What you need to know:

• Cannes was heaving with influencers striking deals, but the message from top marketers, academics and consulting firms was consistent: Go back to fundamentals on brand, embed brand at the heart of business, then execute with consistent creative excellence to drive outsized financial returns.
• Mark Ritson landed that message most emphatically via 10 years worth of Effie data analysed by System1. In short: Do really good work, put enough money behind it, don’t change it; grow more. P&G CMO Marc Pritchard had a similar message.
• CEOs like Gap Inc’s Richard Dickson are codifying brand to drive business decision-making – and it’s working. But other business leaders remain unconvinced.
• Hence EY Parthenon’s Karen Crum putting brand and creative investment on the corporate risk register, just like plant, equipment and supply chains. She’s mapped 20 years worth of Fortune 500 filings that show brands looking beyond negative brand risk and investing to maintain brand relevance and value are “more profitable and stayed in the Fortune 500 longer”. Crum’s new paper unpacks how marketers can help articulate that risk in language that will land with the C-suite.
• Tassal Chief Commercial Officer Matt Vince – also the firm’s Chief Risk Officer – said it maintains corporate risk registers for both brand and marketing after 20-years as an ASX-listed business prior to acquisition by Canada’s Cooke Inc. Crum’s paper, he says, resonates deeply, while Tassal’s rigour in building brand – doubling marketing ROI on a flat budget – has seen Cooke’s global CEO fly into town: “The opportunity for us is to start leading [marketing] from a global perspective.”
• Next, he’s mulling how to embed a creative measurement system, as cited at Cannes by the likes of Nestlé as key to enabling creative growth gains and Grand Prix wins. But Vince is also thinking about influencers after meeting Seal at a TikTok event – and says TikTok “has some amazing things coming in their pipeline”.
• Amid divergence on whether marketing’s fundamentals still apply within a platform-dominated world, Suncorp’s Mim Haysom backed the call to return to basics on distinctive assets – because they resonate in all channels. “We can get obsessed about single channels. But nobody builds brand and marketing plans like that. You look at the whole ecosystem of your brand.”
• But Haysom acknowledged influencers are having a “profound impact” within that ecosystem. “If brands are thinking that it's a flash in the pan they're greatly mistaken.” Which means working through another set of risk management: relinquishing full control of content.
• Here’s their take-outs and take-homes from Cannes 2025 - listen to the podcast recorded just off the Croisette here.

Taking brand deep into corporate heartlands

The way businesses are valued has shifted dramatically in the last three decades, and intangible assets play a much bigger role. Brand is one of the biggest intangible assets a company owns, and can make the difference between growth and failure. Yet it is the least understood. That’s a problem Karen Crum is setting out to try and solve. Her mechanic? Corporate risk registers. Her mission: To get boards, CEOs and CFOs to stop thinking about brand and creativity as a negative risk, and to stop thinking about brand as marketing, but the business itself.

“Businesses need to stop being so siloed and looking [purely] from a marketing lens at the role the brand plays,” she told Cannes delegates. “It fits into every part of the business. It is part of every decision the business makes.”

Crum is Partner, EMEIA Strategy and Transactions at EY’s strategy unit, Parthenon. But she started out as a scientist, building algorithms that analyse the human genome to speed breakthrough drug discoveries, before a near two decade agency career as global strategy lead at Ogilvy and McCann.

Now Crum’s leading a project to prove the investment merits of brand and creativity to the c-suite and boards – and put brand in the same risk profile and reporting bracket as highly valued intangible assets like IP, patents and data. Or higher, because brand makes up somewhere between 10-70 per cent of a company’s value, with industrial firms at the lower end of that scale, and CPG and luxury brands at the top.

That’s why she’s settled on risk registers as the mechanism to shift corporate thinking – because listed businesses are required to report on risks to the market. Given brand’s contribution to corporate valuations, she’s trying to get CEOs and CFOs to think about investing in brand in the same terms as investing in a factory. Per Crum, “No CFO will let a factory go uninvested in, because they know it will come back and kill them. They will proactively deal with that. They will make it a competitive advantage.”

She’s now amassed the data to land the message.

One-eyed corporates

“I've had a very varied career, but essentially what I do is pattern recognition,” says Crum. She’s spotted a clear pattern in how large corporates view brand – and the risks and value they attribute to it.

Presenting the case for reframing brand value and risk reporting at Cannes, Crum highlighted Investopedia’s definition: “Business risk is the exposure a company or organisation has to factor that can lower its profits or lead it to fail.”

But while 98 per cent of CEOs and CFOs surveyed and interviewed by EY said they consider brand-related risk within broader business risk discussions, Crum’s data suggests it’s a one-sided story.

