CANNES, France – Dan Hodges, managing director of Consumers in Motion, yesterday spoke with Elaine Chum, digital marketing lead for Philips, at the Cannes Lion annual advertising festival in Cannes in the South of France.

Based in South Korea, Ms. Chum is the founding member of Philips Pulse, which is an innovative collaboration platform used by Philips. Ms. Chum’s company was recognized at Cannes Lions – which this year attracted 15,000 visitors – for innovation.

What is your expectation for Cannes Lions?
We were asked to speak about what Philips is doing in innovation by Cannes Lions.

We developed an innovation platform called Pulse, which we discussed at Cannes Lions.

Our Philips Health division also won the highest award at Cannes Lions this year. I am enjoying the creativity and networking here at Cannes Lions.

What is the role that mobility plays in reaching consumers for Philips?
At Philips, we think mobile-first as the Asia-Pacific region are mobile first countries.

We don’t have the infrastructure and the multiple pieces needed to support other options, so mobile is our first screen in many countries.

Whenever we think about the experience, for any kind of content we ensure the experience is optimized for mobile, tablet and PC ready.

In today’s marketplace you can’t say “Let’s do it for mobile and let’s do this for PC.”

We focus on creating a great experience for you as a brand and you can react to us as you wish.

How does Philips innovate and stay ahead of the curve and keep up to date in this rapidly changing marketplace?
We focus on infrastructure and the right tooling and we employ social listening tools for our team.

We ask our team: does this operating system support your goals? Does this social media tool work for you and based on your needs? We deploy infrastructure based on their needs.

Our innovation at Philips is all about how we engage our customers, so we can drive the brand and the business to create impact.

The key for us is to understand how we use data to enable us to create stories that are relevant to consumers like you and me.

In Asia-Pacific we set up “The Pulse.”

The Pulse is a group of experts that come together. It doesn’t matter if you are an agency, a vendor and a Philips employee from media or from creative.

Philips asks that agencies take off their agency hat and put their expertise on. It’s all about working together.

Long gone are the days when you are the client and I am the agency.

The environment is so fast now, that if I see something trending and it is newsworthy, we need to respond to create the content that will engage with the consumer on that day.

If you wait and miss the opportunity, it is just gone. I have two data analysts on my team and they look at the data every day. They try to spot what is trending and based on what they see, we create content that is relevant to the consumers based on what is going on and relevant to them.

Dan Hodges is managing director of Consumers in Motion Group, a New York-based strategic consultancy offering business, marketing, and technology services. He is also head of the New York chapter of the Location Based Marketing Association. Reach him at [email protected].