CANNES — From Facebook’s hillside infinity pool to Google’s beachside dance party, Silicon Valley’s courting of top ad execs at the annual Cannes Lions festival is starting to pay off.
Several years after invading the ad industry’s French playground, tech players are getting attendees who control the big bucks to shift their ad dollars from TV to digital outlets, industry sources said.
“Two years ago, it was a trickle, a year ago there was a small movement, this year is the tipping point,” AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong told the Post. Armstrong, who attended the annual ad confab, estimates that there’s been an additional $300 million committed to digital video this year.
“I have heard anecdotally that almost every CMO is moving their TV money to digital video,” Shelly Palmer, a digital tech consultant who touched down in Cannes, told The Post. “That trend line is absolute, at what point is the fatal blow?”
Top marketing chiefs who get to experience the full Cannes treatment — from yacht parties to lavish dinners — seem to support that the tech industry’s wining and dining is working.
Household products purveyer SC Johnson has moved a significant portion of its TV budget to Facebook, thanks to the close friendship between marketing chief Salman Amin and Facebook sales boss Carolyn Everson, according to sources.
Keith Weed, chief marketing officer for packaged goods giant Unilever, arrived at a session on Thursday after all-day meetings with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and teams from Apple and Google.
Weed, who controls the second-biggest ad budget in the world with brands like Dove and Caress soap, revealed that Google had sold out of available ad inventory this year for one popular YouTube star.
Likewise, Bough Bonin, Mondolez’s global media chief, said: “We shifted a sizable amount of TV spending to mobile.”
Madison Avenue isn’t convinced that the huge shift of media consumption to mobile will be a bad thing for traditional media companies, which largely lacked a marketing presence in Cannes.
Michael Kassan, CEO of consultancy MediaLink, told The Post: “Not everyone is convinced the shift is bad for those traditional companies serving TV measured only on the big screen.”
Irwin Gotlieb, head of WPP’s Group M, the global ad-buying behemoth, said that TV ad dollars have been going up between 6 percent and 8 percent over the past few decades, give or take a recession. “In the past five to six years, that 6 to 8 percent has dropped to 4 to 6 percent and we’re looking at a 2 to 5 percent band today.”
But Gotlieb added: “There’s an ongoing shift, the slices are going to get smaller, but I think over time there’s a great growth opportunity in TV than it has ever had before.”