Cannes 2016: Jae Goodman on Entertainment Lions

Jae Goodman, chief creative officer and co-head of CAA Marketing, is president of the Entertainment Lions jury, the newest Cannes category, evolved from the branded content and entertainment slot. As someone who’s brought branded content to the Sundance Film Festival and the Emmys, who better to lead a category that’s been created to rival the likes of the Oscars or the Grammys? He talks to Iain Blair about looking forward to stepping back and taking in the action.

When Jae Goodman, chief creative officer and co-head of CAA Marketing, a division of leading entertainment and sports agency Creative Artists Agency, was told he’d been appointed as president of the brand new Entertainment Lions jury at Cannes this year, he was “both honoured and excited,” he recalls.

“Here at CAA we hold Cannes in very high esteem, and we feel beyond lucky to have done as well as we have there, with four Grands Prix in four different categories over the past three years. So I’m thrilled and wildly enthusiastic.”

Goodman reports that the new category is “an evolution of what was previously known as the Branded Content & Entertainment Lions, and this is the result of previous conversations that a few of us who’d been on previous juries had been having at Cannes for a while. The talk was about possibly evolving the categories into something that could really represent categories similar to those in any other high profile entertainment awards show, such as the Oscars, the Grammys, the Golden Globes and Emmys.”

The difference, of course, as Goodman notes, is that in this case, “It’s entertainment that doesn’t just attract an audience, but one on behalf of a brand that’s trying to drive business results in the same way they would with advertising.”

Talking about the evolution of branded content entertainment, both as a category at Cannes and as a focus of marketers, he adds that it’s been “a wide open space – anything from brand publishing or ad-like content running in slightly longer format. So a lot of us felt like we had editorial freedom to take our commercial idea, that would normally run in 60 seconds, and stretch it to 124 seconds.

"And therefore, it became branded content entertainment as it didn’t fit the format of traditional TV advertising. That felt OK at first, as we were stretching the boundaries, but now we’ve all been at it for a few years, it’s starting to feel like we should create something more, whether it’s a TV show or a podcast or live event, that really rewards the consumer for their time – and also gets you to like Coca-Cola more than their competitors.”

Listening not talking, engaging not interrupting

Ask Goodman about how he intends to approach the judging, and he doesn’t hesitate to lay out his mandate. “First of all, as jury president I’ll be listening more than I’ll be talking, as presidents aren’t active voters so much as overall guides,” he explains. “We only cast a vote when there’s a tie. And I spend so much time in my day job really trying to craft great and highly effective pieces of brand entertainment that I’m now really looking forward to being able to step back and observe other people in action, and determine what they think is the best in the category.

"Let’s face it, ads are by their very nature interruptive, so we’ll be looking for work that is so engaging it draws an audience in, rather than interrupting it. As I said, I believe that the best brands in the world can achieve their marketing objectives and entertain people simultaneously, and we’ll be awarding those brands the first ever Entertainment Lions.”

In terms of recent examples of branded entertainment that he thinks are forging new territory, he says that, “While CAA and others have done remarkable work in the past year, I honestly don’t know if anyone has broken through into global popular culture in such a way that everyone’s pointing to it and saying, ‘That’s the future of marketing that is brand entertainment.’”

For Goodman, Red Bull was “always the prime example, with their space jump [Stratos] and other campaigns, and I feel we’ve been very lucky with our Chipotle campaigns, where people have said, ‘That’s the way forward.’” “And while Coca–Cola is our longest-standing client and I love everything they do, I thought Pepsi’s half-time Superbowl show was great this year,” adds Goodman. “I thought the mix of artists and the whole presentation worked great. It was this wonderful feel-good 20 minutes in the middle of the game.”

He also rates the Intel/Toshiba The Beauty Inside Grand Prix-winning campaign from Pereira & O’Dell for its “great storytelling and beautiful integration of brand and product”, adding, “I’m not sure I’ve seen anything that transcends that, so I’m really looking forward to the judging at Cannes. I know it’s out there.”

“Some things may have pointed the way forward, but for some reason didn’t break through, either in marketing culture or global popular culture,” Goodman says. He goes on to cite Kokanee beer’s revolutionary 2013 big-screen content campaign, The Movie Out Here, conceived by its Toronto-based agency, Grip. “It was brilliant, but if you weren’t in Canada you didn’t see the movie, you weren’t familiar with Kokanee’s long-running TV campaigns, and you didn’t drink the regional beer.

"The humour was also very specific and R-rated, which is also why it didn’t travel globally. But it was one of the greatest case studies I’ve seen in the past decade, and I would never have been familiar with it had I not been on a previous Branded Content & Entertainment jury at Cannes.”

If we all take care of each other, good things will happen

Raised in California’s Silicon Valley, Goodman has always been “deeply imprinted” with the mantra that an idea can change the world. “I watched Apple grow to what it is now, and both my parents worked in the industry, but of course I didn’t want to follow in their footsteps,” he explains. “I ran towards creativity in a different way, and worked for Bill Graham, the famous concert promoter, as a teenager, and then for Warren Miller, who made these amazing ski movies which were really branded entertainment way ahead of their time.

"The cost of the film was entirely offset by promotional dollars from the ski industry, and the company toured the films, more like a concert than a regular film release. So early on I got a sense that there was a different way to make a movie and a different way to promote brands.”

After stints as an ad account executive – “totally by mistake, as I had no idea what it actually entailed” – at RPA and other companies, he joined Ogilvy & Mather, where he ended up working on “the most technical aspects” of their IBM account. “The creative team knew nothing about computers, but having grown up in Silicon Valley I knew exactly what was needed. So I wrote the ads.”

That led to him being hired by Wieden+Kennedy in 1995, “and very quickly I became a copywriter”, he reports. “My whole time there was really formative, and if you look at the top people in advertising today, so many of them were at Wieden+Kennedy in the 90s.” After joining Leagas Delaney where he helped launch Virgin Mobile in America – “some of my favourite work ever”, he became executive creative director at Publicis & Hal Riney in San Francisco.

Then 10 years ago he got the call from CAA. “They pitched me on this kooky idea of having creative people not only represented by CAA, but those in marketing actually working at CAA,” he recalls.

Today, Goodman works in the LA office and helps provide corporate clients with creative solutions that leverage the power of entertainment to build brands and drive business results. Clients include Coca-Cola, General Motors, Diageo, Chipotle, Samsung and Neiman Marcus, among many others. Under his leadership CAA Marketing has been responsible for the first and second brand films accepted to the Sundance Film Festival, the first live interactive show on Hulu, nine Webby Awards in six years for four different clients, and eight Emmy nominations and four wins for clients Old Navy, Chipotle, and Dolby.

For Goodman, such success is inextricably bound up with CAA’s culture-as-business model, “and our culture is one of collaboration”, he stresses. “The company motto is: ‘If we all take care of each other, good things will happen.’ It seems utopian, but it’s true, it works, and it benefits all of our clients every day. They not only have information, insight and ideas from those of us who work within CAA Marketing, but also across every aspect of the world’s leading talent and sports agency.

"Motion pictures, TV, music, video games, sports, digital and more all contribute to our client initiatives every day, so when we set out to create a live experience or a mobile app or a music platform or a piece of film for any medium, we have some of the world’s leading minds in those fields contributing. Then, of course, if the brand idea requires talent, we’re connected to that talent in real time, whether CAA represents them or not. It’s important to note that when we work with talent on behalf of brands, we are always objective about the best talent for the brand idea, regardless of where that talent is represented.”