Cannes Lions. The International Festival of Creativity. Set in a scenic beach town in the south of France, tens of thousands flock to bask in their creative glory, soak up the Riviera sun and test the human capacity for rosé consumption. 2016 brought a record 43,000 entries, 13,000 delegates and the debut of the Entertainment talks and awards track. With hundreds of panel discussions to attend—covering everything from design to diversity to data—it can be tough to determine what’s relevant for your brand and what’s white noise. So in the spirit of clarity, we’ve identified four key trends that came out of Cannes Lions that provide opportunities and stimulus for designing brand experiences.

Sexual Evolution

Following the launch of 2015’s Glass Lions award, the topic of gender parity maintained center stage throughout the 2016 festivities. The task of effecting change is binary, beginning with how we attract and nurture female talent, to how we portray women in our creative output. 

The American Association of Advertising Agencies (or the 4A’s) hosted a powerhouse of female leaders: Tamara Ingram, CEO Worldwide, J Walter Thompson; Becky McOwen-Banks, Creative Director, FCB Inferno & Co-Founder of Creative Equals; Kate Stanners, Global CCO, Saatchi & Saatchi; and Lauren Connolly, EVP, Executive Creative Director, BBDO New York. Speaking of the gender disparity within agencies (particularly in the creative department), McOwen-Banks explained that in addition to historically being “bastions of male personalities,” it’s the one department that lacks a clear line of sight with little to no guidance on how to move up in one’s career. This state of affairs is what motivated her to co-found Creative Equals, an organization that offers executive leadership workshops (Unconscious Bias Training, Hacker Gender Diversity, to name a few) and resources for female employees on how they can help shape their employer’s diversity policies. While enacting new policies and programs to address existing disparity are reactive measures, all four women identified recruiting as an area where we can proactively shape our future. Stanners revealed that Saatchi & Saatchi put a young, female team in charge of creative recruitment, and the results were nothing short of transformative. Ingram recommends installing a policy in which submitted résumés don't reveal university or gender. “We don’t cast our net wide enough. Headhunters fish in the same pool. I’m interested in diversity, so I look in different communities.”

Perhaps the most notable champion of this cause is Cindy Gallop, whose site Make Love Not Porn celebrates sexuality and encourages open dialogue about sex between partners and in the way we communicate as advertisers. Speaking on brands, Gallop remarked that “Everything is sex for the male lens. We haven't begun to explore what we can do with sex through the female lens. Brands need to wake up ... [they] are failing to acknowledge this universal area of human experience.” Deutsch Los Angeles President Kim Getty stressed the responsibility and potential impact we have as marketers when it comes to gender bias. She highlighted the disparity between female representation in commercials and consumer purchasing power, noting that while women are three times more likely to lead the decision-making in a household, less than a third of acting roles and 17.5% of speaking roles went to women for commercials aired during Super Bowl 50—an event with largely gender-neutral viewership. As agencies, we have a tremendous opportunity to shift perception. “Let’s show men and women how they really appear. It is a shortcut to play into gender norms—the frazzled moms, the hapless dads—and those shortcuts are interfering without our ability to connect with the people we want to talk to. When you're writing a role for a women, assume she works. When you’re writing for a man, assume he knows how to change a diaper and make dinner.”

Underscoring the industry’s intent to address this topic, the week concluded with launch of Common Ground—an initiative between the top agency holding companies and the United Nations to tackle global issues—and Sir Martin Sorrell announcing that WPP (the network to which Brand Union belongs) would be focusing on gender diversity.

Innovate and Iterate

The proliferation of tech start-ups over the last decade has forced almost every established company to re-examine its business model to keep its competitive edge. Legacy brands and stagnating industries have made innovation part of their ethos, from talent acquisition and office design to accelerator programs and venture capital investing. John Boiler, Matt Jarvis and Glenn Cole—the “Three Amigos” behind Los Angeles-based ad agency 72andSunny—posited three simple ideas as the pillars for fostering innovation: mindset, space and timing. “There’s no guarantee that any mindset will lead you to innovation, but optimism will likely help ... see possibility in everything,” Cole asserted while showing a clip of Lloyd Christmas from Dumb & Dumber. Employing Winston Churchill's maxim “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” Boiler made the case for breaking down barriers (both literal and figurative) and designing your office to trigger creative collisions. He suggested that “grouping disciplines together allowed for rapid iteration ... that’s where you get new ideas.” Drawing parallels to surfing, Jarvis pointed out that as agencies, the perfect brief or the perfect client seldom exist, saying “You surf the wave you get. You rarely get the wave you want; you have to be opportunistic ... and use what you have.”