“We also built an AI tool that could scrape and analyse all of the company filings and risk registers for the last 20 years of the Fortune 500. That’s a good data set, because you can see how businesses have stayed in [the index] or dropped out of it – and we looked at the how they were declaring risk around brand and creative.”

What the scraper showed is that the vast majority (87 per cent) of businesses were only considering one type of brand risk – the risk of a negative event hurting the business. Only 9 per cent were considering the risk of their brand losing value and the knock-on impacts on the business. Just 4 per cent of Fortune 500 firms considered both risks – and that split has barely changed in two decades.

Flipping creativity’s risk profile

“There’s two types of risk – event based risk where something happens that damages your reputation, like a cyber attack and the fallout that follows, or something that you do to yourself, like a campaign that doesn’t get the reaction from some people that you wanted, that can reduce your brand value,” says Crum.

But the other risk is the loss of brand value due to lack of investment – and the knock-on effects on customer retention and acquisition, price elasticity, business strategy, growth and ultimately, shareholder returns.

If brand represents 70 per cent of a company’s market cap, “and it loses its ability to stay relevant and perform that role, then that's a really big problem. And what we found was that most businesses are only reporting on the former, the event-based risk,” says Crum. “They don’t put much about the second type of risk [into the register] – how you ensure the brand can build value – and feels quite profound.”

Essentially, it means businesses see creativity as something that could cause an event-based risk – a negative. “Therefore you withdraw from creativity and then the brand value diminishes, which means it can’t protect you as much going into a crisis – and you get this vicious cycle”, adds Crum.

“They're only looking at one side. And what this says to us is, ‘don't do something wrong. Don't do something bad.’ Or to quote RuPaul, ‘don't fuck it up’.

“But what's glaringly missing – and I think where we're falling into the creativity trap is – what if you stop doing the things that are right? What if you stop doing the things that we know are needed to build brand value? We're concentrating on not reducing something rather than making sure we build in the first place.”

But for the 13 per cent of Fortune 500 businesses not just reporting on event-based brand risk, Crum’s data provides hard evidence of financial upside: “The businesses that do look at holistic brand risk, that do think more long-term and ensure that it is relevant, they were more profitable and they stayed longer in the Fortune 500”.

While those firms are in the minority, their risk registers “are talking about making sure that marketing is a really powerful tool. They are talking about ensuring that the brand stays relevant, that it stands out there as competitive advantage – and you can't really do that without creativity”, says Crum.

“So what it's saying is that too often at the moment, creativity means ‘no, it's too much of a risk’. I think it's a risk not to be using creativity.”

Language barrier: Outside context problem

Tomes have been written about the need for senior marketers to talk the language of business to cut through at top management and board level. Crum is hesitant to criticise marketers. “It’s a really hard job, particularly at CMO level. So I have a lot of empathy with them, and I don’t want this to come across like they are doing something wrong, because the rate of change, the pace of that role, and the things they have to manage, is phenomenal. But as an industry, language really matters and the language around brand and creativity is a bit loose.”

Crum says reframing brand and making the investment case across its functional, organisational and shareholder value pools in hard business terms is a good place to start.

• Functional benefits are things like the ability to attract and retain customers, improve ROI on advertising and the relationship between brand, pricing and sales as well as product development, R&D and overall marketing strategy.
• Organisational benefits are things like using brand to drive corporate strategy (as Gap Inc is now doing), inform the operating model and M&A and attract talent.
• Shareholder benefits are using brand to drive margin and profit, attract investment, drive ESG and sustainability and improve shareholder perception.

For all of the above, “You need to put the story in the context of what they care about … At a very basic human level, if you're trying to persuade somebody, it's a hell of a lot easier when you use the language in the context that they care about”, says Crum.

“I think we've forgotten about the commercial side of commercial arts.” As a corporate consultant, that is something she is trying to change, hence reframing brand in broader risk terms.

“I see my role as how do I ensure that there's space for this work to exist? Because I know the power of creativity, it's just really, really hard to explain it.”

Biology of brand vs chemistry of performance

As a scientist, Crum finds brand more like biology than chemistry.

“I think the power of brand is that it can do a lot … It's about systems and influencing those systems, and how those pathways connect.

“In biology, the reason it's really hard to make a drug work is because it's probabilistic. It takes 100,000 different things in your body to influence a pattern actually happening, or to have a hormone react. Whereas chemistry … feels more like a guaranteed reaction: You add one compound to another, and you're pretty sure it will transform,” says Crum.

