Second edition of Creative Impact highlights the role of creativity in building brands
Warc published a report sharing the highlights of Cannes Lions 2024’s Creative Impact. Featuring 31 sessions over the five days of this year’s Festival, the survey highlighted the role of creativity in building resilient brands and delivering commercial results .
With participation from some of the world’s top industry leaders and marketing researchers, the report shows not only why creativity matters, but also when and how to apply it. “What we found was that the power of a strong brand endures – and that’s as true for emerging technology companies as it is for traditional consumer goods companies. But we’re still learning about how best to build them in a world of rapidly changing media and consumer landscape,” says David Tiltman, chief content and customer officer at Warc.
The 21st Century Case for Brand Building
Laura Jones, CMO of Instacart, taught a masterclass on brand building for Silicon Valley, where she advocates merging brand performance and budgets and unifying the approach to metrics.
For digital brands that act as platforms or intermediaries, Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, CMO at Doordash highlighted the importance of investing in the brand. For Doordash, the focus is on customers and merchants.
Karen Crum, partner and brand strategy leader, strategy and transactions at EY, called for greater clarity in defining a brand, saying marketers can make the case for building a brand based on precedent rather than persuasion. Convincing people is difficult, but showing them precedents is easier. A new focus on pricing as a result of brand building is helping to make this argument, according to Dr. Grace Kite, founder of Magic Numbers.
The crisis of distinction
The “middle ages”, a trend in which everything starts to look the same, poses new challenges for brands that want to stand out.
Analysis of assets by IPSOS and Jones Knowles Ritchie found that 65% of assets have weak or no associations with the brands paying for them.
According to Karen Nelson-Field, founder and CEO of Amplified Intelligence, the rise of low-attention span media formats is making it harder for businesses to stand out: 85% of ads fail to meet the 2.5-second attention span threshold, meaning ads below that threshold will not generate relevance and will essentially be wasted spend.
System 1 tested a video of a cow chewing grass and found that 50% of ads in the UK underperform the video. New research from eatbigfish, System 1 and consultant Peter Field revealed that brands would have to spend an additional $228 billion in the US or £10 million in the UK for adverts considered boring, which evoke no emotional response, to trigger the same market share growth as more interesting advertising.
Start with the customer
Mark Ritson, founder of Mini MBA, argues that marketers have lost sight of the customer. When marketers properly understand the consumer, factors such as relevance become very important.
Yael Cesarkas, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at R/GA San Francisco, stated that briefings are saturated with unoriginal insights and that crucial consumer insights exist between the customer’s aspiration and their reality.
Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg, co-founders of Evidenza, say synthetic data opens up access to cheaper, faster research and even deeper insights into audiences through digital twins of B2B and B2C audiences.
Commerce claims the future of media
Warc forecasts suggest that retail media will grow 13.7% year-on-year globally to $153.3 billion. Retail media has increasingly attracted the attention of brands eager to connect with shoppers near the point of purchase.
The arrival of commercial media adds complexity to planning and blurs the line between brand building and performance. Diana Haussling, Colgate-Palmolive’s CMO for North America, said the company has strived to build a new “consumer experience and growth” division to handle cross-media budgets spanning traditional and retail media.
Combining discovery, connection and commerce, Jill Toscano, head of media at Walmart, explained how the “RomCommerce” campaign was designed to be watched in two-minute segments on TikTok, showcasing more than 300 products available to click and buy in the content.
