Our research among CMOs in the past few years has revealed an important insight:  as the Cannes Festival has become a large, multi-faceted global marketing event, CMOs are looking for an “end-of-week” synthesis of the important learning and trends at the Festival.   And they are looking to do that in a private environment where they can discuss the implications with each other.  We have designed a program to do exactly that.

The CMO Accelerator Programme is nearly “sold out,” as we are intentionally keeping it small and intimate.  It is attracting CMOs from all around the globe, in categories ranging from financial services to entertainment to consumer products.

Here is a sneak preview of the just-released working agenda for the Accelerator:  CMO Accelerator Programme Agenda

I can hardly wait for June 20 in Cannes, when the first CMO Accelerator kicks into high gear.   I have high hopes this will become a pillar of Cannes Lions for years to come.

TED, which celebrates its 30^th anniversary next year, is simply one of the richest learning environments on the planet, an environment that business simply is not taking advantage of.   Plenty of leaders watch an occasional TED Talk now and then, but few have a strategy for systematically harvesting and applying the inspiration, ideas and themes coming from those talks.

This year, in partnership with Ronda Carnegie’s team from TED and Laurie Coots from Disruption Works, I helped pilot the Institute@TED.  We brought together leaders from five organizations to help them harness the power of TED.  TED’s mission is to spread—and help activate—big, important ideas.  Most businesses share this goal, albeit in a more commercial way.  We wanted to investigate how to best help businesses activate TED’s amazing curated knowledge, in a more thoughtful and deliberate way.

Here is what I learned this year from TED, including my interactions with other business colleagues at the Institute@TED, which I feel is highly relevant for future-oriented business leaders:

– The fast and powerful results from the right incentives.  We all know this to be true—you get what you measure—you get the behavior you reward.  However, as business leaders, we often get complacent with our incentives.  We don’t constantly innovate on them.  We don’t change them as our business situation changes.  Jennifer Granholm, the former governor of Michigan, talked about the great results from the federal government’s “Race to the Top” funding incentives for states who innovate successfully in education.  She called for the same process to innovate in energy.  Alex Laskey, the founder of Opower, has helped individual customers save $200 million by using social incentives that illustrate how one’s energy use compares to one’s neighbors on utility bills.

– Flourishing by embracing constraints to discover new channels of creativity.  So often at TED the most helpful talks come from unexpected people and places.  My most unexpected inspiration this year came from multimedia artist Phil Hansen.  Phil developed nerve damage in his hand which caused a constant tremor, which prevented him from working in his preferred style:  pointillism.  His commitment to “embrace the shake,” as he calls it, helped him achieve limitless creativity from his supposed limitation.  His limitation, once embraced, made him a far more innovative artist.  Architect Michael Green believes in innovating by embracing constraints.  He believes we can meet worldwide housing demand AND constrain carbon emissions by replacing steel and concrete construction with wood construction, that can even be applied to skyscrapers.

– Passion to create disruptive, positive change by simplifying and deconstructing key issues and challenges.   Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, and chief designer for SpaceX and Tesla, makes a strong case that space travel can be far more affordable if we can learn to return and land rockets.  That is the problem he and his organization are solving.  Mary Lou Jepsen of Google believes we can better understand brain disease, and brain functions like language learning, if we can massively increase the resolution of brain scans.  That is what she is focusing on.  Researcher Allan Savory studied the desertification of grasslands for decades, to isolate the driving force that is causing one of the world’s greatest ecological disasters.  He is now focused on restoring grazing herds to reverse this desertification.  Innovation doesn’t always come from where you expect it.

– Creating new ways to work, collaborating in new ways.  We have talked about the potential of collaboration for years, and most of us collaborate with a huge variety of people and organizations to achieve our goals.  It was clear at TED that “collaboration is meeting the crowd,” and morphing to respond to new challenges and new business models.  Futurist Stewart Brand believes information wants to be free, and today we all basically have access to the same information.  Stewart models a new form of collaboration as he and an organically forming network of scientists work to “de-extinct” several animals that have disappeared from the planet.  Musician Amanda Palmer has a new collaboration model for her music:  her fans should pay what they think her music is worth.  She raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter for her latest album.

I recently visited Zhang Ruimin at his corporate headquarters in Qingdao.  I have long admired him for his advanced management thinking, and his simply incredible history of results.  I was eager to meet him to explore his thinking on the right direction for business and management theory and practice.

Haier is one of the great brand stories of the past 28 years.  In 1984, Zhang Ruimin became director of the Qingdao Refrigerator Company, which evolved into the Haier Group.  In the early eighties, Qingdao Refrigerator was in deep debt, made only about 10,000 refrigerators a year, and had deep, systemic quality issues.  In one employee meeting that has now become company lore, Zhang Ruimin took a sledge hammer to 76 refrigerators that did not meet quality standards.