“Brand is not like that. For me, it’s more like biology, because it influences systems, rather than looking at logical step-by-step reactions. I think it's why the digital media and tech side of things really took over a lot of the marketing world – because it feels simpler, and it feels like, ‘if I do this chemistry, yes, it does work’. And I’m not saying some of that stuff doesn’t work, because it does – just not all of it.

“But when you silo out brand, and when you think it's just one thing, you don't get the power of it. And I think businesses that really understand brand understand that it interconnects. It's an organising idea. It's organic.”

The flipside are those businesses that do not perceive brand as an organic system that must be sustained – until it’s too late.

As Crum last week told a packed Cannes hall: “When you stop investing in brand, at some point that's going to bite you. It is a silent killer. And when you do that, it doesn't self-heal. You have to really change it around.”

Hence Marketers, CEOs, CFOs and board members should read Crum’s paper on the investment case for brand and creativity when it lands next month.

Hooking the CEO on brand

Tassal Chief Commercial Officer Matt Vince is also the firm’s Chief Risk Officer. He says the firm has kept its brand and marketing risk register despite being taken off the ASX when acquired by privately-owned Canadian company Cooke Inc. for $1.1bn in 2022.

“We’ve still maintained that discipline,” says Vince. The firm is actively building its brand – and it’s working, driving major growth despite price increases, with marketing’s contribution soaring 70 per cent off a flat budget. Vince said that is leading the parent company to take note of brand’s growth contribution.

“Cooke is the world's largest aquaculture business. However, they're not probably as into brand marketing as we are, so even their CFO has gone a bit of a journey at a global level around the value of the brand,” per Vince.

“We had our global CEO down to Tasmania a couple of weeks ago, and we showed him our Kantar data, our demand power score. We can sit here today and say we're the most powerful protein brand in Australia. We can talk about doubling ROI while maintaining a budget. He's very interested in that with a view of ‘what does that mean on a global scale?’ … And the opportunity for us from a marketing perspective is for Australia to start leading the way for the group.”

Vince agrees with Crum on the need to rebalance brand’s strategic-risk ratio at a corporate level: “Karen made a great point that the CFO will never come in and say, ‘Let's not invest in a factory’.” Likewise the factory and supply chain is directly connected to marketing – given product is one of the four Ps. Which means brand and supply chain are intrinsically linked – and in Tassal’s case biologically.

“Time and time again, every time there is a world crisis, the companies that continue to grow are the ones that invest in brand,” says Vince. “So we feel that we've got a value set. We've linked that to risk in the sense of how we view our total business.”

Making risk pay

Suncorp’s entire business is based on evaluating risk and making it pay – and Executive GM of Brand & Customer Experience, Mim Haysom, has convinced the insurer’s top management that investing in brand is a strategic growth pillar. Even when she has needed additional marketing budget to capture heightened demand – like the spike last year as cost of living pressures hit hard – it hasn’t come at the expense of brand investment.

It wasn’t always that way, Haysom told a separate Cannes session.

“When I arrived seven years ago, two weeks in there was a significant budget cut.” Determined not to be seen as running a cost centre, Haysom duly doubled down on data and analytics to show the results that marketing was driving in financial terms. “If I hadn’t done that, I would not have been able to get to where we are now. Brand equity metrics, yes, but also expressed in the commercial language of the business.”

Haysom is fully aligned with EY’s Crum. “Creativity is every businesses’ greatest growth lever and its greatest competitive advantage – and as our creative output has lifted, we have seen it play out. We have lifted consideration, preference, all of our metrics – and we have gone from number two in market share to number one. So as the CMO … you need to ensure that the organisation very clearly understands the importance of creativity.”

Hence the need to engage with boards, CFOs and CEOs “at a strategic level, not a conceptual level” says Haysom, and why “the CMO should be responsible for creative execution” to deliver on that strategy.

“So I don't bring the work into the room, ever. I bring the strategy and how we're going to drive growth through a strategy, and then it's my job to execute it creatively.”

Reframing required

Haysom agrees with EY's Crum on having to reframe the language of brand to a top management audience.

“It's marketing 101, but sometimes I think marketers aren't very good at it. If you are having a conversation with your CEO and CFO about the budget for the following year, you need to be able to use data and analytics to model scenarios and be able to talk them through the business impact investment in marketing is going to have on their bottom line, on unit growth, on market share, on profitability,” says Haysom.

But in terms of speaking business fluently, “As an industry, we probably need to do a bit of work on that.”

Cannes take-out: The work

Haysom is a Cannes two-timer, last attending in 2022 when Suncorp won a Grand Prix for One House. She’s added to that tally this year with a Silver Lion, but spent hours locked in a jury room as a Creative Data awards judge, crimping the time left to take in speaker sessions and tap the vibe on the Croisette.

