Many of the marketing and communications industry’s big buzzwords were of course front and center again this year in Cannes.
Things like AI, social media and GenZ.
Or “f***ing GenZ”, as Les Binet put it when he spoke alongside Adrian Adaramoye from TikTok on the theme “Go big or just keep posting”.
Just a couple of weeks before the festival, Les Binet had published a report on the risks of prioritising efficiency over effectiveness, and ROI over long-term growth. He’d presented it at a WARC webinar on the theme “Go big or go home”, and I wrote about that webinar and report here earlier.
Among other things, Les Binet pointed out that statistics from the IPA’s effectiveness databases show that 62 per cent of marketers ignore consumers over 45, even though that group accounts for half of all consumption. Instead, they’re chasing younger audiences — not least GenZ.
So in Cannes, Les Binet shared the stage with an opponent who talked about today’s modern, digital world and GenZ as the future.
Adrian Adaramoye did open by praising Les Binet — “with an emphasis on veteran”. He argued that Binet’s “theories rest on a desperate need for a legacy split”.
Adaramoye, however, didn’t bring any numbers or hard facts to back up claims that “old media” is dead, or why the main focus should be on social media and GenZ.
Les Binet, on the other hand, has a few decades of studies and data to lean on. Which doesn’t mean he dismisses digital media at all. Or GenZ, for that matter.
“Everything works, but it works together. You have to go broad across several channels and commit enough resources. It’s not about the quality of the platform, it’s about how you use it,” said Les Binet — and Adrian Adaramoye couldn’t help but agree.
Of course, there are sometimes good reasons to specifically target GenZ in your communications.
One interesting example is the luxury brand Coach, which teamed up with Forsman & Bodenfors on a campaign aimed at young women.
Julia Holtback Yeter, creative at Forsman & Bodenfors, and Joon Silverstein, CMO at Coach, explained that while Coach has very high brand awareness, young people didn’t feel the brand was for them.
It’s no secret that plenty of women love expensive handbags, and that love can be sparked early. 25 million women turn 18 every year, and Joon Silverstein’s goal was for Coach to become their first luxury bag.
Julia Holtback Yeter talked about how, for GenZ, luxury today isn’t about status or ownership — it’s about something that expresses who you are. Studies have shown that young people read a lot, and that reading has become social rather than something you just do alone. So Coach reached out to Penguin Books, and together they created a series of small books that can be attached to the Coach bag like a charm.
Julia Holtback Yeter described how the books became a talking point, turning the target audience into active participants.
“We thought we were creating content, but it turned out to be contact. Not a campaign, but meetings,” she explained.
CREATORS – THEAUDIENCE AS CO-CREATORS OF ADVERTISING
Coach is an example of how a brand opens a dialogue with its audience, who then spread the word further. At several seminars and talks during this year’s Cannes week, people talked about creators — creators as important messengers for the brand.
In WARC’s summary of this year’s Cannes Lions, they also pointed to the value of creators, but stressed that you shouldn’t think of them as channels for messages — rather as part of the brand’s infrastructure.
You could really describe it as a three-tier infrastructure, depending on who owns the creative interpretation and why the person is taking part: influencers, creators, and “organic creators”.
Influencers are closer to being a channel, where the brand owns the message. The influencer gets a brief: “talk about the product in your own way, in your own context.” But the framework, the tone, and sometimes even the wording come from above. In other words, a paid placement — like traditional sponsorship or product placement, just packaged in its own personal channel.
When you talk about creators, the creative interpretation shifts over to the talent. One such example was presented earlier this spring at the Global Marketing Conference, where P&G talked about how British singer-songwriter Tom Grennan recorded a new version of Gillette’s jingle “The Best a Man Can Get” in 2024. That became the foundation for a campaign with Tom Grennan and football legend Ian Wright. Still a commercial relationship between Gillette and the Grennan/Wright team — they got to borrow the brand’s raw material (the jingle) and make something of their own out of it, staking their own artistic credibility on it.
The new recording of the jingle spread fast, not least among GenZ. Six million viral views and 1.5 million streams on Spotify, by one count. At Grennan’s concerts, fans could be seen waving signs asking him to sing the Gillette song. “Ordinary people” picked up on the “sing along with me” call and posted the clips on TikTok — from the guy who got shoppers in Liverpool singing along, to the crowd at a football match.
This was organic spread with no commercial relationship at all. The people filming themselves singing along had no brief and no payment. They took part because the campaign had already become meaningful or fun enough that they wanted to be part of it. The motive is social/identity-based, not transactional.
So that’s what WARC means by “creators are infrastructure”. Creators build the structure that makes organic spread possible, while the influencer tier rarely does, because the message there is usually too finished, too controlled, for others to want to build on it.
And the “organic creators” don’t take any direction at all, yet brands see them as hugely important. Maybe it’s no surprise that Sephora’s US CMO, Zena Arnold, noted that one of the things that’s made being a marketing chief more complicated today is that you have to be more open:
“If there’s one thing that can keep me up at night, it’s all these people talking about us. It can be tough sometimes, but you have to let go of control.”
AI, OF COURSE
This year the tone around AI was a bit calmer and more constructive, and it was clear AI has become a more natural part of everyday marketing work — not something set to take over everything else, but a tool. One marketing chief, taking part in one of the daily morning conversations between CMOs under the theme “CMOs in the Spotlight,” pointed out that throughout history we’ve always believed new technology would replace everything else — only to later realise that the old stuff wasn’t worthless just because new technology had come along.
That said, especially in advertising and media, there are areas where new technology has completely replaced the old — and it happened pretty fast. Few people today probably remember repro houses and typesetting shops. Or what you’d even use a type gauge for.
