[00:00]
Great work has to be the responsibility of the entire agency. It’s not just the responsibility of the creative department. The entire agency needs to be invested in the creative products. Every great agency I’ve ever worked in, everybody feels responsible for it, feels they contribute to it. If your work is not crafted, people are not going to pay attention to it and they’re going to miss the message entirely. So, I think that’s a distinction that our industry needs to get down with. Craft matters maybe even more than message.

[00:27]
Recorded live in Cannes at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. It’s the MM+M Podcast. In partnership with BGB Group. Welcome into the latest edition of the MM+M podcast coming to you from Cannes. I’m editor in chief Jameson Fleming here on Thursday towards the end of the festival and I am joined today by Chris Palmer, the CCO of BGB Group. Welcome into the show. Thank you for having me, Jameson. It’s great to be here.

[00:57]
Yeah, and I’m excited to talk all things Cannes this week. and some other things as well. But we’ll start out with what is the most inspiring thing that you have seen out here on the Palais in the experiences, what has stood out to you the most? Sure, sure. Well, there’s a lot of great work, of course, and a lot of great talks.

[01:13]
But But truth be told, the most inspiring thing that I’ve seen and encountered this week is the number of people that I used to work with, who are now creative rock stars, getting golds and Grand Prixs, getting awarded. It’s great to be able to do great work, but But, I think the thing that makes me happiest is knowing that I’ve had some role in creating great careers for people.

[01:36]
And so, to see other people get the recognition that they deserve for doing great work is has been really inspiring and fulfilling for me. Yeah, and as you’ve experienced the week, has anything been very unexpected for you? Not necessarily.

[01:52]
I mean, obviously, I’m sure everyone has talked about AI and and you know the the amount of conversation that’s having that’s being had around I think, going from 2023 to 2024 to today, the conversation has been almost all about AI at every one of the every one of the festivals. So, I’m not surprised to see that what I am surprised to see is still uncertainty around AI.

[02:18]
After many years of discussing it, people not still not quite knowing how it’s going to fit into our business and exactly how to leverage it. And I think there’s been a lot of work to start to incorporate in our business, but there’s no no real consensus about how it’s going to actually change our business, nor the good, nor the bad it’s going to do for our business. So, I think it’s I think that’s the interesting thing about AI for me.

[02:39]
Yeah, I mean on the topic of AI, you know, we’ve heard from client side folks that there’s one thing that’s starting to break their trust with agencies is they don’t understand how they’re using their AI. Agencies aren’t great at articulating it. So, how do you handle those conversations? What do you saying to them to make sure that they trust what you’re doing with them? Yeah. Well, first of all, we have to put real use cases in front of them, and that’s what we do. So, we have a bunch of tools that we’ve developed that can help accelerate understanding, help validate the creative work that we’re doing.

[03:08]
So, we put the real tools in front of them and show them how they’re being used and how they can be used for their business. So, we’re taking it from an abstraction to um, you know, real deployment of real ideas. On the creative side, we are using, you know, the Gen AI tools that that our clients are expecting us to use, and we we make them aware, um, specifically when we’re using those tools for a whole whole whole whole most of the reasons. First, because we want them to know that we’re being efficient with our time.

[03:33]
Second is they need to know when we’re using these tools because we need to start to embed compliant tools into our work workflows with them. And so we need to show them specifically when we’re using AI that may need to be reengineered using compliant means later. Yeah, we’re only going to go down the rabbit hole of AI for one more question here and then we’ll go back to talking can.

[03:54]
And I mean and this is part partly talking can as well, but what are some of the best ways you see AI leverage for creative purposes, whether that’s out in the real world before can or if you’ve walked the pale and then looked at some of the other winners. Yeah, I it’s just to me about speed of execution of creative ideas. I think the idea that everybody has the power to leverage these tools, I think is is an incredibly important thing in our business. It was said this week that now everybody is a creative director.

[04:24]
Um so really it’s about the quality of the creative idea that is leveraging the tools. It’s not the tool itself. So, to me, it’s all about speed of execution. How fast can you see your idea come to life? Yeah, and so let’s uh let’s go back to talking cannabis because I’d say you’re a veteran. I think you told me six times you’ve been here so far. So, I feel like that’s veteran territory. So, how have you seen it evolve?

[04:47]
Not only not only just the last couple years, but you know six years means you’ve been here before the pandemic when things were pretty different than they are now. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll speak just on the healthcare side of things. I think the thing that I’ve been excited to see most is Pharma and Health and Wellness be incorporated into the larger can experience before it used to be as you probably know like segregated as a separate sort of mini can line experience.

[05:12]
And so, that’s the change that I think is really important because having health and wellness and pharma be a part of the larger create, you know, larger discussion around creativity in our business, I think, is a really, really important thing. So, it’s not seen as something other, but it’s seen as something that’s as legitimately creative as anything else that occurs in can. So, I think that’s one important thing.

