• by David Verklin , July 5, 2011

Last month, much of the advertising world headed off to the south of France for what is always one of the great events in the global business of commercial persuasion: the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

Well, at least that's what it used to be called. Starting this year, the annual get-together on the Croisette decided to call itself the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Should any of us care what this gathering of the advertising glitterati is called? I think so. We all should. This new name really is an important signal, one that those on the media side of the business, as well as our friends on the creative floor, can understand firsthand.

For those of us who remember what "working in a media department" used to be like, it is a visible reminder of just how far we've come.

In our digital ecosystem, there are no limits to what the word "creative" means. This is for the same digitally driven reasons we now have infinite ways of defining the word "content." The idea's the thing -- regardless of where, how or on what platform the idea is activated!

Creative isn't a department. It's the objective of the endeavor. So Cannes' original mission of honoring the world's best print, outdoor and film copy writing and art direction with its famous Lions awards has expanded to include "Cyber Lions," "Promo and Activation Lions," "PR Lions," "Design Lions," "Media Lions," and "Titanium and Integrated Lions."

Our platform-agnostic, integrated new digital ecosystem demands the same kind of creativity from strategists, planners, PR professionals, event marketers, point-of-sale marketing experts and television buyers that it does from copywriters and art directors. I meant what I said when I proclaimed in a speech a couple of years ago that "data is the new creative."

No one seems to snicker at that line anymore, now that we are fully in the age of recommendation engines, ad networks, DSP, behavioral targeting, TV Everywhere, GPS, SEO and Video On Demand.

When the media services revolution separated the media and creative disciplines a little over a decade ago, it declared once and for all that "creative" no longer meant guys with pony tails or going on commercial shoots in the Bahamas. Media strategy, analytics, communications planning and activation were all expected to be (and have become) equally creative labors.

Next up on the creative conga line? The evolving opportunity that is video On Demand, delivered on that gorgeous 60-inch flat screen hanging on the wall in your living room. You say you want to watch what you want to watch when you want to watch it? Go for it.

Say hello to ad-supported VOD, soon to appear in massive quantities from the comfort of your sofa. Sure, I have a dog in this hunt, but I'm not challenging my friends and colleagues in the industry to think differently just because ad-supported VOD is one of the things we do at Canoe. As our CTO, Arthur Orduna, recently noted in an industry speech, "more than 8 billion VOD transactions were served up last year, equaling about 3.5 billion hours of content." That's before the technology called DAI (dynamic ad insertion) has been deployed en masse by the cable TV industry.

Take away the boundaries, tear down the silos and unlock VOD from definitions tied to its origin. VOD is a way to deliver movies to consumers. As such, VOD is an appropriate description for the services people are consuming now when they're watching TV on their iPod, their phones or their PC. They're watching video... On Demand. What is Hulu? It's video... On Demand. What is Netflix? It's video... On Demand. When we enjoy the latest video from our favorite band on YouTube or when we click on the link to a video shared by our Friends on Facebook, what are we doing? We're watching video... On Demand.

Just make that little creative leap in your lexicon and suddenly, On Demand is a bigger and much more interesting opportunity. Extend your vision just a bit more into the near future, and home screens become hotbeds of ad-supported VOD. A little more, and now we can begin to talk about development of a whole range of content specifically created for ad-supported VOD.

In the next 12 months, the cable industry is going to begin making VO a whole new ad-supported and ad-friendly part of the television experience, one that is very measurable. We need to step back and take a fresh look at the role VOD can play in a media plan. Grab your clicker and get comfortable.

The experience we call television is about to get even better. I wonder who will win the first "VOD Lion?"