• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, 8 hours ago

I am writing this from the Croisette, at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, an event my three ad-tech startups have been part of since 1997. Cannes is special in bringing together so many decision-makers and key producers in a massive, incredibly complex industry.

My relationship with Cannes is love/hate, not unlike how I feel about the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. It’s a must-attend for business. Those with lots of time and relationships in the business do well in places like this. You learn a lot. And not being here generates a lot of FOMO problems.

However, as someone who grew up in a small coal town in the mountains of western Pennsylvania and now lives in Manhattan, I can’t ignore the incredible dichotomy — and disconnect — between the world of Cannes and its splendor, and the places where actual users and consumers of the brands that are celebrated here actually live and work.

While I love sipping rose at fabulous restaurants, fawning over the amazing talent (A-Rod to rock stars) brought in to woo us, I can’t forget — and not not feel guilty about — how this is so different from where I’m from, and how different this place and its artificiality is from where our consumer markets are. For sure, Cannes is not America.

Surveying a massive stage with everyone wearing beautiful (and expensive) Cannes clothes, it’s impossible not to see Cannes as something like “The Capitol” in “Hunger Games,” with the same over-the-top characters, costumes, make-up and practices. And the “Districts,” as the places we market to — where the regular people live, the ones we tell what they would like to buy.

Which takes me to the well-chronicled disconnect between chief marketing officers and chief executive officers. Is one of the reasons that so many CEOs won’t engage with their CMOs — and fire them so frequently — that CEOs and CFOs see themselves as answering to shareholders based in the Districts, and see so much of marketing and advertising as living in a caricature-driven world like The Capitol?

CEOs and CFOs want numbers. They want a true understanding of customers and their problems. And they’re not persuaded that lessons learned on a beach in the south of France (no matter how truly powerful and accurate those lessons are) will lead them to deliver predictable growth and superior shareholder value — any lack of which they will have to explain to impatient, monosyllabic fund managers trapped in suffocating conference rooms with no windows in Minneapolis.

In the words of Intuit founder Scott Cook, too many in marketing fell in love with their products (the faux world of The Capitol), not their customers’ problems (the day to day of life in The Districts).

What do you think? Is the CMO and CEO divide a “Hunger Games” problem?