A Cannesdid Conversation: Part Three.
Like a decadent croquembouche that arrives just as you’ve begun to digest your bouillabaisse, the third and final instalment of A Cannesdid Conversation is here.
Today you’ll find the boys lounging poolside. And, because Andrew and Neil like to keep you on your toes, they’ve finally decided to cover up theirs. But that won’t stop them from exposing the real insights from Cannes Lions 2024, some of which include:
The stand-out earned media campaigns.
How to effectively take the piss out of Macca’s.
Ed Sheeran and Adele unwittingly making Kraft Heinz great again.
Micro decisions, micro transactions and micro engagements.
The folly of naming a child after a magazine.
What we can all learn from a company that makes heartburn medication.
Check it out below.
But before you do, we’d like to thank you for your time and interest in this three-part COMMPRESS spin-off. Next month we go back to regularly scheduled newsletters, the ones that break down the most important conversations in culture, business and current affairs to get to the heart of our favourite question:
“What sparks a smarter conversation?”
Lastly, we turn our head to Andrew’s favourite picks from Cannes, which comes from the lens of someone who did the Brand Marketers Academy. A reminder that these are the ideas that lean into earned media to spark smarter conversations and drive unbelievable results, and prove why PR and corporate comms professionals deserve to be taken seriously when it comes to creative:
Facebook – Yes, Couch!
This is the one for me.
It’s got it all: it’s rooted in earned media, it requires next to no budget (despite being from a business with, arguably, a bit of money to throw around), it manages to be both intensively culturally relevant and actually relevant to the product it’s advertising, and it was turned around FAST. Not to mention it’s bloody funny.
Jeremy Allen White in a pair of underpants was unavoidable at one point of 2024, and Facebook – much like water – took the path of least resistance in channeling that hype to their own cause. A deeply intelligent person clocked that this is precisely the sort of vaguely tasteful, possibly crusty couch you’d expect to find on Marketplace and pick up in Newtown and what did they do? Get the real thing and give it away for free. That means authenticity with literally zero barrier to entry for customers. Talk about giving the people what they want.
All it takes to pull off something like this is empowering your team to lean into culture where it’s relevant and, provided you already have reasonable boundaries in place, empower them to act without the bureaucracy of approvals. Speed is key: this whole thing was turned around in 48 hours.
The kicker here is that they made sure the couch was the real thing. I’d kill to know how much Facebook paid for it. My guess is 50 bucks.
Michael CeraVe
You’ve already seen it. You love it.
I won’t labour the point for too long.
No, not everyone can afford a Super Bowl slot and a Michael Cera endorsement but there are principles any brand can adopt. Namely, that weird works. By setting Michael Cera on unsuspecting pharmacies to sign bottles of CeraVe without an explanation, the brand activated George Loewenstein’s curiosity gap theory: when you highlight to an audience that there is a gap in their knowledge, they are compelled to learn more. Rather than provide any context as to what the hell was going on, they allowed the weirdness to roll for weeks, setting chat boards across the internet on fire.
Then they took it a step further by playing a classic rule of storytelling: you have to fulfil your promises. As an author, every time you put a hook in your story you create a social contract to give that hook a resolution. It’s what keeps a story moving. Rather than leave things a mystery, CeraVe made sure to reward the speculation with a spectacular payoff: a hilarious Super Bowl campaign that authentically stuck to the weirdness by commissioning Tim and Eric to direct. It’s peak fan service, which is the sort of thing Anime does exceptionally well, but to be honest that’s a totally irrelevant point to make here.
While I don’t truly believe the campaign helped land the message that CeraVe is developed by dermatologists, as they claim above, I absolutely whisper “All. Day. Hydration.” every morning when I wash my face. It’s like Michael’s right there in the shower with me.
Then there’s this.