From judging, Haysom’s take is that the best work “was all incredibly insight-driven”, with sharper insights powering “really big, bold, creative that has impact – whether business, brand or social impact, that is the work that won”.

Standout work for Haysom was the Creative Data Grand Prix winner, Consul Appliances.

“They are a Brazilian appliances company – what they found was that in Brazil people can't afford to buy appliances. Even though they might desperately need a new fridge, or a new washing machine, they can't afford it. One of the reasons they can't afford it is 30 per cent of their household income goes on electricity bills, and it's the old appliances that are sucking in a lot of the electricity usage, because they're not efficient,” says Haysom.

“So they came up with this brilliant way to use data to say, ‘Let's give you a new appliance. Let's track your old electricity bill to your new one, and from the difference – the savings on your electricity bill – you can use to pay off your appliance’.

“It was brilliant, because it completely disrupted the business model. It was a new way to finance a white goods purchase from the white goods company, and for the customers the impact was significant.”

Outside of that, Haysom rates Godaddy’s Creative B2B Grand Prix winner for Airo, starring Walton Goggins.

“It’s hilarious, brilliant – and that is one of the things that has come through strongly for me: Humour is back in a big way.”

Plus, of course, Telstra’s Grand Prix winner. “It’s great work,” per Haysom. “I am thrilled for Brent [Smart, Telstra CMO].”

A Cannes first-timer, Tassal’s Vince described the festival as: “One, overwhelming. Two, inspirational. Three, it's given me confidence that the same business challenges we're trying to solve, most other much larger global brands are trying to solve those same things.”

He’s also taking home some lessons from Nestlé’s top marketer Aude Gandon, who outlined how embedding a creative framework and benchmarking system throughout the organisation is driving growth gains.

“That's food for thought. We've got all the financial mix, we've got brand share, we've got some data [capability] … but actually do we have a creative measure? Not today, and maybe that's something we have to look at how that plays out.”

Cannes take-out: AI and influencer trends

Haysom said the tone around AI has this year shifted to it being “an enabler, not the idea itself”. Tassal’s Vince said he picked up the same vibe. “That’s a big theme coming out.”

Meanwhile, you could barely move in Cannes without bumping into an influencer, usually with a corporate dealmaker in tow.

“The impact that [influencers] are having on content and media consumption with our audiences is profound. You can’t shy away from it,” per Haysom. “If brands are thinking that it's a flash in the pan, they're greatly mistaken. I think if they're scared to lean into that because they lose control of the content that's created, they need to lean into that as well and start doing a bit of testing and learning, because this is not going away.”

Which brings a new risk for the brand register.

“Brands need to work out how it fits into their strategy, but also how they almost redesign their organisation to be agile enough and also risk accepting enough,” per Haysom, “because you've got publicly listed companies that don't like losing control of content.”

Tassal’s Vince acknowledges that risk – but is open-minded.

“I met Seal last night at a TikTok event. They were talking about his collaboration during the Super Bowl with Mountain Dew. He spoke about how it's got to be a collaborative process. So you’ve got to relinquish control and allow them to add value to an idea, not just tell them what to do. I think that is really fascinating – and TikTok has got some amazing things coming in their pipeline to really ramp that influencer content.”

Final word: Trust the fundamentals

Despite an AI undercurrent of fear and an influx of influencers, the message from top marketers, academics and consulting firms at Cannes was consistent: Go back to fundamentals on brand, embed brand at the heart of business, then execute with consistent creative excellence to drive outsized financial returns.

Mark Ritson landed that message most emphatically via 10 years worth of Effie data analysed by System1. In short: Do really good work, put enough money behind it, don’t change it; grow more. P&G CMO Marc Pritchard had a similar message, though Analytic Partners and Jellyfish challenged conventional wisdom on the need for minimum attention levels in a platform dominated world. They cited research suggesting lots of little attention blips can ladder up to the same large effect – and that because platforms demand fresh content or will otherwise crimp brand reach, that ad wear-out rules are effectively redundant on those platforms.

Suncorp’s Haysom said that is where strong, distinctive brand assets come into play. “So I think brands need to be leaning back into some of those basic fundamentals, because they're the same in these channels – you’ve just got to use them differently,” she says.

“That's why you've got to think about the whole brand ecosystem and all of the channels that are in your mix. Sometimes … because there'll be a new technology or a new way to use a particular channel, we get a bit obsessed with talking about that single channel. But no one builds brand and marketing plans like that – you look at the whole ecosystem, and that's how marketers need to think about it.”