Matt Williams at the Cannes Seminars
Matt Williams, content editor at The Engine Group, London offers his take on the Cannes Seminars running throughout the week, exclusive to CB.
It’s sometimes hard to realise when you’re at this crazy festival that things are still happening in the outside world.
And indeed, if I wasn’t getting all excited about listening to P. Diddy, Jimmy Wales and Conan O’Brien speak today then no doubt I’d have been at home getting all excited about the new Anchorman 2 trailer.
So it was a little ironic that the trailer should emerge today, as O’Brien took to the Grand Audi stage for the Time Warner talk on ‘What Connects in Comedy’.
Because O’Brien, when asked about his favourite ‘marketing campaigns’ that he’d been involved in, picked the announcement made by Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy character last year that Anchorman would return for a sequel.
Burgundy made the revelation live on Conan’s show – an example, the chat show host said, of a brand working seamlessly with him to create a piece of content that audiences will genuinely want to watch.
Inevitably, the ‘announcement campaign’ went viral, with people from all over the world sharing the Conan/Burgundy footage as soon as it had played out live on TV.
So why did this work? Of course, the popularity of Anchorman and Conan O’Brien (8.5 million Twitter followers and counting) had a lot to do with it, but the chat show host claimed that what really made the announcement work so well was that it was authentic. There was nothing forced about it – nothing ‘shoehorned in’. It was two comedians having fun and doing what they do best.
“If we can work with advertisers in a way that still lets me be myself then that works,” O’Brien said. “But the minute you start to back away from your own beliefs because you see a way of making something more profitable, you end up losing.”
“When there’s a lot of cooks–and not just creatives but account people on the line–there can be ass covering. There can be corporate hedging of bets. Sometimes we’ll have a great idea. The company will really be behind it. And then there’s that phone call three weeks before, and the person says, ‘At some point Conan needs to bow down before the product with great sincerity and say THIS very canned line right to camera’…It doesn’t feel right, and we have to say no.”
In a seminar that had the whole auditorium in stitches – in just 45 minutes O’Brien managed to insult the French, the set design, his interviewer Anderson Cooper and the entire audience (his closing remark was “you people disgust me”) – the chat show host went on to give a range of examples of projects that he feels only succeeded because of its authenticity. This ranged from his longer-form ‘Serious Jibber-Jabber’ interviews to his series of Video Game reviews – where some of the world’s biggest gaming companies will send him preview copies of their biggest titles for him to assess.
The reviews are often irreverent, disparaging and always a little vulgar, but that’s O’Brien’s shtick, and those video companies don’t just accept that but actively embrace it – because they know that’s when you get the best content.
“I really believe that in creating content you can have your cake and eat it to,” O’Brien said. “If you like it and are having fun doing it, chances are other people will like it…I’d rather stop doing it than continue doing something in a way that’s becoming manufactured or fake.”
It’s an approach that has turned O’Brien into a media superstar, and has brands clamouring to work with him. And in a world where consumers are extremely commercially savvy and wary of advertising, it’s a lesson that brands creating marketing content cannot afford to ignore.