Save 50% on a 3-month Digiday+ membership. Ends Dec 12.
Digiday covers the latest from marketing and media at the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. More from the series →
The Cannes International Festival of Creativity is, as its newly changed name reflects, all about the creative side of advertising. When it comes to digital, however, the conversation is often dominated by the technology side that’s most aligned with targeting. There are times that focus on targeting, as important as it is, obscures that great advertising designed to move people and change perceptions is about creativity.
As part of Digiday’s coverage of Cannes, I sat down with Paul Alfieri, vp of marketing at Turn, the cloud marketing platform. The challenge for the industry, he believes, is moving tech discussions beyond the realm of targeting and direct-response advertising. “Technology evolves so quickly that we get caught up talking about pixel fires or whatever acronyms there are,” Alfieri says. “We forget that as good as the technology gets, the creative has to balance it out.”
That’s not to say the ad world shouldn’t embrace tech platforms. Alfieri believes that the creative side of the industry has to embrace targeting and data as ways to build upon the ideas that are the lifeblood of the industry. “The mass creative doesn’t work any more,” he says. “Our industry has to think of making great creative that leverages what all these targeting strategies are doing.”
View the full video below and check back to Digiday regularly for updates from Cannes.
More from Digiday
Technology x humanity: A conversation with Dayforce’s Amy Capellanti-Wolf
Capellanti-Wolf shared insight on everything from navigating AI adoption and combating burnout to rethinking talent strategies.
How Costco stood against Trump’s agenda on tariffs, DEI this year
Costco has continuously been held up as an example of a company that has stood firm in its willingness to do what it believes is best for the business.
How The Arena Group is rewriting its commercial playbook for the zero-click era
The company is testing AI-powered content recommendation models to keep readers moving through its network of sites and, in doing so, bump up revenue per session – its core performance metric.