Sean O’Connell, Chief Digital Officer, AscentialI think MxM are a phenomenal product design, engineering and product management company. You bring a set of capabilities that allow us as a customer to go faster and validate quicker than often we can do ourselves.
Ascential / Cannes Lions
Using business intelligence to drive new revenue streams
The challenge
Cannes Lions has the largest archive of the best creative advertising in the world - over 200,000 campaigns (a number that grows with each passing International Festival of Creativity).
While this archive has been digitised, the company’s subscription service suffered from two problems: traffic was massively skewed to the weeks surrounding the festival and the product lacked investment and was difficult to use.
The owners of the festival, Ascential, saw an opportunity to build a new product that used this unique content to build long term engagement and meet the needs of the creative industry in new and inspiring ways.
Our approach
We started by discovering the needs of potential users and where the best opportunities for growth lay. After speaking to an internationally diverse range of creatives, strategists, marketeers and branding agencies, it was decided to focus on helping creatives do their job better by providing the best tools for inspiration and idea generation.
A combined Made by Many and Ascential team designed, built and launched the new digital venture from the ground up in just nine months. Starting with a powerful search functionality, a simple and intuitive interface was created that allowed the award-winning creative work to speak for itself. In addition, new features such as curated collections and membership features were built in to provide hooks for year-round use.
The results
The Work successfully launched at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Advertising and now has many thousands of users. This is in addition to a global holding company already signing up before launch as a user across its entire agency network.
The significant impact for the Ascential Group will be a new year-round revenue stream that The Work creates for Cannes Lions, and another successful step towards its ambition of becoming a digital business intelligence provider.
Here’s a short video we made at the launch in Cannes:
Paul Coxhill, Managing Director, Digital Ventures, Ascential EventsWe think we’re creating a new business that has a real latent need in the market…the whole process is insight driven, end-to-end. We’ve been able to evidence every stage of the journey: why we’ve made certain decisions, what’s in the product, what’s equally importantly not in the product, based on what the customers have been telling us.
