This year saw the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity celebrating its 70th anniversary on the French Riveria, undertaking its annual evaluation of the advertising industry.
But Cannes is more than your typical awards show or industry event – it’s also a hotbed of inspiration, fuelled by big ideas, exciting conversations and chance meetings at a Run-DMC Monday afternoon spot.
The week passed for many in a blur of meetings, parties, awards and making sure they didn’t miss out on anything too important (an impossible task), with hot topics for 2023 including AI, creative effectiveness, being bold, embracing humour and the increasing importance of purpose.
As the co-founder and chief brand officer at Contagious, an intelligence resource and advisory service for the marketing industry, Paul Kemp-Robertson – who is also an advisor to the UK creative arts charity Create – has done his fair share of walking the Cannes croisette.
Here, he shares his take on this year’s festival, reveals his key takeaways and muses on what impact they are likely to have on the industry over the next 12 months…
As a veteran of 27 festivals, I find that the time-space continuum gets bent out of shape during five intense days at Cannes Lions. So, imagine my chagrin at losing 24 hours, courtesy of flight cancellations caused by two kinds of lightening – meteorological and industrial (yes, those infamous wildcat-striking French air traffic controllers.) Catching up on a missed day is like having to sprint to the start line of a marathon because the bus taking you there has broken down.
So, in keeping with the frenetic pace of my truncated experience, here’s a whistlestop take on the 70th International Festival of Creativity:
Normal service is resumed
Fears that the pandemic or subsequent global economic strife could dampen the industry’s enthusiasm for Cannes Lions did not materialise. Some 26,992 awards entries signified a 6% increase on 2022 – and most of the major tech companies and consultancies were present on the ground.
Climate change and responsible growth wasn’t as high on the agenda as I’d expected, and this time around there were fewer headline-grabbing interruptions from environmental activists armed with boats and fire engines.
Diversity and Cannes debuts
This year’s Cannes festival was noticeably the most diverse on record, and hurrah for that. There was an impressive geographical spread in the rankings, with Armenia and Nigeria picking up their first-ever Lions, and HungerStation’s Subconscious Order by Wunderman Thompson Riyadh became the first Saudi Arabian campaign to win a Grand Prix.
It was also refreshing to see legions of students making the most of the Palais’ packed agenda thanks to discounted passes, and to note initiatives like Black Out 2023, a campaign to drive Black representation.
Mental availability
Intriguingly, the upstarts and innovators were largely confined to the Bronze awards at Cannes Lions 2023. Big brands and their big budgets were the big winners. Half of the total Grands Prix appeared to be awarded to well-established, storied monoliths, like Nike, Apple, Adidas and Unilever’s Dove.
Indeed, Apple scooped three Grand Prix for three different campaigns and was named the festival’s Creative Brand of the Year for the first time. Interestingly, the firm was credited as creator (or co-creator) of every one of these winners. But Apple’s VP of marketing communications, Tor Myhren, reassured nervous creatives that agencies ‘are forever’ – but only if they recognise their role as outside agitators whose value lies in challenging clients to see things from a fresh perspective.
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Social media innovation
Awards-wise, there were few examples of innovation within the main social media platforms. YouTube and Twitch played a part in some big Cannes winners and Twitter got a look-in, thanks to a Gold in Social and Influencer for Prime Video’s Who – A Thread Movie.
But Instagram, TikTok, Snap and Facebook barely featured. Unilever’s Dove filled the void with some rebel moves; wining a Grand Prix for its #TurnYourBack campaign criticising TikTok’s Bold Glamour filter, and two Gold Lions for Cost of Beauty, which confronts mental health issues triggered by unattainable standards of beauty paraded on social channels.
AI and the metaverse
AI was an inescapable subject, with holding companies in particular scrambling to show they were in front of the wave, by flagging up their partnerships with the world’s hottest AI companies. Platforms, like Google and Meta, revealed new AI tools developed with marketers in mind.
The impression I got is that everyone at Cannes thinks AI is going to rapidly influence the industry, but no one can predict how it will play out: chaos or liberation?
In a seminar, musician and entrepreneur Will.i.Am – touting his new productivity tool, FYI – urged creators to guard against the AI land grab by protecting ownership of their work. “You need to own your likeness and your essence,” he said:
“It’s a human right. We can’t give this up to tech… People should own their own stuff.”
Despite the hype, there was nary a mention for the metaverse. The Titanium Grand Prix-winning First Digital Nation campaign for the government of Tuvalu was technically a metaverse campaign, but the judges played this aspect down. “It’s not a technology idea, it’s a problem-solving idea,” said the Titanium jury president, David Droga.
Trend forecasters were left with egg on their face, with Blockchain technologies, including NFTs, getting similarly short shrift.
Humans 1, Robots 0
Ultimately, people won out over the machines at Cannes – for now. In a talk, entitled ‘Give Them a Punch in the Feels’ Adam&eveDDB’s CCO, Richard Brim, pointed out that ‘feeling’ is one of the most powerful tools humans possess.
Quoting Maya Angelou (“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”) and with tongue firmly in cheek, he said “AI can go fuck itself: it can’t feel like we can.”
McDonald’s USA’s chief marketing and customer experience officer, Tariq Hassan, echoed this sentiment, urging marketers to be more human: “Get closer to your fans. Find the soul of your brand in the soul of your customers.”
Amen to that.
