Best Sessions from Day 3 of Advertising Week Europe 2018

 Advertising on Trial 

Like modern-day tricoteuses, a huge audience flocked to what was somewhat hubristically billed as 'the trial of the century', which put advertising itself in the dock. With Gemma Greaves, chief exec of The Marketing Society playing judge, three charges were laid in front of a panel of industry experts including Uncommon co-founder Nils Leonard, Tammy Smulders, president of VICE Media's Fashion & Luxury Group and Chris Hirst, Havas Media's UK chairman, before being put to the public vote.

Charge one - the industry's failure to embrace diversity and inclusion - produced a resounding guilty verdict, though as Hirst pointed out, in relation to gender diversity, now that executives like himself are being required to present gender pay gap data, change is going to be forced.

Next up on the rap sheet was the lack of creativity - that agencies are creating more content watched by fewer people and as long as it pays the bills, no-one cares about creativity any more. Here, the industry got off with a light rap across the knuckles and a caution, with the general feeling being that there is an oversupply of content, which makes getting noticed challenging, but that agencies need to do more to adapt to this new enivironment. 

The final charge was the way the industry does business. Has it allowed greed to create a race to the bottom? Here, the verdict was split between the crowd (guilty) and the panel (not guilty): both Smulders and Hirst pointed out that agencies are, after all, in the business of commercial creativity. The best agencies are great businesses and great businesses make lots of money, so what's wrong with that? Great creative solutions can transform clients' businesses - so agencies should be paid for them accordingly.

 Video content leaders discuss the future

It's hard to know who is actually getting it right in this world of emerging content creators, where everyone is battling to successfully move away from traditional video formats. What is the secret alluring ingredient of those with unimitable viewing figures? The panel at today's Post the 'pivot to video' moment: who's winning and what's next? had some answers in the form of panellists from The Guardian, BBC Worldwide, Bacardi and young video platfrom, Kyra TV (TV series hosts pictured above). Although they came from different backgrounds, the panel agreed that authenticity and evoking emotion from their viewers were key to obtaining core engagement. Kyra TV's co-founder Devran Karaca coined the phrase "obsessive fan base" as his aim for cultivating viewers and revealed that he measured the number of people who tune into a show within that first 24 hours of it dropping as a metric for success. We reckon it won't be long until that phrase catches on and is used more widely by the industry and beyond.

 Schofield on why he's Snap-famous

Philip Schofield is a man of many talents - as well as owning the screen as a presenter on This Morning, Dancing on Ice, Mr & Mrs and countless more TV shows, he's the face of WeBuyAnyCar.com's current campaign, and an all-round nice guy. But it's a surprise to hear about his latest side-hustle: being a Snapchat star. Yes, the housewife's favourite has conquered that most millennial of platforms and amassed a huge following of 18-20 year-olds by sharing Snaps of bacon sarnies, Holly Willoughby with an outsized set of teeth (he's a particular fan of that 'distorted face' filter) and going in search of a bargain bucket at the height of KFC's chicken supply crisis.

A genial Schofe gave his top tips for Snapchat success in a cosy chat with Snap's UK GM, Claire Valoti. Stories with a theme tend to do well (like the time he systematically demolished a smoke alarm using bolt-cutters and a hammer). Crap life situations (like going on holiday to a rainy Dubai) make for Snapchat gold. It has to be an honest reflection of your life (although on occasion he'll use the beauty filter to stop himself looking too appalling).

When it comes to promotions, he's 'very choosy' and prefers 'being clever and playing around the boundaries' with stunts such as the aforementioned KFC Story (which resulted in the chain sending him a deluge of buckets with his face on them) or the time Cadbury's sent him a load of product after he sported a 'Milk Tray Man'-esque rollneck on Dancing on Ice; Schofield turned it into a live giveaway on Snapchat. He even gets his advertising right - isn't it about time we canonised the man?

Befriending the client

Wieden + Kennedy's successful redesign of the F1 logo and subsequent rebrand was deconstructed on stage during their Forumla 1 + Wieden+Kennedy: a New Era Unleashed session. But what was more surprising perhaps was just how buddy-buddy speakers ECD Tony Davidson and Ellie Norman, Director of Marketing on the client side, were. Not only did they hug and sing each other's praises, they talked about the meeting of minds to truly understand the brand and make the relaunch work. 

While each person plays their role in the process, the case study revealed that there was genuine trust and admiration from both sides. As Davidson said, "You don't get to work without having good relationships." A lesson for us all: invest more in befriending our clients.