Last week WARC led the Creative Impact stream at Cannes Lions 2024. So after 31 sessions, 5 podcasts, a slew of new research and insights from the industry’s best and brightest – what exactly did we learn?
The WARC team are catching their breath after a crazy few days. As ever, Cannes was a whirlwind of stage sessions, podcasts, meetings – and the odd rosé. Now it’s time to make sense of what we saw in a special edition of In Effect, our members only newsletter, out from behind the paywall to share what we learned.
Here’s my initial take – written from Cannes as the Festival closes.
At the start of the week, I said we needed a “21st century case for brand”. And I argued that there are three questions we need to be able to answer to counter Scott Galloway’s claim at last year’s that the “era of brand” is dead.
Let’s see how we did.
1. Does a strong brand really matter to new-economy brands as well as the legacy players?
I think we’ve answered this.
Two sessions from Instacart and Doordash showed how digital-native companies rely on their brands. We know this is what the theory states, but having new examples that show how creative brand-building can be applied to data-driven, performance-focused companies is now crucial.
Instacart’s Laura Jones was brilliant here, explaining how the brand work only really worked when it was fully aligned with the performance approach.
Look out for these videos when they hit the site – they’re well worth watching; in the meantime, hear Laura’s and many more interviews on the WARC podcast right now.
2. How do we disentangle brand-building advertising (one of the 4Ps) from the much bigger act of building a brand (all of them)?
All 4Ps are back (sort of). Mark Ritson’s punchy session ‘Creativity is Not Enough’ was a really important contribution here.
Beyond the many, many swear words, his point was that we need to return marketing to a strategic discipline, rooted in market diagnosis and customer understanding. Building a brand starts here.
His points were echoed by the CFO of McDonald’s, when asked about his attitude toward risk. He said that he had become a lot more comfortable with risky execution (IE highly creative ideas) as long as the strategy is rock solid.
In other words, know your customer, know your market, and there is a much greater chance of selling in creativity.
3. How do we redefine brand-building so that it resonates more with leaders outside the marketing department?
The consensus was that we do not need yet another new word or term for ‘brand’ – but we may need to reframe it. The answer, according to EY’s Karen Crum, is to aim for much greater clarity on what brand means and the range of benefits it brings.
Pricing effects of a strong brand, for example, are not widely recognised outside the marketing department, despite new IPA research presented by Grace Kite.
And we had several sessions highlighting the penalties of not being distinctive or interesting. The excellent ‘Cost of Dull’ project showed creative brand-building can be framed as a way of saving money (by being less dull and therefore wasteful).
There’s lots, lots more to come, including research on humour, a barnstorming session from Liquid Death, and a host of new research.
WARC subscribers already have access to the Creative Effectiveness Lions.
Later this week, we’ll be posting our Creative Impact, Unpacked report, containing the team’s key lessons. In a few weeks we’ll have our in-depth analysis of the case studies.
