Dive Brief:
- Advertising campaigns are taking new forms and including multiple brands and venues. At Cannes Lions, Vice’s Shane Smith highlighted this development, describing a campaign for Bank of America that involved a video series produced by Vice and promoted on Pinterest's new Pinsight Labs.
- Smith, in a presentation at Pinterest’s outpost at the festival, said these cross-brand and platform collaborations challenge the typical ad agency model.
- Bank of America wanted to tap into Vice’s storytelling ability as well as a new Pinterest tool that allowed the brand to find out what financial topics appeal to the social media platform’s millennial user base.
Dive Insight:
Ad agencies may be facing a challenge from an unusual source. At the Cannes Lions creativity festival, Smith explained Pinterest’s new Pinsight Labs offering allowed Bank of America to retrieve insights into what financial topics appeal to Pinterest’s millennial users. Possibly taking a shot across the bow of traditional ad agencies, Smith said, “We have the platform, media and brands.” He added, "You have new alliances forming. You can see where [the industry is] going. You can see it going to a more bespoke, case-by-case, platform, content, brand kind of thing."
Meredith Verdone, global chief strategy and marketing officer for Bank of America, explained the campaign to AdWeek, saying, "It's a little bit of strange bedfellows and that's what was intriguing. To say: 'Listen, how can we tap into the relationship, the storytelling that they do with their audience, to tell the story about better financial lives.’"
