Cannes Lions 2024 — Insights and Learnings on Data and Creative Effectiveness
The week of Cannes Lions 2024 was filled with a lot of discussion about creativity, but, as expected, topics such as technology, innovation, effectiveness, data and Artificial Intelligence were not left out.
Brazil didn’t do badly at the awards and secured 3rd place with 92 Lions, behind the United Kingdom and the United States. But what was striking was the lack of Brazilian awards in the Film category, the event’s most traditional, but which has also seen a decline in the number of entries. Is this part of the transformation of channels and languages or was it just a more competitive year? On the other hand, two Grand Prix, the festival’s highest accolade, were highly celebrated achievements: the “Errata at 88” project by Johnnie Walker and AlmapBBDO, which pays homage to Alaíde Costa, and the “Handshake Hunt” campaign by Mercado Livre and Gut in partnership with Globo. It’s worth researching and getting to know these and many other Brazilian award-winning actions. There’s even gold in the design category with the “Black Lights” project, carried out by AlmapBBDO and sponsored by Bradesco Seguros. Incredible and inspiring.
Our mission there was focused on the intersection of the world of data, metrics and technology in the context of advertising and creativity, and we captured a lot of interesting things. So let’s get to our compilation of insights.
More Data on the Effectiveness of Creativity
Advances in the use of technology and the evolution of data culture in advertising are bringing discoveries that go beyond the surface of performance marketing. We can now understand the role of brand building and creativity as key profitability factors in advertising. Several panels featured research from WARC and the IPA that converges on this conclusion. But others went further. The in-depth analysis of creativity now knows what works in detail: emotion, humor and differentiation, for example, are associated not only with the most awarded campaigns, but also with those that record the highest results. So let’s take note: investing in branding and creativity brings great long-term returns, and piloting this investment requires understanding the dynamics of the culture and language of each product and community.
Creator Economy is on the Rise, Bothering and Defining Relationships
This year, the festival added a new content track and spaces dedicated to the creative economy and influencers. Controversy erupted as soon as this new modality entered the conversation at Cannes. Traditional budget holders, whether agencies or brand partners, complained about the size of the slice of the budget that content creators had already bitten off. And those who have already seen the movement as inevitable or as a trend pointed to the need for the practice to mature in the industry. After all, in many cases there is a lack of professionalism, structure or even management, and this needed to be discussed in depth in order to stimulate evolution. Let’s see how this develops in 2025.
Business Management and Creativity Management
Countless content sessions and conversations pointed to the same need: CMOs need to talk about tangible financial results for companies, and CFOs need to understand the impact of advertising activities and brand investment. In other words, they need to speak the same language. In previous editions, the idea of this partnership was just a draft or something desirable. But in this edition, it was made compulsory. And this was very positive, because as well as talking about the importance of the issue, it brought real cases, such as McDonald’s, and new frameworks and complete management models that promise to put creativity efforts in order in order to achieve not only excellence, but also effectiveness and guarantee the promised competitive edge. These management models envisage aligning not only language as a basis, but also metrics, operations focused on effectiveness, the relationship between partners and strategic vision.
1st Party Data and the Expansion of Commerce Media
Cannes was already aware that retail media represented the 3rd great wave of advertising. Since the arrival of Amazon’s port and the presence of the big retailers, the new revenue stream had already announced that audience and consumer data were not something restricted to media outlets. Other retail companies were part of the daily journey of life and consumption and were beginning to exploit this opportunity. But this time, Chase and American Airlines have already shown that it’s not just retailers who have all this relevance for communication. They were there, demonstrating their media solutions and rubber-stamping the expansion of the term to Commerce Media. After all, it’s not just retailers; all trade in products and services can monetize audiences and data. And that’s where the real differentiator of these new platforms comes in: 1st-party data. The information that only certain companies have about your life. Can you imagine what banks know about your financial health? What credit card companies know about your consumption patterns? What do pharmaceutical companies know about your physical health? We don’t need to say any more, do we? If you haven’t yet grasped the real importance of structuring your 1st-party data architecture well, your competitor already has and may be generating more margin than you, simple as that. I don’t want to jump into technical jargon, but how is your data warehousing, your CDP, your observability practice, your data quality standards or even your digital analytics?
Artificial Intelligence, Generative or Not, Is Here to Stay, but It’s Going to Change a Lot of Things First
All advertising networks, all communication platforms, all marketing and advertising people have already touched or will touch artificial intelligence tools. In the creation, conceptualization or simple deployment of content, we’ve already seen it. But Cannes was also the stage for solutions and innovations that focus on data, metrics, customer service, research and media, to name a few of the latest applications. The excitement of the possibilities is AI”, “GenAI” and all the intelligent and automated novelties that we are seeing pass by every day right in front of our eyes. All advertising networks, all communication platforms, all marketing and advertising people have already touched or will touch artificial intelligence tools. In the creation, conceptualization or simple deployment of content, we’ve already seen it. But Cannes was also the stage for solutions and innovations that focus on data, metrics, customer service, research and media, to name a few of the latest applications. The excitement of the possibilities is waning and the discussion is now moving towards incorporating these technologies into current tools and processes.
DP6 and The Brandtech Group in Cannes
DP6’s focus at Cannes Lions 2024 was on unveiling evolutions and developing the themes of data, metrics and creative effectiveness as part of the mission of the group we are part of, The Brandtech Group.
This year, the Brandtech Group’s beach space in Cannes was the perfect place for meetings, presentations and talks in a relaxed atmosphere. Between breakfasts, lunches and dinners, we were able to welcome clients, partners and friends to discuss the future of advertising, the creative economy, GenAI and demonstrate our cases, projects and solutions.
Collectively, the group’s influencer marketing agency, was one of the supporters of the festival’s new Creators track and organized panel discussions on the subject.
Gravity Road exhibited its “1 in 100 million” campaign created for the Olympic Refugee Team. It’s an incredible story and extremely relevant in the divided world we live in. Oh, and speaking of the Olympics, the Olympic torch passed down the red carpet in Cannes and Brandtech’s beach too!
Pencil, the group’s generative artificial intelligence platform for content creation, announced its latest partnership with CreativeX for the integrated evaluation of creative elements in campaign optimization. And Jellyfish, the group’s media agency, demonstrated its newest competitive intelligence solution, called “Share of Model”, which analyzes and compares brand attributes and perceived positioning through today’s most widely used language models (LLMs) such as Gemini, ChatGPT, MetaAI, which are already a source of information for thousands of consumers. If you haven’t yet had the chance to get to know any of these solutions or possibilities, we need to have a coffee and talk. The future is just around the corner and we can introduce you to it. Talk to DP6.
It doesn’t seem like it’s only been a week. Lots of content, lots of connections and lots of learning. Let’s plan our next mission to Cannes in 2025, shall we?
Profile of the Author: Leonardo Naressi | CEO at DP6