That undeniably meant a lot of jobs disappeared. Ad agencies scrapped their big repro cameras. The art studios, once something of a cash cow for agencies — where teams of paste-up artists physically assembled artwork by hand — shrank as Macintosh computers and fast, simple layout programs developed and improved.
Computers replaced manual labour, but still needed skilled hands and eyes at the keyboard.
P&G’s Chief Brand Officer, Marc Pritchard, was on stage in Cannes as usual. I found him extra interesting to listen to this year, because he gave several concrete examples of how P&G uses AI — not least in product development.
He described how their “Chat PG” gathers data, crunches numbers and can make suggestions. But also how wrong it can go if people aren’t involved too — people who have feelings and imagination, and who understand consumers.
Marc Pritchard described a successful product launch in the US that turned into a total flop when they simply repeated it in England. American consumers immediately loved Dawn Powerwash, a spray for heavily soiled dishes. Just spray it on the casserole dish, or whatever it might be, then wipe or rinse off — no need for the dishwasher. Fairy Powerwash’s immediate failure in England came down to the simple fact that they hadn’t understood that British consumers soak their dishes to loosen food residue before putting them in the dishwasher (the brand Dawn is Fairy in the UK, and Yes in Sweden). When they renamed the spray Fairy Skip the Soak, British consumers finally took to it.
AI has neither empathy nor a sense of humour. And AI definitely couldn’t have come up with as mad an idea as aftershave that smells like grilled marshmallow. But the people at P&G created a limited-edition “summer scent” for grilling season. There are few American barbecue nights that don’t end with grilled marshmallows between two crackers (preferably with a piece of chocolate too). So for all those guys who often end up “in charge of the grill” (once the women have prepped the food and sides), they launched a “Summer Dudes Collection” featuring “Old Spice Serial Griller”.
A limited-run joke that got so much attention they had to make more of it, because creators spread the ad across social media.
Marc Pritchard described several examples of product development where AI played a part, but where people were the ones who understood the emotions that the product development or relaunches needed to be built on.
So for P&G, AI is a valuable aid and tool. But just as important is the seamless ecosystem they work within, where the company, retailers and agencies (whom Marc Pritchard called MVPs — “Most Valuable Partners”) function as a single unit.
CONSENSUS AND DISSENT
At a very well-attended seminar, professors Mark Ritson and Byron Sharp sat on the same stage together for the first time in ten years. And, unusually, they agreed on five points for how marketing communication creates effect:
The importance of mental availability
The importance of distinctive brand assets
The resurrection of mass marketing
Consistency and long-term thinking
And that “brand purpose is complete nonsense”
But on that last point, there’s a good deal of disagreement between them and the marketing industry at large.
They talked about how “nobody cares what your toothpaste thinks about racism,” and how nobody just wants to sell good coffee to people who want good coffee without also talking about equality.
“But nobody buys anything for that reason alone,” they argued.
A surprisingly dim-witted statement from two gentlemen with doctorates in marketing. Have they perhaps been listening a bit too much to the battle cries from the US about “woke is broke”?
Sure, it’s probably fairly rare that someone buys coffee SOLELY because it’s Fair Trade certified. But there’s a wealth of studies and practical experience showing how much sustainability and diversity matter for business results, even if few brands make sustainability their main focus.
One that does is Patagonia, who also spoke in Cannes. A company with billion-dollar revenue (in dollars), and very healthy profitability. But a company whose founder, Yvon Chouinard, didn’t want to be a billionaire — so he gave the entire business away to a foundation, with the aim of using the profits to fight climate change and protect land.
“The earth is now our only shareholder,” he said at the time.
But plenty of other examples of the business value of working sustainably and inclusively have been presented on the Cannes stage over the years. Brands like Dove (which, thanks to inclusive advertising, has become Unilever’s biggest brand — three times bigger than when the “Real Beauty” concept was introduced). Marc Pritchard has previously talked about how, around ten years ago, P&G decided it would always reflect the real diversity of the markets where it communicates, in order to represent its entire audience — something it has kept checking it achieves ever since. A further aspect of this work on diversity and sustainability is the internal benefit. A few years ago in Cannes, Mars’s vice president described how their work on greater diversity in advertising hadn’t only paid off with consumers.
“The impact has energised everyone who works at Mars. It also makes it easier for us to attract talent to the company,” he said — a claim there’s plenty of evidence for.
A WEALTH OF HARD FACTS
The studies behind the report “The Business Case for Progressive Advertising,” presented in Cannes in 2024, analysed the effects of inclusive advertising for 392 brands over a four-year period from 2020 to 2023. It covered 58 countries around the world and a wide range of product categories — confectionery, snacks, beauty, pet food, alcohol and household products, among others.
According to the report, the evidence for the business benefits of inclusive advertising is clear.
Brands with more inclusive advertising sell more (3.46% higher short-term sales and 16.26% higher long-term sales)
They’re considered and tried more often (33% higher likelihood of strong consideration, 62% higher likelihood of being the consumer’s first choice, and 8% higher likelihood of being tried)
They get more loyal customers (23% lower likelihood of being abandoned after trial, and 15% higher loyalty)
Consumers value them more highly (54% higher price elasticity)
And they have higher brand equity (8.3% more meaningfulness, 12.1% more differentiation and 9.4% higher recognition)
These commercial benefits hold regardless of product category or market.
So it’s clear: inclusion drives revenue.
In early December last year, Kantar in Sweden discussed market trends across various areas ahead of 2026 at a lunch seminar, where they also summarised developments during 2025.
Among other things, they pointed out that 65 per cent of consumers prefer companies that promote inclusion and diversity — up six percentage points since 2021. Among GenZ, even more expect companies to do so.
So Mr Ritson and Mr Sharp can agree all they like. But the fact is: purpose isn’t nonsense, and woke ain’t broke — inclusion is income!
