs? What are the results that they're seeing, not only in the bottom line, but some of the bigger and more surprising positive impacts. So let's start off and look at how these executives saw that need for change.
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INDRA NOOYI: I think that we have gone through an immense shock to the system in the last couple years. We've had an excessive short-termism that really compromised long-term sustainability.
JAIME COHEN SZULC: Our industry was very much into what I call push. So you create a message and you go out and communicate this message. And that worked, that worked for many, many years.
MARC PRITCHARD: Consumers are increasingly cynical and distrustful of brands, companies, and governments. They're looking for brands with a higher-order purpose that are doing good, not only for themselves, but for the world.
MARY BETH WEST: Today we have no choice but to elevate the reason that we are in business beyond just the transactional buying and selling of merchandise.
INDRA NOOYI: We have to figure out how to hold a consumer's attention in this intensely fragmented world. It's not easy at all.
JOHN KENNEDY: The old way was more fragmented; the old way was more mechanical. We're living in a world now where it's much more transparent, collaborative, and organic, and that's often required a whole entirely different way of working.
JAIME COHEN SZULC: You have to understand you're going to lose control of your message. The days that we controlled what your message is are over. They're over. You don't control the message, you manage the dialogue. And how do you manage and how you steer the dialogue, that's an art and that's what they're all about these days.
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JIM STENGEL: So we've taken the last several months, traveling around the world, talking to leaders of some of the most famous brands in the world and we asked them, "What do you think the question is and what are you doing about it?"
BOB GILBREATH: And of course we'd be doing everyone a disservice if we didn't give the entire world, not just the folks that we're meeting, a chance to weigh in on this. And so a couple months ago, we created this website, burningquestion.com. We've been crowd-sourcing the answer. We've been asking people to give us feedback on what is that question that we should be asking ourselves. We've been lucky enough to get hundreds of responses on the site and really interesting things that do seem to be pointing to a different direction that we're going to show you about today.
JIM STENGEL: But in all those comments, a common theme is coming out. And as we talk to CEOs around the world and you heard from some of them this week, Bob McDonald and Maurice Levy earlier today, talking about many of these ideas. We traveled around the world to talk to CMOs and we got hundreds and hundreds of Twitter posts. And during all of this, The Burning Question fell into place. And here it is. How can we in marketing and business...
BOB GILBREATH: ... Hold ourselves to a higher standard...
JIM STENGEL: ... To create a positive impact on those we serve...
BOB GILBREATH: ... Our employees, and even the world?
JIM STENGEL: So you may or may not be surprised, I doubt it, it is pretty simple, but it is deeply profound. And this question really gets to what we've had in our guts for a long time. When we do work that meets this standard, we transcend advertising, we redefine brands and we redefine companies. And we've seen examples this week, the Pepsi Refresh, Gatorade, IKEA, VW, Pampers, Old Spice, work that transcends the advertising and sets an agenda for the brand and the company.
BOB GILBREATH: We've got to elevate our thinking and really go to the entire consumer experience, every touchpoint that there is, everything from packaging to consumer relations, corporate responsibility, everything's on the table.
JIM STENGEL: And I love the simplicity of this question, you know, and this idea of holding ourselves to this higher standard. And it really speaks to the desire we all have to do work that is important, that has a higher ideal, that makes a big impact. Work that we're actually proud to show our friends and our families. It's about making marketing a far more noble profession.
So this burning question is actually being asked and in part answered by some of the world's leading companies, Luxottica, P&G, Samsung, Pepsi, Levi's, IBM, Kraft, to name a few. And these brands represent, in total, over 20 billion dollars in advertising spending. So this is a big start. And it's important to note that while these leaders are setting the path, paving the way, they don't have all the answers. So what we're now going to do is hear them in their voices tell their stories honestly and transparently about their works in progress.
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LISA MANN: It's no longer about placing an ad and having a consumer see your ad. It's about inviting the consumer to engage with an asset that you create.
SALMAN AMIN: The Pepsi Refresh program in the U.S., that's been a terrific example of tying into a movement, the need to be part of a broader society, to give back to the communities that we all live in and we cherish so much or to the causes that we are so passionate about and return the control back to the consumer and say brand Pepsi is a brand that's really keen to work with you, so you pick where you would like us to spend some of the resources we have and tying in with some of your most passionate causes.
ESTHER LEE: The brand is actually an expression of a promise made. It's not just about what you want to stand for. It's what people now assume you've promised them. Our Facebook strategy, we take a very integrative approach so, yes, we have marketers. We do promotions. We provide products and services for the first time, give unique offers to our fans, but it's really important that our social media environment is a place where consumers encounter the entirety of the company.
LISA MANN: We have to create something of value, we call it an asset, that they'll want to engage in and it really isn't about creating the commercial and buying the one spot on the Super Bowl. It's just not like that anymore.
MARY BETH WEST: On Philadelphia Cream Cheese we launched a Real Women of Philadelphia program, which was a digital program. Six thousand recipes were uploaded by consumers. We have in our kitchens ten thousand recipes on Philadelphia Cream Cheese. So in a moment, consumers caught up with Kraft.
