As part of our Cannes Considered feature, Directory is pleased to be able to publish the text of Chris Clarke's seminar, which he delivered to a packed audience on the main stage of the festival on Innovation Day.

This industry is stuck in something of an idee´ fixe. Whatever the brief, whatever the case study, the word "content" pops up. It seems that now the infrastructure of the web is built for most brands, they're finally focusing on what to actually say in this space. In the social era, we all know you can't stand back from culture - as a brand, you need to be contributing to it, in ways that interest and engage your target audience. But culture is a place of ideas, of challenging concepts and of entertainment, it's not typically a place of messaging. For years, agencies have been geared up to bring messaging into the gaps between culture. If we're gong to make stuff that is culture, we need to work differently.

Whoosh

Culture happens at the speed of light now: memes appear and disappear; people are fleetingly gripped by something they can barely remember five minutes later. We bounce across the surface of often trivial things giving about seven seconds of attention to each link we're baited to click. This is no environment for slow-moving brands. Entering into that culture requires a certain amount of bravery, a creative process of a rapid, fearless kind and a lot of trial and error. Everything we know about successful content tells us that what constitutes a cultural success often happens by accident. As content-makers, we need to put ourselves in the way of those kinds of accidents; we need Accident Factories.

For many years, advertisers have been in thrall to eyeball- buying, in the form of TV-focused spending. Even now, the way the advertising industry generates its creative concepts - not to mention the lengthy process by which these are signed off by clients - is still grounded in the slow-moving, risk-averse era of messaging, when our task was to interrupt people and tell them what we wanted them to know. That is a very different brief to the one content marketing takes on: to entertain and keep consumers' attention, to be responsive and relevant in today's full-throttle, attention-deficient world. Old-fashioned messaging, we can probably all agree, makes an awkward and inadequate competitor to Game Of Thrones. So, how to compete? By working fast, immersing ourselves in data and daring to fail.

Rapid prototying

It's the creative side of TV, rather than its advertising proposition, to which we should be looking if we want to create content that means something. If we take the television commissioning process as a mature example of an entertainment content business, we know that in that world an awful lot of material is written and rejected. At Channel 4, they talk about "rivers of creativity", and they have no fear of data, using TV audience data to guide large numbers of creative teams in producing great work.

The Accident Factory model is powered by a similar form of rapid prototyping, combined with upfront data analytics and a recognition that failure is a crucial component of success. It calls for new thinking, new kinds of teams, and bravery on the part of the client that invests in such a dedicated, cutting-edge resource. It also demands a rejection, on the part of agency and brand, of the risk-averse strategies that for so long have coloured creative thinking in advertising, where the systems are unwieldy and too many good ideas go to waste.

Red Bull has built its entire organisation around a devastatingly effective content operation, in which brand and creative action are indistinguishable from each other. Not every client can do that, but using the Accident Factory approach, we aim for similar results. We can build multi-skilled teams to attack a client's creative challenges from a position of deep brand understanding, with a licence to work fast, to fail fast and learn faster.

Many agencies, inspired by such examples, are fumbling in a similar direction. Our particular approach to this problem is rooted in our work in the business innovation space, where we have spent the past year or more refining the Digital Innovation Group (DIG) with AstraZeneca. We know how to put together flexible, reactive, collaborative teams - directors of production, creative teams of diverse backgrounds, and, crucially, the distribution expertise without which the best idea might as well stay on the drawing board. There are bought and earned media experts embedded within our teams, and they play a key part in the creative process as it evolves.

Fragile focus groups

Data, too, occupies a vital place in the Accident Factory. To embrace a creative approach that reflects the world in which we're operating, we need to unpick our presumptions. Advertising deals - or thinks it deals - with a world of certainties, in which we suppose our carefully- chosen approach will work because a client's competitor has done it, or because we've done it before, or because a focus group told us it would work.

Very often, all of those suppositions are flawed, but advertisers can use media spend to push that creative to so many people that it appears to have been successful, or indeed genuinely becomes successful. That bludgeoning approach, and the fragile rationale of the focus group, is a relic of a lost world. But clients still need confidence in the work they're producing. So rather than spending money on TV ad research, technology allows us to invest that money on data analytics up front, to help reduce the risk and increase the probability of successful outcomes.

A lot is said about data, much of it misleading, but what is true that when you have an audience in mind, today's data gives you ways to understand what they are interested in, what they share and what they care about. And while it is often considered the antithesis to creativity, we are proposing that it can be the fuel for the creative fire and the foundation for success. Deep analytics can inform creative thinking, help you hedge your bets a bit better, and they can do it far more accurately than a focus group can. Even though the eventual outcome still has an element of accident to it, you are effectively making your own luck by trying to create as many happy accidents as possible.

We also draw on our knowledge of the efficient, flexible start-up space, as well as the practices of companies such as Google and Microsoft. We have funding gates where ideas get backed or killed. We are adopting that style of innovation, that method of generating ideas, and applying it to the generation of content. We think the right clients will be inspired to partner with us on that and share some of the risks, in exchange for a creative return that really works in today's world.

An epic true story

When we presented the Accident Factory method at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, we used the Cannes audience as our target market, and took the FireFlies cycling tour for leukaemia and lymphoma research as our cause. We analysed 1,676 attendees of the 2013 event - their sharing habits, their interests, their provenance - and enlisted legendary true-storytellers Epic Magazine, the writers of Argo, to co-create an epic true story of the kind our audience was known to love.Our fast-assembled campaign involved a multiplayer game for leukemia sufferers that got easier as donations came in. We identified a prolific Instagrammer and key influencer in the audience, who, it transpired, didn't speak English - a rapid failure - and quickly crashed our Twitter account - a second one - but we raised £12,000 in half an hour. People cried. It was experimental, it was flawed, but we were doing something right.

It takes a bold client to back a new approach, and one with the courage to recognise the limitations of its current creative thinking, which may be numerous. Sometimes, it seems as if brands and agencies are talking at cross- purposes: clients say they want content, but what they really want is long-form messaging that doesn't require any media spend. More often, opportunities simply emerge and disappear in a fraction of the time it takes for clients to sign off on a creative approach.

Flogging a dead model

The distinctive character of the risk-free, TV-driven approach, however, is that it nowadays comes heavily laden with risk - risk of missing the real opportunity, of being left behind, of flogging a dead media model. Agencies the world over are being paid fortunes to feed a slow-motion process built on spreadsheets, ponderous meetings and eventual creative work that doesn't do a brand much good.

Most of us know that the old messaging days are behind us, but the structures and thinking that once supported them take longer to change. Moving out of messaging and into content calls for different ways of working, and this way feels right. We have to make content that is good by design; we need to get it into the world fast; and if we fleetingly look foolish from time to time, at least we'll know we've learned something.