On the occasion of Cannes Lions 2024, the entire J’ai un pote dans la com team is mobilizing to make you experience the festival as if you were there. Throughout the week, we are meeting personalities from the world of advertising so that they can share their insights on this flagship event, and their vision of the trends that are shaping – and will shape! – the area.
In this article, we welcome Laura Lavergne, 14H and MAD Director at the Figaro Group. We will discuss significant campaigns, social networks and the synergy between the 14H agency and the MAD media.
JUPDLC: Can you introduce yourself?
Laura Lavergne: Hello, delighted! My name is Laura Lavergne. I manage the 14H unit, an omnichannel Brand Content agency and MAD, a media outlet specializing in Social Media – which exists only on social networks, within the Figaro Group.
JUPDLC: This is your first edition in Cannes. Have you had the opportunity to see the winners this year? In your opinion, are there any emerging trends?
Laura Lavergne: We arrived yesterday morning, so I have just arrived in Cannes. Yesterday we had the third edition of our program « Creativity is Business » in partnership with the AACC (Association of Communication Consulting Agencies) and Kantar. And we were able to see some very good advertising projects, notably campaigns from Orange and Allianz, from a CSR angle. So it’s very interesting because these are subjects that make sense and which, in addition, are evaluated through the prism of the perception of brands and the business impact they can have. I found it super stimulating and inspiring!
JUPDLC: Did a campaign particularly inspire you? If yes, why ?
Laura Lavergne: Allianz! I don’t know if you are familiar with this campaign that was presented to us yesterday. It seems to me that it was made by Ogilvy. She’s super interesting because her name is “The other side of the coin”, they attached themselves to the theme of the Olympic Games of which they are partners to take up the theme of cyberharassment. So it’s a subject that really affects young people and I found it very clever to do it from this angle.
They demonstrated that behind all the beautiful words and angles that highlight all our athletes, they also have the other side of the coin on social networks. They are sometimes insulted, through homophobic or racist comments, and I found that it was a very clever angle because they are necessarily personalities with whom young people identify, and they are role models. It really makes sense for this generation.
JUPDLC: Social networks are your area of expertise. There are a lot of developments in this ecosystem. Can you tell us about it? How do you understand these developments?
Laura Lavergne: Indeed, there are a lot of changes on social networks, particularly in uses. And we continually adapt to it, both for our editorial lines but also for all the operations we can carry out with brands.
When we launched MAD, we favored Instagram because it is a media dedicated to fashion and creativity and it was the territory that seemed most appropriate to us. Then the arrival of TikTok shook up our strategy a little: we diversified our content to also be present on this platform. It is important for us to always be at the heart of the uses of our audiences, who are between 18 and 34 years old. There has also been a change: it is the typology of content consumed. Initially, we dealt more with fashion subjects from a very creative and very humorous angle. Today, we bring a little more meaning because we are no longer in the same era, and now pedagogy and edutainment have taken up a lot of space.
JUPDLC: Regarding the synergy between 14H and MAD, can you explain to us how this makes sense?
Laura Lavergne: 14H is a unit that functions very well within the Figaro Group, which is omnichannel, and which knows very well all the issues of Brand Content across all of the group’s levers. We have know-how that is quite plural and extremely interesting within this BU. And the synergy with MAD really makes sense to densify our approach to video and Social Media. Especially with the arrival of Gala in the group that you have undoubtedly followed, who is reshuffling the cards and our power on the platforms. We now reach 33 million social users overall! So there is a real desire on the part of the Group to diversify its revenues, and to be stronger on these channels.
JUPDLC: We can sometimes have prejudices, for example that the content on social networks is not necessarily of good quality. How do we offer high value-added content? And how do we recognize it?
Laura Lavergne: This is a really good question and requires us to constantly observe the performance of our content. I think that content is consumed differently depending on the populations we are targeting. From our point of view, within the Figaro Group, the idea is to adapt our editorial lines for each of our media on the networks so that it is truly a mirror of the other levers of the brand. That is to say that on MAD, it is creativity in all its forms with this desire to highlight a very young population, on Madame Figaro, which is very anchored in creation and culture, we thought formats dedicated to cinema, photography, or even literature which represent the DNA of the brand. And this is what guarantees us a significant commitment on each of the levers.
JUPDLC: What do you expect from the creative industry and brands? What messages could they convey on social networks?
Laura Lavergne: Personally, I am delighted with something on the market and in the collaboration that we are setting up with brands: I realize that they increasingly have the need and the desire to bring a more narrative aspect in their mode of communication. This is really what we know how to do since we manage media and we are very happy to support them in this dynamic to put forward messages that make sense, always bridging the gap – and that’s our role of creating convergences between our editorial territories and the pillars of the brands -. So it’s really excellent news for me that communication is moving towards this mode. In any case, thank you very much for your welcome on this rainy beach!
