Taming the lions: authenticity, attention and artificial intelligence at Cannes 2023
Written by the Creative Team
It was more Cannes-al than Cannes as we set up our Lions.tv big screen area at Tangerine’s Manchester HQ, but over five days our team took in hours and hours of the live and on-demand talks from the Cannes Festival of Creativity 2023.
We watched a lot – good, bad and ugly – with an eye on how the attention economy is impacting the wider industry.
Our key takeaways were definitely centered around brand purpose. Not the save the whales type of purpose, but confidence in what, where and why your brand says what it says.
This truth came from mistakes, and the mistakes came from chasing an inauthentic voice (a guaranteed turn-off for a turned-on world).
And from there came craft. Perhaps not in a noodling, working over the weekend to find the right line of old, but in thoughtfulness, simplicity and honesty in your strategy.
Our raison d’etre is to get our clients to the Centre of Attention, with the right people in the right spaces. With Cannes having a heavy slant towards performance this year, we were especially keen to see how our peers were navigating the narrow strait between story and efficiency and, with our own Tangerine colleagues in the south of France spreading our Shapes of Attention model in person, how our mantra of storytelling for salience was continuing to disrupt the sector.
Here are our favourite bits...
Pinning Down the Wider Purpose
Written by Helen Gradwell, Creative lead
I watched Pinterest’s The Internet is Broken, Let’s Fix It, which focused on “creating for the good.”
It’s common sense in a way. But it did raise a really interesting point for all of us in advertising, marketing and creative comms: impact has two meanings.
The first is the one we’re all used to: the data. Reach, impressions, engagements, clicks, sentiment, traffic, conversions… the impact the creative or campaign had on the platforms it was distributed on.
But what Pinterest encouraged us to do is to think about the impact our content has on people as individuals, while considering the impact of the wider online ecosystem they’re in. After all, after watching your content, they’re likely to scroll on to other content that could engage or enrage them.
There was an emphasis on not creating content to keep people glued to screens – trapped in your marketing funnel, sliding down the sides as they try to claw their way out, like a spider in a bath. Instead, the key is to create content that will inspire the audience to take action outside of those online bubbles.
The aim is simply to encourage “healthy, active, engaged citizens who want to make a change online and in the real world.”
We’ve seen this approach mirrored in our recent work with Bodyform, where we’re highlighting the shortcomings of the social platforms we are distributing content on. A lot of our content – and that of countless others – featuring anatomical words like cervix, vulva and vagina, have been flagged or censored altogether. Not only are we trying to raise awareness of this censorship, we’re also trying to prompt the audience to help us make a change through conversation driving and an online petition.
Image source: https://unsplash.com/photos/HDCT7Xtk0jQ
Leveraging authenticity in Storytelling; Hold my Beer
Written by Max Hamilton, Creative
I was struck by a few honest truths in the chat between giant American beer brand Miller Lite and their agency BBH.
Firstly, honesty about their business objective. They were selling tons of beer during the pandemic, but they knew deep down that was because of the pandemic. Sometimes our industry can veer too far towards performance and KPIs; sometimes creatives don’t mention the brief at all! The balance here was refreshing and highlighted the importance of great in-house teams working seamlessly with their agency.
Secondly, they reflected on their heritage to create guardrails around their authentic voice. Wary of following trends to chase relevance, they cited the nightmarish situation of being called out as phonies and pointed out a rival’s move into cucumber-flavoured hard seltzer as a great example of, frankly, losing the plot.
Thirdly, they found a much-needed consistency by combining the functional and the emotional.
Functional: Miller Lite was America’s first lite beer. It is tasty, it is low calorie, it is widely consumed.
The emotional: Miller is a feeling; finishing work, arriving at a party, nostalgia. This was in fact already established in the American vernacular: “Miller time”.
Combining the two, ‘Tastes like Miller time’ was born. From then on, every activation had this audience-led sentiment at the heart of it. It was adapted for holidays, local activations and sporting events with emphatic success. The right platform allows you to take creative risks, knowing you’re never straying too far from the familiar path. Easier to hit a target when you’re standing still, no matter what you’re throwing at it.
Fourthly, my favourite, and a very tactical idea, is that they road-tested the above tone work in the always-on-instant-feedback world of Twitter. By publishing themes and ideas about the Miller Lite POV on the channel, they got invaluable customer interactions, testing their work and cementing Twitter as the premier place to flex your tone of voice.
