Cannes Lions 2024 condensed: The Frontify summary

9 creative trends, 10 business learnings, and 1 surprising theme

Did?you miss the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity this year? Or was it hard to take it all in as you moved through the flurry of networking, drinks, and endless panels along the Croisette? Or are you just struggling to recap the vastness of it all for your colleagues back home? Don't worry.

Our Chief Storyteller, Karl Wikstr?m , has processed and distilled down the whole creative shebang into nine creative trends to inspire you, 10 learnings for driving greater business profitability with branding, one surprising main theme, and, finally, a simple key to your future branding success. Enjoy!

I. 9 creative trends — the cutting edge of brand building in 2024

1. The power of the past — curating history for relevance in the present
2. Community service — real innovation for communities and causes
3. Fluid ownership — playing with and weaponizing brand ownership
4. Hidden figures — celebrating the unknown and flipping celebrity endorsements
5. Regenerative creativity — reinvesting in regrowth and business value chains?
6. The search for surprise — confusing the customer to stand out
7. Memefication — building more meme-ready campaigns
8. Big reflexes — the maturation and scaling of instant response marketing
9. Technology ecology — repurposing ecosystems through technology?

1. The power of the past — curating history for relevance in the present

In the relentless and endless now, more brands are reaching back into the past to give their campaigns weight and resonance. But not just their own past — brands now act more as curators of history, drawing attention to or celebrating forgotten aspects of shared history.

Notable examples include the Michelob Ultra “Lap of Legends,” where modern F1 driver Logan Sargeant got to race against perfect AI-recreations of the past racing giants he admires, the Johnnie Walker “Errata at 88,” where the brand restored the lost music legend Alaíde Costa to her rightful spot in history, or the brilliant “First Speech” campaign from Reporters Without Borders, where the flowery inauguration speeches of dictators are contrasted with their real impact.?

1. Lap of Legends — Michelob Ultra
2. Johnnie Walker — Errata at 88
3. The First Speech - Reporters Without Borders

2. Community service — real innovation for communities and causes

Brands are taking new strides in inclusion, diversity, and corporate social responsibility, innovating for specific communities or integrating solutions for their problems into their marketing and products. There’s more active innovation in serving communities and society at large — going far beyond checking boxes or empty signalling — toward truly collaborating with brand audiences.?

Examples include the “Transition Body Lotion,”?a skin cream for the skin problems trans women undergo during transition; the WhatsApp-sponsored documentary “We Are Ayenda” about the Afghan girl’s football team’s journey to freedom; or the simplicity of the “Pedigree. Adoptable” pet food campaign turning every Pedigree ad into an ad for adoptable pets.?The trend encompassed everything from digital systems, like the "PinkChip" campaign highlighting the cost of gender bias in global business, to physical marvels like the "SightWalks" guidance system for the blind.

1. Transition Body Lotion — Unilever (Grand Prix, Glass Lion for Change)
2. Pedigree. Adoptable — Pedigree (Gold, Outdoor)
3. We Are Ayenda — WhatsApp (Grand Prix, Entertainment)
4. PinkChip — Degiro and UN Women (Gold, Glass Lions for Change)
5. SightWalks — Sol Cement (Grand Prix, Design)

3. Fluid ownership — playing with and weaponizing brand ownership

More brands are playing with ownership and IP to an unprecedented degree — lending their brand to others, using intellectual property laws in creative ways, blurring the line between fake and real, and inviting people into the playground of their brand.?The relationship to strict brand guidelines is loosening, with brands shifting into co-created projects with their audience.?

Some great examples include the magnificent “Thanks for Coke-Creating,” a celebration of the homemade bodega branding of Coke across the world; “Right Against The Right,” a weaponization of copyright law against Neo-Nazis; and “A Piece of Me,” the Dutch brand KPN’s platforming of real experiences of online shaming into a pop song that changed laws and lives. And, of course, the much-discussed “Recycle Me” Coca-Cola campaign.

1. Thanks for Coke-Creating (Gold, Print & Publishing?
2. Rights Against The Right (Silver, Creative Strategy)
3. A Piece of Me (Grand Prix, Creative Strategy)
4. Recycle Me — Coca Cola (Grand Prix, Print & Publishing)

4. Hidden figures — celebrating the unknowns and flipping celebrity endorsements

It’s been amateur hour this year, in the best possible way. In reaction to celebrity and influencer culture, more brands are celebrating the unknowns: platforming ordinary people, niche profiles, or hidden talents. Many brands also reversed their way of doing celebrity collabs, playing down their status —hiding them or normalizing them instead of lionizing them.?