[05:32]
I think the thing that I would still like to see change, and again, speaking only in pharma and health and wellness, I would still like to see more branded pharma work be recognized and or more branded pharma work be able to be recognized. I I guess that’s the real trick. So much of the work that is still awarded is unbranded or around health activism, which is awesome and which is great.

[06:00]
But I’d still challenge our entire industry to do the work on the branded side that has the ability to be recognized as being the best work in the world.

[06:12]
Yeah, and it’s interesting you make that point cuz I believe the Grand Prix winner was technically unbranded work uh for Ogilvy and uh Viagra, but because the way the film was shot and the couch they used looked like a blue diamond, it was pretty much a Viagra ad and you knew it was a Viagra Right ad, but it was never there. And so it it was kind of an interesting, brilliant mix of both of technically unbranded, but you knew what it was for. Yeah, 100%.

[06:40]
I really I thought that was a brilliant, brilliant play by Oglevie and and Viatris. I thought it was I thought it was exceptionally well done. Technically, again, unbranded because it didn’t mention the brand name and didn’t have to carry any of the sort of you know legal and regulatory encumbrances that branded work does. But yeah, it was undeniably brilliant and absolutely deserving of a Grand Prix. Yeah, and I I talked to Franklin Williams who was the jury chair for Pharma this year.

[07:10]
And you know one of the things that that they said they really honed in on was, it’s a lot of great craft and they they evaluated the craft in a lot of these pieces. So when you’re looking at work, what are you honing in on? Is it craft? Is it message? What What are the kind of key components that you’re looking at that you say that is great work? For me, you know, having been doing this a while, I have really two two key criteria and they’re not very complicated.

[07:36]
The first is that it has to have some emotional resonance for me. I have to feel it um cuz if If you don’t feel it, if it doesn’t make you feel something, then literally it doesn’t exist. So, my first and most important criteria is it makes me feel something, whether that’s joy, sadness, shock, disgust, laughter, mystery, sometimes even confusion initially. I have to feel something and that’s when I know I’m taking a look at something that has has real potential.

[08:05]
And the second is, I really believe that we have an obligation to put beautiful things into the world. There’s so much I guess saturation of media is the best way to describe it. So, it’s a shame when work just leads to sort of environmental pollution. So, I really believe that we have an obligation to put beautiful things into the world. So, we have to do everything we do, we have to elevate in terms of our craft.

[08:27]
And to me, craft matters even more than message because if your work is not crafted, people are not going to pay attention to it and they’re going to miss the message entirely. So, I think that’s a distinction that our industry isn’t really down with, but needs to get down with the idea that that craft matters maybe even more than message. Yeah, I mean it’s it’s definitely open my eyes.

[08:49]
I mean I come from the consumer advertising world where craft is definitely important, but you know I think there’s so much great consumer work that stands out that I I don’t always necessarily notice the craft, but here this week, I mean it was undeniable. And and craft, you know, got a lot of these pieces to the finish line, which I also thought was kind of a fascinating part of it of like, you know, talking about the Grand Prix winner again. Yeah.

[09:12]
You know, the fact that they shot that with a, you know, long exposure and is able to, you know, essentially blur the actions of the people, you know, making love on the couch and that if you pause the video, you couldn’t see anything even still. I mean, and Frank Williams talked about how this was a brilliant way to actually speed up the the approval process because it took a lot of shortcuts and I I just thought that was absolutely brilliant. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s creative problem solving on a lot of levels. I think that that’s that’s one of the things that also distinguishes a lot of work.

[09:40]
It’s not just the idea, it’s the scrappiness and creativity and getting the work executed and done in a lot of these cases that I think is is really cool. I think another thing maybe to just answer a previous question. Again, I think another thing that I’m really excited about and pleased to see is the increasing use of humor in in healthcare. The Friedrich Ataxier work, the Cologuard work. I think there were three or four examples of leveraging humor.

[10:07]
One, you know, one of which was about colorectal cancer that I think is just I think I’m encouraged by that because I think we need to inject some levity into the system in healthcare in order to get people to pay attention and engage with it. It’s uh you know we kind of overdose on earnestness sometimes and you using humor, I think, can be a very, very powerful weapon in this in this side of the business. Yeah, exactly. I mean, a lot of people tend to, you know, cope with their conditions by laughing it off.

[10:34]
And if you do it the right way and you acknowledge that there’s those moments where you can kind of laugh at your situation and it it just makes her more powerful work. Yeah. So, let’s talk about uh about BGB here and I I I would love to know about the creative culture that you’ve built within the organization. I mean, I find it so fascinating to talk about creatives and how you set everybody up for success and you really build the organization to think in a certain way that really leads to your success. Yeah. It’s a great question.