Today, Haier is the largest global refrigerator manufacturer, and has branched into a wide array of white goods.  Their annual sales are roughly $24 billion, with 80,000 employees worldwide, and a reputation for innovation and quality.  Zhang Ruimin has led Haier for nearly 30 years, inspiring this most remarkable brand story.

Here is what I learned from my intimate discussion with Zhang Ruimin:

–The future of organization design will be more self-managed.  Mr. Ruimin is a student of organization theory and design (his first question to me was about P&G’s approach to open innovation), and he has been deeply influenced by Jeremy Rifkin’s “The Third Industrial Revolution.”  We talked about how the internet has affected how we work,  how lateral processes and distributed teams are outperforming hierarchal organizations,  and about the importance of being close to the customer all the time.

Haier is experimenting with small, self-managed, contract-based teams, with no hierarchy and no bosses.  They are inspired by Morning Star, a U.S. tomato-processing company that has been practicing these principles for years.  I loved a quote from Mr. Ruimin during our chat, “It is important to keep twirling the pyramid all the time, because it is more important employees listen to the market and not the boss.”

–The power of tapping into the deeper thoughts and feelings of employees to build your culture.  I have recently written a book, “Grow,” about how higher brand ideals drive growth by engaging and inspiring employees and customers differently.  The ideas in my book resonated with Zhang Ruimin and his leadership (they translated my book into Chinese months before I launched the book in China).  He shared a book with me that Haier employees had created, which brings the Haier culture to life through cartoons and quotes by a variety of employees.  This book, simply called “Haier’s Pictures and Words,” was exclusively created by Chinese employees, but the concept is now spreading to other countries.  Here are a few of my favorite quotes in it:

“Corporate culture is like a pot of strong tea, the more you taste it, the better it tastes, and the aftertaste lingers.”  By Wang Yong

“The nature of innovation is to be creative in breaking something.”  By Xiao Huang

“Brand is upheld by user’s heart.”  By Huang Fei

“If you do not care about the users, the users do not care about you.”  By Yang Honghui

–How storytelling can keep your heritage relevant and motivational.   The Haier heritage center is about as good as it gets.  As a new employee or visitor, you walk through the history of the company as a story, experiencing the remarkable history in a visceral and human way.  At the end of the experience, there is a room for sitting and reflection, so employees can think about the implications of their heritage on them as leaders.

Given the economic doldrums of the past four years, President Obama was unlikely to win reelection this week.  The fact that he did says a lot about the strength of his “brand ideal” and the effectiveness of his campaign.  So what can we learn from his success?

Certainly, there were a number of factors that contributed to Obama’s triumph – the improving jobs picture, the recovery of the housing market, etc. – but his success points to a critical issue at the heart of any people-related endeavor.  Whatever the product or service, the most important question on the customer’s mind is: “Who cares?”  “Who cares the most about my welfare and is helping to improve it?”

For most of the campaign, Obama cornered the market on caring.  He did so by focusing his narrative on the “Why” – emphasizing shared values and a people-serving purpose to lift the middle class.  Bill Clinton’s rousing convention speech and Romney’s own foibles (including his ‘47%’ comment) helped to make empathy a meaningful point of difference for Obama

By contrast, the bulk of Romney’s campaign focused on the “What”: cutting taxes and downsizing government.  It promoted Romney’s “features and benefits” as an economic repairman, and his résumé was the “reason to believe.”  It wasn’t until the first debate that Romney gave voters a real taste of his “Why” – his empathetic interest in fighting for people.  Only then did a real contest emerge.

Obama’s victory underlines the importance of “Why” over “What,” and it reminds us that every winning enterprise needs an ideals-driven agenda – a people-serving purpose.  It’s by caring for people that we earn their trust, and that trust leads to commitment.

As it turns out, Dale Carnegie’s maxim on relationships is also a power strategy for businesses.  To win fans and influence customers, you have to show genuine interest in them.  That’s exactly what today’s most effective companies and brands are doing.  Coke works actively to “open happiness” for people.  At Ritz-Carlton, “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.”  Nike helps you “find your greatness.”  And because Apple puts such loving attention into its user experience, we love Apple in return.

To get love, your business has to show love.  That’s how everyday elections are won.  Just ask President Obama.

http://www.digiday.com/brands/adweek-former-pg-cmos-advice-to-marketers/

I also studied the “on the ground” efforts of the many brands – 53 in total – who had a presence at the 2012 Olympics.  Of course the most ubiquitous were the so-called TOP sponsors, who paid the most.  Brands like McDonald’s, Visa, Coca-Cola, and Samsung.  I especially liked the Visa people stationed around Olympic Park with tall Visa-branded poles, simply there to help people and answer questions.  It was a nice touch of generosity from Visa.