Key examples include the JCDecaux's Grand Prix “Meet Marina Prieto” in B2B, showing the power of outdoor ads by turning an unknown old lady into an overnight sensation; XBox’s platforming of an expert gamer into a real football coach with "Everyday Tactician"; and Stella Artois's “The World’s Most Famous Hand Model,” employing a subversively concealed David Beckham to position themselves. Even luxury brands got in on the game, with Loewe masterfully elevating two unknown ceramicists in a global craftsmanship campaign.?

1. Meet Marina Prieto (Grand Prix, Creative B2B)
2. The Everyday Tactician — Xbox (Grand Prix, Direct)
3. Stella Artois — The World’s Most Famous Hand Model
4. Loewe X Suna Fujita (Grand Prix, Luxury Goods)

5. Regenerative creativity — reinvesting in regrowth and brand value chains

Brands are committing more resources to investing in the communities that create, sell, or buy their products and finding new ways to give back and promote regrowth. They're looking at their ecosystems and value chains in a new light, innovating to promote long-term sustainability and business stability. This also taps into an emerging trend in the branding industry — creating space for pauses, giving back, and (hopefully) exploring how to responsibly use people's creativity in a way that doesn't lead to burnout or exploitation.

Great examples include “The Heineken Pub Museums,” which made business easier for pub-owners by re-classifying them as museums; Mastercard’s “Room for Everyone,” which used data to pinpoint win-win business locations for Ukrainian refugees in Poland; and the Renault “Car to work” initiative that makes car buying more accessible to the newly employed who need a car to go to work but can't afford it yet.?

1. Pub Museums — Heineken (Gold, Creative B2B)
2. Room for Everyone — Mastercard (Grand Prix, Creative Data)
3. Cars To Work — Renault (Gold, Direct)

6. The search for surprise — confusing the customer to stand out

In a culture where everyone has seen everything, brands must go to new heights to surprise. As Liquid Death founder Mike Cessario said in his Cannes lecture, “Don’t underestimate the power of confusion.” And this year saw brands tricking, confusing, and surprising customers in truly unexpected, counter-intuitive ways.?

Some standout cases include Orange’s football campaign that used technology to disguise great football goals by female players as goals by male players to address gender bias in football, the "SweetHeart Situationships" that turned defective candy into the perfect gift for blurry relationships, and Magnum’s defiant “summer” campaign promoting ice-cream sales in the winter.?

1. If You Love Football, You Love Women’s Football — Orange (Grand Prix, Entertainment Lions for Sport)
2. SweetHeart Situationships
3. Find Your Summer (Magnum) (Grand Prix, Outdoor)

7. Memefication — building meme-ready campaigns

In a meme-driven culture, brands are growing more meme-ready. Experiences and campaigns are being built for maximal shareability and fan modification, with brands amplifying reactions and remixes.?

Some great examples include Poptarts "Edible Mascot," maximizing the impact of their sponsorship; Specsavers’ “The Misheard Version,” which turned Rick Astley’s classic rickrolling hit into a remix of misheard lyrics to promote hearing tests; and, finally, the meme-tastic conspiracy theory of CeraVe’s “Michael CeraVe": Is the true brain behind CeraVe skincare really actor Michael Cera?

1. The First Edible Mascot — Poptart (Grand Prix, PR)
2. The Misheard Version — Specsavers (Grand Prix, PR)
3. Michael CeraVe — Cerave (Grand Prix, Social & Influencer)

8. Big Reflexes — the maturation of instant response marketing

The pace and tempo of social media and the faster news cycles have driven brands to more instant response campaigns and “live-reaction” branding. But instant response branding has now entered a new era of maturity and scale, causing brands to react with even greater product modifications and larger activations than ever before.

The standout cases this year are Coors “Lights Out,” where a broken sign was turned into a beer in 48 hours; the Heinz activation of a Taylor Swift sighting into a product re-launch of the newly named “Ketchup and Seemingly Ranch”; and the DoorDash co-opt of the SuperBowl, were they delivered EVERYTHING featured in the SuperBowl ad breaks to one lucky winner.?

