Cannes Lion Advertising Awards II

In addition to Obama’s campaign winning top awards, one of the most interesting items to come out of Cannes was a new potential partnership between classic advertising agencies and big internet companies, like Google and Microsoft.

The question I have is, what took so long? Did the recession finally give these guys the idea that they might be able to help each other? Is that what it took? A serious decline in online ad revenues?

What ever happened to the creativity and thought leadership that both of these classes of companies are supposed to display? My issue with this is that if revenue is all that is being sought here, that the partnership will produce product (in this case new classes and types of advertisements) that don’t really address the market’s needs.

From a small agency perspective, we need to constantly be producing strategy and tactics that can demostrateably create new or incremental revenues, awareness, sign-ups, or whatever the goal is. I can find nothing from either Ballmer nor Schmidt that talks about this; all they seem to focus on is to have new ad formats that the agencies can sell.

Is it just me, or is the entire focus of the “new partnership” missing the boat?