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BOB GILBREATH: You know, Jim, for me, I was really impressed by both Indra and Salman talking about this idea of a movement, not something you hear in marketing historically. I don't remember a Kotler book that talked about a marketing movement.
JIM STENGEL: I think we're hearing a lot from these leaders and we heard it all week about movements, and what I think is really interesting, our old language was, you know, brand equity, points of parity, points of difference, brand character, brand personality. The language is really changing. It's got meaning and impact and ideals and purpose. You know, it's really, really, really something fundamental going on here.
BOB GILBREATH: Lisa, you're here in the audience. Thanks for coming. I want to, let me put you on the spot a little bit. Tell us about this idea...
JIM STENGEL: Let's give it up for Lisa.
BOB GILBREATH: Yeah, please. Tell us...
LISA MANN: Thank you.
BOB GILBREATH: Tell us about, you know, an asset, new language, that you developed the iFood app, one of the first apps on the market and got on the Apple Store. How does that just come about? Just a crazy idea one day?
LISA MANN: So it's a funny thing. Obviously, we're a CPG company and we do our business in the grocery stores, right, but we found that things were changing. You got to back it up a bit. When are consumers thinking about your product? And we started to think about ourselves as a media company. And we started to think about developing assets.
BOB GILBREATH: Awesome. Thanks. Let's take a look at a couple more of those success stories here.
BEGIN VIDEO
JAIME COHEN SZULC: The message not only has to be disruptive, because the space is very cluttered. So the message has to be very disruptive. But if it's disruptive, then it's not relevant, people will not engage.
FABIO d'ANGELANTONIO: OneSight is a foundation that gives every year, hundreds of thousands of frames and sunglasses. And especially in countries where sun is very strong, sunglasses are crucial to maintain their eyes. Through our frames we also are able to give the gift of sight back to people that never had the money or the culture or the doctors to really have access to that.
MARC PRITCHARD: Unfortunately, there are many women and children around the world that die from neonatal tetanus and what Pampers does is give moms a way to help those babies, by just buying a pack of diapers. One pack equals one vaccine to fight neonatal tetanus. That's the way that you make life better through a better diaper and you make life better through the vaccines you're giving to those consumers.
INDRA NOOYI: And any time you articulate something called performance with purpose, which is in its essence how can we as a company do better by doing better for society, it is not a short-term statement. It is not a short-term deliverable.
JAIME COHEN SZULC: By aligning ourselves to the very core human values that your consumers have, and that's the only way I think we're going to be successful. That's the only way we're going to make a difference in the world. That's the only way we're going to make a difference for our brands. And that's the only way we're going to make a difference for ourselves.
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BOB GILBREATH: Let's talk about results. You're all waiting to see that of course. Is this just a bunch of talk and what's happening with these efforts that are going forward so far, so we asked that tough question too. Here we go.
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MARY BETH WEST: It's most important that we participate because if we wait for the measurement tools to catch up, so you have an ROI at every single tactic you're executing, the next wave of change will have occurred. And we need to be participants in what's happening. And we'll figure out the methods as we go.
SALMAN AMIN: When you now look at brands through the prism of performance with purpose, you very quickly realize the financial metrics are the, not the only ones that matter.
JAIME COHEN SZULC: It's not even thinking about market share. It's not even really thinking about the financials. It's really thinking about the role that this brand has in people's lives.
INDRA NOOYI: I think performance with purpose and this notion of doing better by doing better has galvanized our employees' life, you know. We never even expected this much of emotional involvement. People actually loved coming to work for PepsiCo. Now they're proud to be part of a company that actually is practicing performance with purpose.
JOHN KENNEDY: IBM at its core is working with and selling into enterprises, commercial enterprises, small companies to larger companies. But with Smarter Planet we had the chance to connect with many audiences who ordinarily wouldn't connect with our brand, from schoolchildren who are interested in how technology can improve sustainability, to communities, to mayors, leaders all around the world. So, it gave us this incredible platform to extend the brand.
SUE SHIM: I believe in the power of marketing with value. We can solve real problems for our consumers, not to sell products. Let's ensure what we offer to consumers truly enriches their lives. When we realize that, we can achieve anything.
MARC PRITCHARD: We will no longer be just focusing on a campaign that defines and describes what we want people to know, but movements that will inspire action by consumers. So ideas that are so powerful that people will be compelled to act and be part of the brand and be part of participating in and creating the brand.
LISA MANN: The higher standard is helping simplify consumers' lives, helping solve their everyday problems, being invited in, being their partner. That value? That's meaning.
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JIM STENGEL: This is the only way to work. So I have one more question for all of us. And that is how do we help each other be part of this transformation, agencies helping clients and clients helping agencies? And how do we challenge ourselves to make advertising and marketing a much more honorable profession again? To have the work we do, do more good, to have marketing that motivates our employees and makes them feel great about what they're doing for their consumers and customers. We should be proud to be in this great industry, to be part of a noble profession, a noble profession. That's what these leaders here are talking about.