1. Coors Lights Out (Gold, Outdoor)
2. Heinz Ketchup and Seemingly Ranch (Gold, Direct + Social & Influencer)
3. DoorDash — DoorDash All The Ads (Grand Prix, Titanium)

9. Technology ecology? — repurposing ecosystems through technology

The explosion in AI and machine learning, combined with the growing access to large sets of complex data and different ecosystems within companies, has fueled a revolution in data repurposing. There's a huge trend in brands finding innovative ways to put existing data to work — both in unexpected contexts or at an unprecedented scale — to build new systems for value creation.

The examples are too many to count and run through all the Cannes categories, but a few favorites include the Mercado Libre “Handshake Hunt,” a promo campaign connected to different handshakes across different TV shows; Spotify’s "Spreadbeats," a music video integrated into a media sheet for B2B ad sales; and Philips' “Refurb,” a whole ecosystem for giving old products new life.

But the range of innovations here is truly amazing — from a remote diagnostic tool for diabetes using only voice (!) to a clever way of turning MRI scan noises into soothing audiobooks for scared children and a major initiative by DP World to mitigate climate change and conserve energy by raising the standard temperature of cold storage worldwide from -18 degrees to -15 degrees.

1. Handshake Hunt — Mercado Libre (Grand Prix, Media)
2. SpreadBeats (Grand Prix, Digital Craft)
3. Refurb — Philips (Grand Prix, Creative Business Transformation)
4. Voice2Diabetes (Grand Prix, Innovation Lions)
5. Magnetic Stories, Siemens Healthineers (Grand Prix, Pharma)
6. The Move to -15 — DP World (Gold, Titanium)

II. 10 business learnings for brands from Cannes

Cannes Lions 2024 was not all creativity and play. It also included multiple thought-provoking deep dives into the strategies, science, processes, and business outcomes of brands, exploring new ways of delivering greater efficiency and effectiveness. Here are this year's greatest takeaways:?

1. Build a creative system encompassing marketing, finance, and the entire C-suite: The most impactful brands at Cannes — including McDonald’s and AB InBev — showed how they had increased the creativity and business impact of their marketing to an astronomical degree by building creative systems internally for all stakeholders. Both companies had pioneered a mandatory training program in creative marketing for all executives. Greater internal transparency in marketing strategies and KPIs added billions of dollars in profitability by aligning the entire organization on more profitable marketing.?The result? A 2.5 increase in marketing impact on revenue and an extra USD 30 billion in global sales for McDonald's; AB InBev now has eight of the 10 most valuable beer brands worldwide.
2. Unite the funnel: Song Accenture made the case for uniting the purchase funnel — starting neither from emotional brand building focused on feelings at the top nor sales activation focused on action at the bottom. Instead, creative chairperson Nick Law argued for starting from the middle of the funnel: Create understanding for the value and key benefit of a brand, and unite the traditionally warring tribes of brand marketers and performance marketers in working from one shared vision.?
3. Build broad trust to win B2B and B2C: A new study from Bain highlighted the importance of brand awareness for all brands, but especially in B2B. The US and Europe study showed that in 81% of B2B buying cases both main buyers and “hidden buyers” in the decision-making committee all knew the brand from the start. Even the most rational committees chose the brand they were all already familiar with from the beginning, no matter what.
4. Get the fundamentals right: Marketing professor and provocateur Mark Ritson argued that too many brands today focus solely on creativity and forget the fundamentals of the right diagnosis, the right positioning, and the right strategy. Get the basics right and simply distilled if you want creativity to be a true multiplier for your business.?
5. Rethink research: Many brands demonstrated how they had elevated and improved the speed and impact of their research — all the way from Evidenza agency's showcase for lightning-quick AI-replicated consumer panels and “synthetic research” to provide immediate guidance to AB InBevs 30 hours of mandatory face-to-face conversation for all executives with real beer drinkers every year.?
6. Become the only: In many categories, the only game is to be first or second. Multiple brands showed how they had created systems for reaching megabrand status and set up investment strategies to consistently re-invest to grow their market share.?Don't aim to be a runner-up; aim to be the only.
7. Align on universal KPIs: A running theme among the most successful brands was aligning on universal KPIs and creating marketing measures that were supported by and regularly shared with finance, HR, and other departments. There’s a trend toward making marketing departments less of a black box and more of an open door to all.?
8. Leverage the power of marketing for pricing: Multiple experts and marketing professors called for focusing more on pricing — how all the evidence shows that marketing can shift price sensitivity dramatically and enable brands to increase their pricing without negatively affecting their market share. In short, advertise and promote in a way that means you can charge more than your competitors while remaining the preferred choice.
9. Segment and target with AI: An ongoing discussion was the potential for AI to help drive better targeting and activation at scale and find the right opportunities for building brand and driving performance among different groups. Tom Roach, VP of Brand Strategy at Jellyfish, made an astute observation about the need for “creative metrics that scale” and ensure that the creative work is “fit for platform” and shown at the most advantageous moment, and that AI can potentially help drive that revolution.?
10. Never be boring: A great talk from Adam Morgan of eatbigfish and Jon Evans of System1 focused on “the extraordinary cost of dull” — the huge cost increase in media and reach when your content is boring, neutral, or uninteresting, and that more than 50% of advertising makes people “feel nothing.” So, if you want to be effective, promise to never, ever be dull.

