Revisiting Cannes One Month Later: Our Biggest Takeaways

The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity is the world’s largest festival championing creative communications and the advertising industry as a way to recognize the year’s best and biggest creative ideas, as well as celebrate yearly achievements and plan for the future of the industry. Brands, agencies, media companies and consultancies come together to learn, network, and celebrate.

Sharethrough was eager to attend this year's Lions after two years of missed festival opportunities due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Several Sharethrough employees traveled to Cannes to attend some of the conferences and awards, meet with clients & partners, network, and learn about the biggest stories and events taking place from June 20-24, 2022. Here are three of the biggest takeaways and themes from this year's Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, ranging from sustainability, to politics, and DEI. 

Sustainability, Sustainability, Sustainability

By far the most prominent in Cannes, our team felt that this year’s most prominent theme was sustainability. A major theme this year, and likely to continue as a hot topic for years to come, sustainability was the talk of the town. Sustainability is a topic that many brands are addressing in real-time, and working on figuring out how to make a difference, sustainability is something that several advertising exchanges are working on using to help make the internet a more efficient industry. This year there were at least a dozen sustainability topics on the programming agenda, which included the announcement regarding Ad Net Zero’s international rollout with corporations, agencies, and trade organizations to reduce the carbon impact of the advertising industry. Companies such as Scope3 are partnering with ad exchanges to offer consumers green media products, and a way to help offset carbon emissions. 

During the week of events at Cannes several partnerships were announced by companies around sustainability, similar to what Scope3 and Sharethrough did at the beginning of June 2022 with Green PMPs, part of the Green Media Products Initiative. There is now an increased interest from brands, agencies and ad tech companies to deliver net zero carbon emission campaigns. In June of 2022, Sharethrough launched Green PMPs in partnership with Scope3 as a way to offer media with net zero carbon emissions. “There's now more opportunity than ever to partner with companies to help reduce, not only your own business' carbon footprint, but the carbon footprint of the digital supply chain,” said Richard Ottoy, General Manager, EMEA at Sharethrough. 

Sharethrough’s own CMO, Benoit Skinazi had the opportunity to attend a CMO Growth Council centered around sustainability, where brands and leaders came together to take ideas and turn them into real actions. “Cannes became a place to strategize together on solutions of how to reduce our carbon footprint in advertising.” said Danielle Wachtler, Regional Vice President of Sales, East, at Sharethrough. 

Award categories reflected this increased drive towards sustainability, with 42% of the work entered for the Design Lions award focused towards solving environmental problems, and the additional implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals Lions awards for the recognition of environmental efforts among categories. 

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI)

It looks like brands are getting more and more serious about making DEI a major part of their company culture. While DEI has long been a topic at Cannes, this year there was an attitude of “don’t talk about it, be about it” which involved many companies implementing new DEI initiatives and practices. Several panels were set up featuring prominent speakers in the advertising world such as Chaka Sobhan, CCO at Leo Burnett London. Chaka’s panel was an inspiring one, focused on a new generation's expectations for brands to be more socially responsible and inclusive. 

Companies brought relevant DEI news and announcements to Cannes, as Google unveiled new inclusivity marketing playbooks, while other companies such as Delta Air Lines and Mindshare announced their partnership to tackle prejudice in digital marketing through the utilization of IBM’s Advertising Toolkit for AI Fairness 360. Similarly, at Sharethrough we have now teamed up with DEI awareness organization, CultureAlly, to offer inclusive awareness and unconscious bias training to our employees. It’s great to see so many organizations taking initiative when it comes to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Metaverse, VR & AR

Another hot topic making waves at Cannes 2022 was the metaverse, with events and themes centered around Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality. Wunderman Thompson and McCann Worldgroup created and hosted their own metaverse experiences for clients and guests, featuring a space where they could collaborate, network, and showcase their company’s work. McCann’s metaverse experience allowed users to take a walk through the company’s most memorable ad campaigns from the past year. Meta Beach (Meta’s central space) was offering walkthroughs and tutorials with its Oculus virtual reality headset in correspondence with a fireside chat diving into the best metaverse business strategies. The metaverse even allowed some who were unable to make it to Cannes, to join in on the festival activities from afar, sources told Digiday. The metaverse will continue to expand, and will surely be a popular topic next year, as more and more companies continue to experiment with and further explore the space. 

Despite an Uncertain Global Context, Cannes Lions Came Back Bigger Than Ever

“Prior to arriving in Cannes, I was expecting a smaller event than previous years, mainly because of the pandemic but also because of the global economic & geopolitical context. I was proven wrong, as Cannes was back bigger than ever before.” said Benoit Skinazi, CMO at Sharethrough.

Yachts galore, events 24/7, tons of panels with experts and professionals discussing all of the hot topics, the typical Cannes experience was right there to be had, plus much more! According to Richard Ottoy, General Manager, EMEA at Sharethrough, Cannes was much more business focused compared to past years, and involved a more meeting-dense schedule. “Everyone from the Sharethrough team who attended Cannes had a huge number of exciting discussions, keeping us busy day in and day out.” This aligns with the current economic climate that we’ve seen in recent months. Market research companies such as Insider Intelligence, reported seeing a 13.2% US Ad Spending year over year increase in 2022, and expect this trend to continue onward. With so much money going into advertising, it will come as no surprise to see Cannes continue to grow.

Additional takeaways and hot topics from this year's Cannes included: NFT’s, Netflix, conflict in Ukraine, and B2B marketing. 

There were many incredible takeaways from this year’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. We can’t wait to be back next year and see the progress made from the incredible partnerships, and collaborative ventures made from this year's festival. The Cannes Lions festival of creativity creates an atmosphere where brands increase activism, and take action and push companies to take tremendous action.