As the Cannes Lions Roar
Give or take, some 15,000 marketing folk from around the world are packing their bags for the 70th annual sojourn to the shores of the Riviera, and the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. It’s like the Oscars for advertising but in linen instead of black tie.
In advance of this, I sat with the Festival’s CEO, Simon Cook, whose vantage of the global creative community and its output gives him unique perspective into the state of (marketing) creativity today.
Our conversation covered a lot of ground, as Cook talked about the changes from the Festival’s beginnings in 1954, when it was The International Advertising Film Festival, to its evolution to this its 70th anniversary year. From the time the first Lion was awarded in 1954, it would be another 38 years, and not until 1992, that there was any change in or expansion to the awards categories. Worth noting is that less may have changed in that 38-year span than has changed in just the past few months.
Among the topics I personally found most interesting was the part of our conversation that considered how the ever-expanding mix of Lions , in Cook’s words, “reflect and catalogue enduring changes to the industry.”
While it took 38 years from the the Festival’s origins for a new Lion to be awarded, the past 4 years alone, including the creation this year of a Creative Gaming Lions category, have seen additions of the Creative Business Transformation Lions in 2020, the Creative Commerce Lions in 2021, and, last year, the introduction of the Creative Business to Business Lions.
As something of a mirror on the evolution of the marketing landscape generally and applied creativity specifically, in the Lions, we see the influence media and channel proliferation, the fragmentation of attention, the expansion/explosion of data and tech inputs, the evolution of business-to-business (B2B) marketing, the shifting importance of “purpose,” and as he shared, “the acceleration of experience, commerce and business transformation.” All of which have served as cause and effect of the Festival’s evolution in turn.
Here’s our conversation—and here’s to the continued evolution of creativity and creative. May a chilled glass of Rosé always be within arm’s reach of your desire.