Nestlé’s Global Head of Digital & Social Media Pete Blackshaw described his own “innovation trifecta” that allows a 150-year-old Swiss conglomerate to innovate like a start-up: internal, external and open. In launching its Digital Acceleration Team, Nestlé created an in-house incubator for 18 high-potential leaders who spend eight months hacking their way to organizational transformation. The Silicon Valley Innovation Outpost places them among potential start-up partners who are tackling nutrition and food solutions, enhanced brand experiences and everywhere commerce. With the upcoming launch of Henri@Nestlé (named for the brand’s founder), Nestlé hopes to connect their expertise with outside innovation on a truly peer-to-peer platform. “We not want to merely catch up, but to be the leader in leveraging digital and e-commerce.”

The Future is Experience

A dominant theme appeared across all industries and areas of focus: the future of a brand’s success will be determined by experiences it creates. It’s not enough to simply plaster our messaging on billboards or television ads: consumers are demanding more brands in exchange for their loyalty. Brian Chesky, Co-Founder and CEO of Airbnb, stated “The American Dream had this romance around ownership, but we are losing our love of ownership ... Now, we now want access and are living in [an] experience-based economy.” When it comes to hospitality, it’s easy to see how one can experience the W Hotels brand because you’re guaranteed to have the same experience walking into any W Hotel around the world. But how do you create a brand experience when your brand is comprised of tens of millions of hosts, as with Airbnb? Following the unilateral success of Van Gogh BNB (launched as a partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago and Leo Burnett, and winner of three Gold and three Silver Lions), Airbnb announced the launch of Night At, a platform that will allow brands and agencies to create more projects like Van Gogh. “People want to have an intimate connection to a brand, and there is nothing more intimate than sleeping in someone’s home.”

The topic of virtual reality reigned supreme at Cannes as brands and marketers race to develop more immersive experiences. And lest anyone write this burgeoning technology off as a fad, Mike McGee, co-founder of VR production studio Framestore, reminded us that “Everything was seen as a fad when it started—YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, smartphones…” Google’s resident VR filmmaker Jessica Brillhart says “With VR, you don't read or see or watch [a story]; you’re in VR. If a story is unfolding, you’re a part of it.” Unlike traditional film, “You don't start or end in the same spot. It becomes a conversation, and you can unlock the entirety of the experiences.” AOL’s digital prophet David Shing echoes this notion, stating “The two and a half hours we watch in a movie is linear, it’s what the director has created. VR is lateral storytelling, and you become the director.” Shing sees tremendous potential in two extensions of virtual reality: 

Branding Basics

With every brand looking toward the future, it’s easy to forget the fundamentals of what we do as brand builders and marketers: make beautiful things that people want to buy. Design legend Stefan Sagmeister crafted his “Experience” session around five reasons why beauty matters. In claiming that beauty changes our mood, he cited a sentiment map created by the New England Complex Systems Institute that compared tweets from New York’s Grand Central Station to Penn Station, the results of which unwaveringly favor Grand Central. Referencing the Cannes Lions brand mark, “We are supposed to bring beauty to the world, and look at this shit. What the fuck is this?!”

SAFETY AND ADVENTURE

Discussing our desire to feel both secure and free in our relationships, Perel says, “It’s not a problem that you solve, it’s a paradox that you manage.” Ford conjures two brands that have been able to cater to human conflict. The Virgin brand services a vast range of needs, from banking to travel to exercise to health care. Lest we forget their disruptive roots, they launched Virgin Galactic, creating a new sector of tourism around suborbital space. Soho House transcends hospitality and encourages its members to travel the world knowing that they will have a home or community wherever they land.

TRUST AND BETRAYAL

Trust can take years to build in relationships, but can also be entirely undone by betrayal in a moment’s notice. The acknowledgment of wrongdoing and creative repair are essential steps in the road to post-betrayal redemption. Case in point: Volkswagen. Ford recommends that for the German automaker to regain market share and consumer trust, it must return to its core values that made it so successful in the first place.

TRANSPARENCY AND MYSTERY

Speaking of the age of information, Perel says “If you don't have transparency, you have control. But if you have excess transparency, you kill desire.” Ford cites Apple as the poster-child for the mysterious, as it employs a number of tactics—supreme secrecy, launch events, a closed system—to incite desire around the unknown.