Music Marketing Forum

So, the reason I'm here in Cannes - the 2nd annual "Music Marketing Forum", a chance for people from both sides of the music/brand equation to get together and try to thrash out how we can work better together in the future.


It was an interesting mix of people, without listing everyone, there were representatives from all over the world, from agencies, from brands, from management and from labels.

I was pleased to see a few friendly faces in their to, including Natasha from KLP, Susie Moore (my old client) from O2, Richard from Leap Music (BBH) and Jess from AEG. Also good to meet a few new people from the likes of Havas, Frukt, Coke and EMI.

So what came out of it? I'm not sure if I'm honest, I think I need to spend some time thinking about it. However, there were a few key points that interested me straight away:

1. When discussing core objectives and how they varied between "music people" and "brand people", it became immediately obvious that for one side (music) there were a pretty constant set (exposure, distribution, etc), but for brands there was no simple answer. This creates an immediate issue, as you have to ensure that there are no broad-brush assumptions made when you enter into a partnership.

Is this the biggest issue? Do we have one group of rights holders who very simply, always need roughly the same thing; but on the other hand have a set of brands who will, every single time, want something different. You could even add another layer on to this and say that the brand's objectives could change over time - so you what you set out to do, ends up a mile apart from where you end up?

2. Seeing a brand as a marketing channel helps rights holders understand the opportunity better. To me, as someone who's worked on 3 telecoms brands now, this seems obvious, but it starts to get really interesting once you look at more traditional sectors like FMCG.

In comparison to labels, we hold relatively large budgets, but more importantly, we understand our audience or customer base - something that the music industry has been notoriously bad at. Therefore if the partnership is a fitting one, we can bring an enormous amount of value to the table.



Summary

The whole session was filmed and the chairman will be compiling a report, which I'll post up here when it's completed. Once I've had a chance to chew over where we got to, I'll post again, but in the meantime, I once again need food!