MattCreamer.com

I have two pieces in this week’s issue. One’s a recap of last week’s Venice Festival of Media and the other is a news piece about the third installment of Millward Brown’s ranking of the world’s most valuable brands. I’m coming up short in finding a thread that winds through both stories so I’m not even going to force it.

On a personal level, I’m all full up on ad conferences. I go to about a half-dozen a year–and that’s not nearly as many as a lot of folks I know–and the returns are now severely diminished. To sum up: Too much jargon, too many cliches, too many 30,000-foot analyses at the expense of talking about things that are actually working in the marketplace, little back-up of big swinging digital blather. In practice, Venice was no exception. As a symbol, however, the fact that the folks who determine where to place ads and who are architects of overall communications strategies can turn out in force for a two-day event in an old European city does represent something of a power shift that’s gone on in the ad world. Once famously relegated to the last 15 minutes of the pitch, media is now front-and-center. Media fragmentation has made the planning and buying of ads a trade unto itself, that stands apart.  In just its second year, the conference–and it is a conference, notwithstanding the “festival” part of the name–has scale and a level of buzz you don’t see around many industry events. Still, it’s not going to upset the center of balance now located in Cannes, where creative types descend every June to give each other awards and drink heavily. Cannes is an institution; Venice, now, is a curiosity, a meaningful curiosity, but a curiosity all the same.

More on the Millward Brown ranking in a separate post.