Universal McCann, Microsoft & Facebook delve on the power of ‘gravitational media’

At a time when fragmentation is seen as a growing challenge facing advertisers across markets, Universal McCann, Microsoft and Facebook officials spoke to the audience at Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival on the Gravitational Mass Media that can replace the need to purchase distribution from standalone media companies.

The speakers of the session comprised Gayle Toberman, General Manager, Advertising and Consumer Engagement – Microsoft; Brian Monahan, SVP, Global Lead of Social Media – Universal McCann, Mike Murphy, VP, Global Sales – Facebook and Brian Hall, GM – Windows Live, Microsoft.

Toberman took the audience through relevance and how content could be created as a centre of gravity. Microsoft followed the philosophy of ‘Tech is not that interesting, people are’, and gathered audiences through applications like Twitter. She explained that even as these initiatives helped in gathering audience, the question was how a business conversation could be done with these audiences, without being intrusive.

According to her, that was one of the bigger challenges of new media, where while content allowed a certain mass of people to come together, the introduction of a branded conversation and its continuation was the problem.

Murphy on the other hand stated that another challenge was who wanted what. He said, “Especially on a platform like Facebook, where there is no traditional advertising --- understanding that is a problem.”

The panel discussed that in the new media world there were new roles emerging. There were curators needed rather than marketers, or editors and content producers needed rather than creative heads. One point that everyone agreed on was that any company earned the right as a brand based on the value that it was delivering.