III. A surprising main theme: BRAND VULNERABILITY — fears, flaws, and daring to f*ck up

There was a strangeness to Cannes Lions 2024. On the surface, everything was the same as always — the big sponsors were there in their big tents full of hot air (from the warm Croisette breeze, of course, why do you ask?), the rosé was flowing, and AI was touted as being the future, once again. The carnival was in full swing but with a greater air of melancholy and reflection than ever before.?

A clear main theme emerged over the week of the Festival of Creativity: Instead of speaking about bravery, boldness, and success, brands talked more about fear, failure, and leaning into your f*ck-ups. It was an oddly moving year of brand vulnerability, where brands were more open with their mistakes, imperfections, and failures to take risks or pay their dues.?

It was a year of reckoning, with more talk of responsibility and honesty. A mournful sense that the creative industry had failed by jumping at too many shiny new things at once. It had failed to solve its own internal divisions and had forgotten its responsibility to deliver value to its audience and give back to its community.?

And no work captured this spirit better than the Grand Prix film Winner for the Sydney Opera House, a brilliant music video celebrating the 50-year anniversary of the iconic building through comically honoring the absolute opposite of its spirit. It's a subversive masterpiece by comical songwriter Tim Minchin, ostensibly in praise of playing it safe, avoiding responsibility, and criticizing things from a safe distance.?

Play it Safe — Sydney Opera House (Grand Prix – Film)

If there’s one thing you need to see to get the full flavor of Cannes this year, it’s this film. Please, please watch it.

Not just because it’s a great film, but because it also serves as the Rosetta Stone for the undercurrents in the branding industry — celebrating the past, engineering surprises, tapping into meme culture, honoring hidden figures, and embracing collective ownership of brands. A return to risk-taking, responsibility, and giving back to your community.

It's a timely story about the temptation to play it safe and the great things we can accomplish if we face the fear and do audacious things that may not be universally liked at first but genuinely stand the test of time.

IV. The final lesson: Open your brand to countless futures?

So many big things happen at Cannes that it’s hard to take it all in.?

After digesting what feels like a million meetings, case studies and seminars, it becomes really hard to articulate what we learned.

But sometimes, a small thing can give us the key to everything.?

There was a beautiful and extremely well-crafted (yet somewhat hidden) Bronze-winning case study in the design category called “Departure to Countless Futures.” It was made by Dentsu and celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Hoshi Award for science fiction through a colorful and playful system of posters honoring past winners and showing the literal departure to countless tomorrows.?(The picture doesn't really do the campaign justice. It really has to be seen in real life.)

And it captured something simple yet profound about the whole Festival of Creativity: There's not one future, but many futures — countless futures that we're shaping right now.?

What the greatest work in Cannes asks us to do is to actively join in and contribute to the shaping of tomorrow.

To have a say in the future by connecting more openly, vulnerably, and curiously with culture, technology, and the people around us. Not without fear or hesitation but by feeling the fear and doing it anyway, as they say.

So, this is the key lesson we take away from Cannes 2024, the year of vulnerability and failure:?

Open your brand

Open your brand to greater co-creation and involvement from your customers.?

Open your brand to greater scrutiny and input from your non-marketing colleagues.?

Open your brand to experimentation, failure, and greater risk-taking.?

Open your brand to new technologies and platforms.?

Open your brand to connections with other brands, systems, and history itself.

Open your brand to more generosity, humanity, and vulnerability.

Because an open brand is a brand that learns; a brand that grows; and a brand that can power through the fear to seize all the opportunities of today and tomorrow.

Open yourself up. You have nothing to fear but failure, and failure is just the first step on the road to triumph.

- Karl Wikstr?m, Chief Storyteller @ Frontify