Stagwell chairman and CEO Mark Penn chatted with the New York Post Monday afternoon at Sport Beach where his company is throwing some of Cannes Lions’ most dynamic events, which include talks with athletes, media execs, all while running pickleball matches and morning workout classes in the dynamic seaside space.
Penn talked about his company’s projects, the political climate, artificial intelligence and whether brands like Bud Light should wade into social issues or remain on the sidelines.
Q: Why did Stagwell brand this space Sport Beach?
A: We asked AI what we should do here.
No, we asked humans and what was the idea that would captivate people and do something a little different in Cannes, and yet, bring together marketing, sports, fandom, all the things that I think are really part of the current trends and what we see out there in the marketplace.
I think it’s been very successful in drawing people.
Rather than put Stagwell [branding] all over the place, we said, ‘hey it’s Sport Beach hosted by Stagwell.
Q: Why sports?
A: I think if there are sports, alcohol, technology, food–we do a lot of work with the NFL, we do a lot of work with teams, we do a lot of work with people who sponsor teams–and so that brought that together.
Pus we knew people in Cannes would be interested in sports and they could meet the athletes here and talk about subjects related to sports – but they can play pickleball and other sports themselves.
Q: What services does Stagwell offer to clients?
A: Stagwell is a company that I founded about eight years ago and we are now 12 to 14,000 people.
We are about $2.5 billion in revenue and we basically provide core marketing services, including digital transformation, research and insights, paid media and advertising and acquisition, communications and creativity.
We really cover 360 degrees the services that a modern marketer really needs for digital and creative marketing today.
Q: AI and AR are big themes here. Do you see it as the future of media?
A: We are also heavily involved in creating a series of tech products.
We have an augmented reality experience for stadiums called ARound. You can download it on your phone and when you’re at a game.
If you’re at a Minnesota Twins game, you can see a whole different experience on the field so we are very into AR.
We also have a PR product, PRophet.com, where generative AI writes your news release for you, then figures out who is going to cover it, then figures who you should pitch it [to], then helps you write the pitches, so you may be receiving pitches from PRophet PR at least assisted by that.
Q: There’s a lot of trepidation around AI and a feeling that it will replace peoples’ jobs. What do you think about that?
A: AI is going to be disruptive. Even regular technology has been disruptive.
When I was planning and doing surveys 30 years ago, I would have 50 interviewers and 4 key punchers and my people don’t even know what a key puncher is, right? We would use 60 people and today we use 3 or 4 people to do a survey.
You’re going to see a kind of skinning down of some of these processes but it’s not going to change the importance of the human element in creating the best in creativity.
We still do surveys today and we even do more surveys than we did before, and we are going to do marketing tomorrow but I think people will get more assistance than they have.
Q: How is today’s political climate affecting brands?
A: I think that people have a political brain and a commercial brain.
Generally, the commercial brain drives what you like and what you enjoy and your political brain drives how you vote.
When your political brain takes over your buying decisions, then brands are in trouble, particularly if they’re supposed to be an every person’s brand because they need not 50% but 80% of the country.
I think what brands want to do is decouple them again and get back to the essence the great products that they produce and not involve the political brain unless that’s part of their strategy.
Q: There has been a lot of backlash from Bud Light campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. What is the advisable strategy when brands want to reach a smaller audience without alienating their core audience?
A: Bud Light is actually breaking some new work with one of our agencies in the next few days here.
I think in general, what I’m urging is, look, there are a lot of ways for you to be politically sensitive, for you to be involved in issues, but I want you to do it with a Democrat and a Republican to really kind of vet the issues in advance.
I think too many had one or the other. We are actually looking at companies now and saying, ‘what’s their corporate reputation with Republicans versus Democrats?
Certain brands have really skewed towards republicans and certain are really skewed [towards democrats] but don’t you really want to be in the middle where both Democrats and Republicans respect you? Because it is a divided country.
