Cannes Health Lions – Where do we go from here?

By Andrew Schirmer, CEO, Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide

I’ll get the bad pun out of the way quickly: for me, the jury is still out on the Cannes Health Lions awards show.

Last month, I was fortunate to have been able to attend the show for the fifth consecutive year, and so I have participated in this event since its inception. I won’t deny that it is an amazing spectacle located in a truly glorious surrounding where you get to mingle with a broad array of advertising, marketing and media folks. And you do have the chance to see some cutting-edge innovation and very strong work. But it can also be both overwhelming and frustrating as there is so much going on simultaneously, the Health show is sectioned off from the rest of the festival, and many of the actual sessions overlap each other.

For those lucky attendees who were able to secure a full pass for the entire Cannes Lions festival, there was a massive amount of content, numerous sessions, and an abundance of inspiration from the “main” show through the entire week. But for those of us who had the two-day Health Lions pass, we were limited to the area of the Palais de Festivals that held only the health sessions. I heard rumblings from a number of attendees who headed over to the main theater to see David Droga kick off the larger festival on Monday morning but were turned away as they had Health-only passes.

Once the Health Lions show got underway, though, there were some great talks, including an excellent presentation regarding how GSK Consumer Healthcare has transformed the way they speak to their customers and has moved from simply defining efficacy to showing empathy, and ultimately, to building trust. There were a couple of interesting sessions that showed how behavioral science is helping to solve significant health problems. And one of the more intriguing presentations defined the rapidly growing use of health bots, and how this technology may be the most logical solution to getting important health information to consumers on their terms, on their preferred platform, via an interface that uses artificial intelligence and a human-like bot to engage.

Over the course of the two days, there was ample opportunity to review the short-listed work, and while there were some great examples of creativity, it seemed that there were also a lot of entries that would be better categorized as health interventions (devices, products, tools, technology, etc.) rather than creative campaigns, marketing or advertising. As the majority of those submitting to the show are advertising and communication practitioners and agencies, one does wonder if the general description of what makes it into each of the categories needs to be refined further. At the same time, the new category format was indeed an improvement over years past.

The awards show gala is always a nice event as it really does allow those of us who work in the ad/comms business to feel celebrated for the significant and challenging work we do on behalf of our clients, their brands, and most importantly, their customers and consumers. We get to see our friends, competitors, and colleagues acknowledged for work that stands apart from the rest and ultimately spurs all of us to push ourselves and our own work further. But we also saw a lot less of all of these folks this year, as it was clear that all of the agency networks and independents cut back on both attendees and sponsored events. This was in keeping with the overall effort of the Cannes Lions Festival leaders to taper back a bit of the excess and expense of prior years. You have to wonder, though—will that decrease in attendance continue? And is that ok?

The Cannes Lions still stands as THE creative showcase for the industry and will continue to inspire tens of thousands of attendees in the coming years. At the same time, I would encourage the festival directors to seek out opinions and ideas for how to do a better job of integrating the Health show with the main festival. And, I would recommend they make it more relevant to the bulk of the actual produced work that is powering the healthcare industry and place a stronger emphasis on recognizing creativity within marketing, advertising and communications.