Huge's Martin Harrison on Cannes 2014

Huge is a full-service digital agency working to transform brands with innovative, creative marketing solutions and experiences. With offices worldwide and a forward-thinking attitude and approach, the company has been making waves with work for Fat Face, H&M and recently designed and developed Eurosport’s new website.

With a small team representing the company at Cannes Lions this year to soak up the latest thoughts and feelings of the industry, here, Martin Harrison, head of planning at Huge London, tells us what he learned in the South of France and how we can apply it to the future of an ever-changing marketing landscape.

In the 18th Century, scientists proposed the existence of a substance called Phlogiston – a substance that made things burn. We now know that it’s Oxygen that burns, but you can see what they did: they took a phenomenon they didn’t understand and invented something to explain it. As far as I'm concerned, “influencers" are the Phlogiston of the Internet. We’ve watched content get shared virally without a solid understanding of why, so our industry was happy to settle on individual “influence" as the explanation.

At Cannes this year, our perspective on influence seemed to have evolved to something more appropriately cynical. While people still marvelled at the immense networks built around celebrities like Kanye West or new media moguls like Jamal Edwards, they were viewed less as awesome individuals (which, to be fair, they are) and more simply as a means to the effective distribution of content. There was a feeling – perhaps not surprising amongst a group of advertisers – that advertising, far from polluting the pure experience of digital nirvana, could actually add real value to their audiences. As one speaker noted, "what would Vogue be without the ads?"

Throughout the week, multiple panel discussions focussed on how we as an industry can now use established – and well understood - distribution channels to reach larger and larger audiences. SBTV, theAudience, Mofilm, YouTube, Maker and Facebook all emphasised their scale and reach with festival attendees.

Despite our apparently improved understanding of how to use these distribution channels and networks to share branded content (or - let’s just say it – advertising), we are still in an incredibly experimental stage when it comes to what we should do with them. The festival itself ended without choosing a Grand Prix winner in the Branded Content and Entertainment category from contestants including everything from a short film series to a selfie taken at the Oscars, games, social campaigns and in–store stunts.

Perhaps one thing we can take away from all this is that the interplay of advertising and culture matters more than ever. Even though we are getting closer and closer to being able to distribute truly personalized, brand-to-individual content, nothing excites marketers more than being the thing that brings people together; establishing cultural relevance with a large group. That's why – if it were up to me - I would have awarded this year's Grand Prix to Samsung’s Oscars selfie stunt. I can’t think of a finer example of the future of marketing: jacking culture and using a large-scale distribution network at the same time.