But one brand stood out for me for its quiet effectiveness at the Olympics.  It was Oakley, the high-performance athletic brand that excels in eyewear.

Full disclosure – I do some consulting work for Oakley’s parent company, Luxottica in Milan.  Through this relationship I have gotten to know Scott Bowers, SVP Global Marketing and Brand Development at Oakley.  Scott invited me to experience the Oakley Safehouse in London, housed in the London Design Museum, which they basically took over for a month.  The concept behind the Safehouse is to give athletes and their families a place to relax away from the craze of Olympic Park.   They serve three meals a day, provide entertainment at night, celebrate each medal of each visiting athlete with an Oakley ceremony, and basically chat with the athletes all week.

Here is what every brand builder can learn from what Oakley does at the Olympics (they have been creating Safehouses since the Atlanta Olympics in 1996):

– Build personal relationships with people that really matter for your brand.  Over two weeks, Oakley builds strong, authentic relationships with hundreds of the world’s best athletes.  They send about 40 of their own people to create and run the Safehouse – they don’t outsource it to an events agency.   They do it themselves because they see their core work as building relationships.

– Integrate your product or service, and its uniqueness, into everything you do (if you have nothing unique about your product or service, well that’s for another blog).  Oakley has a giant “lab” central in the Safehouse, where they talk about product with the athletes, and make special customized products for each athlete.  They have nearly 70,000 parts on site to make just about anything for any sport.  Every piece of eyewear they make is a live demo to a thought leader of their superior design and performance.

– Learn all the time.  Oakley, while building relationships and making products at a major global event, is also doing consumer research 24/7 at the Olympics, an unparalleled gathering of athletes of the world.  That is one reason Oakley brings its own staff to the event for weeks.  They will regroup after an exhausting and exhilarating month and share learning, and implications.

– Make a bold and creative statement about who you are.  Oakley collaborated with the London Design Museum, which housed the Safehouse, to organize a special exhibition in the museum about cutting edge technology and sport, called Designed to Win.  Oakley’s brand ideal is to ignite the imagination through the fusion of art and science, and they stand for no compromises in design and performance.  So in a beautiful exhibition open to the public, Oakley celebrates the history of design, excellence, and technology in athletics.

And, by the way, the exhibit will be open the balance of the summer.  I recommend you take it in if touring London.

What I found encouraging was the optimism of the best work at the Festival.  I have been going to this event for nine years, and believe me, it is not always optimistic.  Our world today is fraught with complex and difficult issues:  the Euro crisis, a near frozen political system in the U.S., implications from a rapidly rising population in emerging markets, high unemployment among youth in most major countries, to name a few.

So why was the most awarded work at the Festival so optimistic?  Perhaps the global creative community sees something we don’t yet see.  Creative people are intuitive, they may sense something economically happening in the world that is not yet evident to us broadly.

Here is just a sampling of some of the highly acclaimed, highly awarded and commercially successful work that is downright uplifting:

– Chipotle, which won the coveted Grand Prix award, encourages us to “cultivate a better world” by rethinking how we source the ingredients in the food we eat, and by encouraging more local sourcing.  The film, which they launched on You Tube with a soundtrack by Willie Nelson, is one of my all time favorites.

– Google Chrome’s “All is Not Lost” video out of Hakuhodo Japan is one of the most beautiful and meaningful videos I have ever seen.  This was brought to the market after the devastating tsunami in March 2011.

– Nike’s Nike+ FuelBand helps all of us to be healthier, and to enter a community of people trying to be more active, more healthy, more inspired.  This initiative won the hjghest honor, the Grand Prix, and in its first year of introduction, it is already $1.5 billion in sales.

– The Ministry of Defense in Colombia engaged the advertising agency Lowe-SSP3 in Bogota to encourage guerrilla fighters to return home through the Rivers of Light campaign.

– Both Visa and P&G have remarkably optimistic, globally distributed campaigns around the Olympics that unite us around human truths.  While the Olympics is endemically optimistic, these two companies capture that optimism more poignantly than I have seen in the long history of Olympic marketing efforts.

– Prudential celebrates the stories of people on Day One of their retirement,  and they share these stories in paid and social media.   The cumulative effect of these stories evokes a feeling of rebirth, optimism and renewal at this very emotional time of life.

I could go on and on.  Kraft, American Express, Chrysler, Coke … they all had awarded work that lifted our spirits, and also lifted their business.

So is the marketing and advertising industry leading us out of a global economic funk?   I think they might be.  And I am in good company:  for the first time President Bill Clinton addressed the Cannes Lions Festival.   His message:  this industry more than any has the potential to lead and change things for the better.   Lets build on this momentum in 2012,  and make everything we do as great as the optimistic work awarded in Cannes this year.

