The World Advertising Research Centre (WARC), a global authority on marketing effectiveness, has unveiled its report on Creative Impact, a content stream at Cannes Lions 2024. The report, co-curated by WARC and Cannes Lions, is now in its second year and featured 31 sessions across five days of the Festival. It spotlights the role of creativity in building resilient brands and delivering commercial results.

Chief Content and Customer Officer, WARC, David Tiltman, said: “At Cannes Lions last year, Professor Scott Galloway claimed that “the era of brand is over”. We set out to prove him wrong. Our goal was to develop a 21st-century case for brand-building, with effectiveness at its heart.

“What we found was that the power of a strong brand endures - and that is as true for emerging tech companies as it is for legacy consumer goods companies. But we are still learning about how best to build them in a rapidly changing media and consumer landscape.”

Key takeaways from the report include the 21st-century case for brand-building, the crisis of distinctiveness, the importance of starting with the customer, and the role of commerce in the future of media.

On 21st-century brand building, Laura Jones, CMO of Instacart, advocated for merging performance and brand budgets, and unifying the approach to metrics for digital startups. Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, CMO of Doordash, emphasised the importance of brand investment for digital brands that act as platforms or intermediaries.

Karen Crum, Partner and EMEIA Brand Strategy Leader at EY, called for better clarity on the definition of brand and argued for brand-building based on precedent rather than persuasion. She said: "Persuading people is hard. Showing them precedent is easier. A fresh focus on pricing as the outcome of brand-building is helping to make this case".

Dr Grace Kite, founder of Magic Numbers, suggested a fresh focus on pricing as the outcome of brand-building.

On the crisis of distinctiveness, analysis by IPSOS and JKR found that 65% of brand assets have weak to no associations with the brands that pay for them. Karen Nelson-Field, Founder and CEO of Amplified Intelligence, highlighted that "85% of ads do not meet the attention memory threshold of 2.5 seconds. Anything below that threshold will not drive salience and is essentially wasted spend, resulting in more ads getting misattributed to competitors."

Research from System1 found that 50% of UK ads underperform a video of a cow chewing grass, and System 1 research with eatbigfish and consultant Peter Field, found that for “dull” ads to elicit the same market share growth as more emotional or interesting advertising, brands would have to spend an additional $228 billion in the US or £10m in the UK.

On starting with the customer, Mark Ritson, Founder of Mini MBA, argued that marketers have lost sight of the customer and need to refocus on understanding the consumer. Yael Cesarkas, SVP, Executive Strategy Director at R/GA San Francisco, stated that crucial consumer insights exist between the gap of the customer’s aspiration and their reality.

Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg, co-founders of Evidenza, claim that synthetic data opens access to cheaper, faster research, and even deeper insights about target audiences. They stated, "synthetic data opens access to cheaper, faster research, even deeper insights about target audiences through digital twins of audiences in B2B and B2C."

And finally, on commerce media, WARC's forecasts suggest retail media will grow 13.7% year-on-year globally to US$153.3 billion. And there was a growing presence oof 'commerce media' owners - those who operate beyond conventional retail environments (like Uber, Chase and United Airlines) - in Cannes this year.

The arrival of commerce media blurs the boundary between brand and performance, but Colgate Palmolive’s North America CMO, Diana Haussling, said the firm had striven to break down silos and 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, Walmart, explained how their fully shoppable campaign ‘RomCommerce’ was designed to be watched in two-minute segments on TikTok, displaying more than 300 products available to click and buy in the content.