With 80 hours of events, 12,000 delegates, 26,753 award entries, and 34 Grand Prix winners, Cannes 2024 was the perfect exploration of the creative industry's direction of travel.
Whether you were there or not, there was a lot of Cannes 24 to take in. We take a look at some of the insights and trends from the Cannes Lions Official Wrap-Up Report 2024 - an easily digestible perspective from the organisers of this year’s festival.
Find your funny
“If it’s funny, it doesn’t need to fight for your attention. You’ll seek it out,” actor and Saturday Night Live regular Kenan Thompson told a packed audience in the “Ready to laugh again: The return of comedy” session.
Comedy was a recurring theme throughout this year’s Cannes, and is set to become a key strategy for brands looking to stand out among the crowd. Noel Bunting, chief creative officer at Publicis London, shared some numbers from ‘The Happiness Report’ from Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX) and author and podcaster Gretchen Rubin, which demonstrate the power of comedy. If a brand uses humour, 80% of people are more likely to buy from the brand again, 72% are more likely to choose the brand over competition, and 63% will spend more with the brand.
However, 95% of business leaders still fear using humour in their comms. The message from Cannes was clear: find the fun.
Embrace weird and messy
Not everything has to be slick and polished. Sometimes it works to get your weird on.
“Marketers can be too literal about making sense – there is a tremendous value in confusion,” said Mike Cessario, founder and chief executive of Liquid Death. “If you can confuse people, you can stop them.”
Often, weird means embracing everyone’s inner ick. Anti-nausea brand Dramamine’s “The last barf bag” by FCB Chicago bid farewell to the sick bag it claims to have made obsolete, while IKEA wasn’t afraid to use vomit and dog pee to demonstrate that “Life is not an IKEA catalogue” in the grossest possible terms. Both were Lions winners. Dramamine took the Grand Prix in the Health & Wellness Lions and IKEA won a Bronze in the Print & Publishing Lions, specifically in the new “use of humour” category introduced this year.
There are other ways to get weird and messy too. Heineken’s “150 Years of Whateverken” by LePub Milan picked up a Gold Direct Lion by playing on people’s misspelling of the word Heineken and turning these common mistakes into a global celebration of the Dutch beer’s landmark anniversary.
Celebrity - but not as you know it
While the power of attaching celebrity to a campaign is unlikely to wane, how star appeal is used is shifting. It’s celebrity, but subverted. Rather than bowing down to status, brands are getting playful.
The Social & Influencer Lions’ Grand Prix-winning campaign, “Michael CeraVe” from cosmetics brand CeraVe, used Arrested Development actor Michael Cera to send up a genuine Reddit thread that (wrongly) claimed he had developed its skincare range. “The haters will say it’s just a celebrity campaign, but it’s smarter than that,” said jury president Amy Ferguson, the chief creative officer and partner at Special U.S. “It’s a symbol that taking a risk on brave, unexpected creativity can be beloved by culture, the industry and the business’s bottom line.”
Find out more of the 2024 Festival’s standout themes in the Cannes Lions Official Wrap-Up Report 2024: from why empathy and vulnerability can be competitive advantages (Talent & Culture) to why creatives are returning to traditional craft techniques (The Creative Toolkit). Plus new routes to effectiveness and the cost of dull (Creative Impact) and warning from X chief technology officer Elon Musk that, despite this being the most interesting time in history, there’s a 20% chance of AI going rogue and “something going terribly wrong” (Innovation Unwrapped).