This all began about two years ago when Terry Savage, Phil Thomas and Steve Latham of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity called me to discuss what more we could do for clients at the Festival.   Since 2003, when I brought the first large client contingent to the Festival as P&G’s Global Marketing Officer, the Festival has attracted a huge number of clients — about 20% of the attendees now.   They come with their agencies seeking to raise their game in creativity, and to accelerate their business growth.

We decided in 2011 to pioneer a new offering at the Festival — an Academy for Young Marketers.  The core idea was to begin to prepare the next generation of brand leaders to embrace creativity and learn how to lead breakthrough in the creative process.  So we reached out to senior leaders at top companies like Kraft, Dell and Unilever to nominate top development marketers, and within days the class was full at 35.  We capped it at 35 to preserve intimacy and to maximize interaction and personalized action planning.

We piloted the Academy last year:  the sponsor was Wunderman, the direct and digital marketing network, and I was the Dean.   For long days and nights, I taught, facilitated and challenged the “students” with my colleagues Suzanne Tosolini, who worked with me at P&G and is part of my consulting team, and UCLA Anderson’s Professor Sanjay Sood.   We knew by the end of the week we had something very special:  in our evaluations from the students at the close of the week, they ranked it on a scale of 1 to 5 an average of 4.9.

This year we have learned from our pilot, and have expanded the Academy to two sections of 35 each, with a tutor for each section (Suzanne Tosolini returns, and we are adding Serfi Altun, the founder of Idea Bakery, as a second tutor).  Our objectives build from last year’s success.  This year we will strive to:

– Help young marketers navigate Cannes – get them to the best speakers, interactive sessions, show reels, access to judging panels.

– Help young marketers learn from Cannes – facilitate insight sessions each day to interactively deduce the big learnings and “aha” moments.

– Provide tailored experiences – create a speaker panel for each day specifically selected and briefed against the academy objective.

– Help young marketers apply Cannes – make the learnings practical to their work, create sessions in which they can discuss real examples, ask experts for points of view on how to approach the creative process differently, how to manage their management or agencies differently, and to create a network that lasts beyond Cannes.

Again our Academy filled up in a few short days.  The young talent this year are coming from an even more impressive list of companies, including Google, Luxottica, PepsiCo, Visa, 3M and P&G.

Our presenting sponsor this year is the Mobile Marketing Association, and they have been outstanding partners in developing the program.   We have created a few new surprises for the students during the week — to enhance their learning and also to build their relationships more deeply with colleagues from other leading companies.

I cannot wait for the program to begin on June 17, and we are already thinking how to take this amazing phenomenon further.  Next year we would like to again design and deliver an Academy for Young Marketers,  but we would also like to pilot a similar Academy for Senior Marketers, which I would personally lead.  We are doing research at the Festival this year among Senior Marketers to see how we could design an engagement for them that would dramatically help them build their personal leadership and capability.

If you are interested in learning more about how you can get involved, please email my collaborator Steve Latham, Head of Talent & Training, at the Cannes Lions Festival:  stevelatham@canneslions.com

It is already 3.5 years since I left P&G.  Time flies when you are having fun:  since then I have worked in some way/shape/form with nearly 100 companies in over 12 industries.

It will be no surprise to you that marketing effectiveness is in every one of these 100 companies’ top 3 issues.  That is why this event is more relevant than ever, and more important than ever.

But I am not here tonight to simply congratulate the winners, nor am I here to comment on trends in the industry.  I am here tonight to talk about … tomorrow morning.  And I am addressing my comments to anyone involved with any of the winners tonight.  What are you going to do tomorrow morning?

From what I know about previous Effies, many of you will be sleeping in tomorrow,  but I want to talk about what you will do when you go back to work.

Here are a few suggestions:

First, thank anyone who had anything to do with your award, and spend as much time as that takes.  Nothing we do in this industry we do alone, and we spend too little time thanking our colleagues and partners when they do WORK this effective, this creative.

Second, capture the “behind the scenes” story of what happened with your winner, and tell it far and wide.   Blog about it, speak about it, share it at all the right times and in the right places.  Capture what happened, what was different about it, what you as an individual and organization should learn from it.

Third, hold a management meeting about the winner, and share with your leadership what it would look like to do 10 times more of these initiatives.  What would need to be true, what you would like them to help you with.

Fourth, display the award somewhere where lots can see it and ask about it.  Be proud of it – don’t bury it in an office somewhere.  Make a short clever video and put it beside the award.  Have fun with it, celebrate it.

Last, make this personal.   Make a specific and singular personal commitment on what you will do differently to do more work like all the winners tonight.

Five things to do.  Tomorrow morning.  For now, get back to enjoying tonight!

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