[11:04]
I was hired about a year ago because at BGB which is traditionally a med com shop. We came to the realization that we needed to really start to compete in the marketplace of ideas from a creative perspective and so I was brought into kind of overhaul and create the a creative offering that is BGB that is a project still underway. But my firm belief is, great work has to be the responsibility of the entire agency. It’s not just the responsibility of the creative department.

[11:32]
The entire agency needs to be invested in the creative products. Every great agency I’ve ever worked in, everybody feels responsible for it, feels they contribute to it. So, that’s the fundamental change that I’m bringing to BGB is creating that culture around creativity, which which hasn’t really existed, quite frankly. And so, I’m doing very practical things, like every Friday we have a session called Good Ideas Friday today in which we invite the entire agency in to talk about great work, work that we’re doing, work that inspires us from the outside.

[12:02]
So it’s just a regular part of the conversation and then we talk about creative standards, you know, how we evaluate work. We ask ask everybody to kind of rate the work that we show in these sessions, um have really, I think, relatively deep discussions about creative quality. And so it’s really making everybody invested in the outcome. It’s that simple, but it’s also that hard. Yeah.

[12:25]
on on those Fridays, are are you looking at all kinds of work, consumer and healthcare or Yeah, cuz I I mean that’s one of my big things coming in this industry is there’s so much for this industry learn from consumer work, and I think sometimes a lot of creatives forget there’s so much you can apply from what and a CPG or an auto brand does to what we do in the healthcare space. 100%. We have a healthy mix of work from outside our industry and work from inside our industry.

[12:49]
And I think that, you know, the trick is that so many people think there’s a difference between pharma or healthcare versus CPG or other service brands and there it simply isn’t. You know, people all have the same reactions to the work that’s put in front of them. Doctors are people, other allied healthcare professionals are people as well. We all have the same reactions to the communications that are put in front of us. So, that’s another part of the education process for the agency is is we’re not different from consumer.

[13:18]
We have to do work that is on par with the great consumer shops because that’s the way we engage people. Yeah, and If we’re sitting here at Can next year, we’re having this conversation again, what do you hope to be the things that you’re excited to tell me about from your first to 2025 and beginning of 2026? Where do you hope to go? First and foremost, I hope to be here with work that is being, you know, judged and and recognized.

[13:45]
The second thing is, you know, the simple truth is, it’s a zero-sum game for talent. I’m looking forward to all the great people. We’re going to hire this year who are going to make a a real difference. in the creative trajectory of BGB. It’s really that simple. Yeah, and uh I’ve been asking pretty much every creative and pretty much any healthcare execs I see this week uh you know when I finished MMN’s agency 100, I sent out an email to all the agencies that who’s going to be in can.

[14:12]
I got responses from maybe 10 of them including yours uh which I was excited about. And you know there’s more than just those 10 who are here, but it’s not many. What’s your message to all those agencies that are sitting out can year after year after year. Why should they be here? What I’d say to folks who are sitting out can is you’re missing an opportunity to just see the best work in the world. It’s really that simple.

[14:35]
The work that is shown, awarded, evaluated here comes from the best creative minds in the world. Sometimes those are way outside the walls of the US or even developed countries. And so I’m super excited to see, you know, the kind of diverse thinking, the the sort of diverse talent that is feeding the best work in the world. So that’s the first thing. It’s just the work is worth seeing, understanding, and experiencing.

[14:59]
And I think that the other thing is just to see the different ways people are thinking in terms of the way our business is changing. All the talks and forums that people are putting together for discussions around the way our business is changing. One of the most lightly attended things I saw this week was LinkedIn’s conversation around how B2B needs to change. Absolutely fascinating. There are like maybe be 40 people in it, but it was like literally a life-changing talk for me.

[15:28]
And you know, just to be exposed to that kind of thinking, I think is invaluable, highly worth the investment. Yeah, I mean that was going to be my last question, but now I have to ask, what was one insight from that LinkedIn talk that really was so life changing or career changing. It was validating around, I guess, my instincts around what we do. I mean, we are in the B2B side of the business and the talk was basically around the idea that B2B is not different than B2C. It is fundamentally exactly the same.

[15:58]
You need to connect with people emotionally, you need to connect with people culturally, you need to understand what drives their decision making. And so I I think that was the thing that was just another step is just saying, “Our business is not different. Our business is the same and we have to do the same things that consumer brands are doing.” Yeah, well thank you so much for your time here. Really enjoyed the conversation. Jimson, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it as well.

[16:22]
Chris Palmer, the chief creative officer for BGB Group and I’m Jameson Fleming for MM+M. Thank you for listening to another edition of the MM+M podcast from Cannes.

[16:40]
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