After all this they showed some great work: authentic, routed in earned media, fun and iconic stuff. Very cool. Made me thirsty.
No Laughing Matter
Written by James Pettecrew, Creative
BBDO’s Andrew Robertson's entertaining talk – and compelling statistics (But Seriously Though - Why We Need to Make People Laugh) – showed that, even in a pandemic, laughter is still the best medicine. Some of the jurors at Cannes last year highlighted the lack of scope for fun in the 'purpose parade' and there's still a serious undertone driving many of this year's campaigns. Yet the two do not need to be mutually exclusive. When they're brought together, as in Mars' inclusive Maltesers campaign in 2017, the effect can do wonders for both awareness and sales. Even when it comes to an apology for letting consumers down, KFC's empty bucket still served a zinger.
At Tangerine we're big fans of Robertson's version of LMFAO – laughter means financial achievements optimised. Some of our most engaged content relies on humour as a hook. Whether we're laughing with our audience at their Specsavers 'Should've' moments or enjoying the glamorous excess of Eurovision on the sofa with Dunelm, having a laugh is a KPI – kindle purpose intuitively – everyone wants to hit.
And with a global rise in unhappiness, maybe advertising has a new purpose of its own. People can't avoid ads. Let's at least make them laugh.
Gary V’s Four Letter Manifesto
Written by Joe Whitely, Senior Creative
Among the 149 profanities, loud screeches and the telling of TV ad directors in the auditorium that their work is pointless, Gary Vaynerchuk’s Cannes appearance produced three key points:
Free Creatives
Don’t be scared to post
F**k AI
Let’s start with the first point, naturally. Free the Creatives. Basically, kill the processes that stop good pieces of work seeing the light of day. It’s not a new notion by any means, your idea is only as good as the person who’s signing it off thinks it is – that old stumbling block. It got a round of applause from those in the room, and those Creatives watching in attendance here, but in theory, how much can you push back? If you feel strongly about something, tell the decision maker that. But after a couple of rejections, there’s not much more you can do. Move on.
Point two: don’t be scared to post. A caveat from the writer that they think (or at least hope) he was talking about short-form platforms here. His argument was ‘the more people see you, the more relevant you become’. Try telling that to certain famous faces who’ve been in the news recently. Anyway, shoehorning yourself into every trend/topic will soon get weary, whether you’re Gary Vee or an independent bookstore in Halifax.
Finally, his biggest and most aggressive shout: F**k AI. Given the number of speeches about AI at Cannes this week – including the one that quite literally preceded him on the main stage – it appears he’s shouting into a vacuum.
All in all, a high-octane 30 minutes that helped lunch go by a little quicker.
Image source: https://unsplash.com/photos/cLcoxRGcf_0
Nurturing Iconic Brands with Soul
Written by Sam Swaffield, Creative Director
Droga5 and Levi’s got together to talk through their campaign around the 150th birthday of the iconic 501 jean. To double-down on their authenticity claims (this was all about authenticity), they also invited a Levi’s historian to talk a little about how these trousers transcend mere clothing.
What’s great here is that Levi’s ride waves. The story is about relevance for a century and a half. How they feel fresh right now and how they use, and don’t use, their brand story to stay culturally relevant and keep selling millions and millions of pairs every year.
There were four killer takeaways I got from the short talk.
One, stay true to the product. They collaborate; they bring in creators and partners to mess around with stuff but there is a guiding principle about everyday informality, quality and an impossible cool that just always seems right. If they stay true to the 501, they can’t go wrong.
Two, show some love to the fans. The team said that embracing the communities that adopt you is the key to keeping your icon authentic and fresh. Admittedly this is easy for Levi’s, a staple for most culturally rich movements in western life for decades, but it points a way for staying true to your customers and finding a place in their worlds.
Three, tell culture-forward stories. Understand what is important to your audience and align your purpose.
Four, finally, was take risks. The ongoing search for relevance is all about discovery, and all adventures have some peril. This can work across so many cultural touch points for Levi’s but each tells a tale of reach and breadth of reference; if they work in music, what sort of music? If they work with creators, what sort of work are the creators known for? If you centre yourself in place, what sort of place is that and are you disrupting the status quo by following that route?
Risk, as a concept, I often wonder is the plaything of the super brands with budgets. Levi’s positioned it as a necessity, and while we might not always have total freedom to test, learn and disrupt, let’s not forget that risk can be a creative mindset, and that makes it scalable, achievable and exciting!
