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3 Quick Things from Cannes LIONS 2023 Making the World a Better Place

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Bonjour! We were at Cannes LIONS, hitting the Palais, fringe stages, and SPORT BEACH to bring you fresh insights every day of the festival. Today in 3 Quick Things: Brands and agencies at Cannes LIONS get creative trying to make the world a better place. (Miss anything at Cannes? Catch up on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.)

IT CAN BE PROFITABLE BEING GREEN Is carbon-free advertising a possibility? Felipe Thomaz, deputy director of the Oxford Future of Marketing Initiative, thinks so. At his Ad Net Zero panel in the Palais, he claimed as clients start factoring in carbon as an operating cost, agencies will follow. “Once I win your business away from you by being greener … you will be under tremendous pressure to match me.” SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS: GALE becomes largest agency to cut ties with fossil fuels
WOMEN DESERVE BETTER Companies can’t “just pink it and shrink it,” said Wilson Brand’s Amanda Lamb at SPORT BEACH. In the same panel, Olympic champion Allyson Felix said she started her shoe company, Saysh, because other women’s sneakers were built on molds of men’s feet. The message: Brands can’t just pander to women, they have to meet their specific needs in products and marketing. Hopefully, more women in top marketing positions will help. At The Female Quotient’s Equality Lounge, Kory Marchisotto, Chief Marketing Officer at e.l.f. Beauty, shared a stat: Women now make up a majority of CMOs for companies in AdAge’s list of top 100 advertisers. WATCH: Building for the Female Athlete
MORE AI, MORE PROBLEMS? Forget the robot apocalypse. Will AI lead to rampant copyright abuse? Lost jobs? Boring content? Those were the big questions on the Croisette. Two big takeaways from Cannes LIONS: 1) AI tools that create video and images will need to be trained on copyright-free material to be useful for (responsible) agencies. 2)
Relying solely on generative AI for creative tasks is a bad idea. As Google’s Robert Wong said at the Palais, “You always need someone with taste to choose the best line. AI does not have taste.” DIVE DEEPER: Embracing Generative AI: A Responsible Approach

Beyond the Stage

Stagwell talked to C-suite marketers, sports luminaries, and other innovators at SPORT BEACH and the Palais. You’ll find fresh, insightful videos on our YouTube page from every day of Cannes LIONS.

On the sand at SPORT BEACH, Anton Vincent, President, Mars Wrigley, North America, talked to the NFL’s Mack Hollins and Damaune Journey, Global Chief Growth Officer, 72andSunny, about treating business like sports, sustainable growth, and the importance of the Black Executive CMO Alliance (BECA).