By Reuben Webb, Chief Creative Officer, Stein IAS
Earlier this year, LIONS, organizers of Cannes Lions, the International Festival of Creativity, announced the first-ever B2B Creative Lions category at this year’s festival, a significant coup for creativity in B2B. Having just about recovered from my first foray to the festival as both a member of the B2B creative community and a speaker, there are a number of lessons I took away from my time on the Côte d'Azur.
First and foremost, there was an undeniable golden thread among those brands and agencies that took home the spoils: delivering lasting change. Genuine change for the brand in question, its industry and the wider world – no small feat.
For example, the B2B Grand Prix winner, Sherwin-Williams and its agency Wunderman Thompson Minneapolis, changed the way architects specify colour with its AI app “Speaking in Color.” When I tried the app, I asked for “blue whale blue and tarantula black” and the app nailed it. A B2B Gold (and Grand Prix winner in the Creative Business Transformation category) went to Dole Sunshine and Ananas Anam for Piñatex. With Piñatex, Dole has created a sustainable, vegan alternative to leather made from discarded pineapple leaves grown by farmers in the Philippines. The campaign was a call to action aimed at the fashion industry to start using Piñatex as a more eco-friendly alternative with brands such as Nike already using it in its products.
That’s not advertising, that’s transforming business operations, driving sustainability and supporting local farmers using a waste by-product. And the by-product of that is amazing advertising – mind-blowing.
The debrief from the Entertainment Lions for Sports jury demonstrated the appetite Cannes has for change. A brilliant Gold went to Brazilian soft drink Guarana Antarctica for “Stuck in the 80’s,” a campaign that ultimately changed a law in Brazil to ensure women’s sports prizes were not stuck where men’s prizes were in the 80’s, but equal to men’s prizes today. Changing a law for equality’s sake: how’s that for changing something for the better? So, why didn’t Guarana Antarctica win the Grand Prix? Because, according to the jury, it didn’t create something that delivered change with permanent utility, like Nike’s Grand Prix-winning app, NikeSync by R/GA London, that provides a platform for athletes who have periods, allowing them to tailor their workouts to their menstrual cycles. The app educates people that at times during their periods, they are stronger not weaker, busting a myth that’s been with us for centuries.
So, the bar for change is high! But what exactly does it take to facilitate lasting change as a marketer or as a brand? If you want to hang with the brands that are celebrated and recognized at Cannes, you need commitment.
The “B2B Effectiveness Code,” an important paper published by LIONS, WARC and the B2B Institute @ LinkedIn, makes a strong case that creative commitment correlates to effectiveness, with marketers having three commitment ‘levers’ - spend, duration and number of media channels.
We think it goes beyond that. It’s about having a passion for and commitment to the creative craft. A commitment to change. A commitment to cracking substantial, complex challenges. A commitment to facilitating commercial ends while doing good. All of this is only possible with a commitment to developing and embedding a creative culture throughout your agency or organization.
Whether you’re an agency or brand, if you think somebody else is going to do this for you, you are sadly mistaken. This is a challenge for each and every one of us involved “in the work,” a challenge we need to meet together. If you’re an agency, this doesn’t simply mean your creatives. It means your strategy team, your account team, your media whizzes. Equally, it’s essential that brands own the commitment, challenging their agencies to join them on the journey to realize the significant opportunity the B2B creative effectiveness movement provides.
As I discussed on stage at Cannes, Stein IAS and WARC have launched a new paper detailing how B2B agencies and brands can achieve exactly that. “The Big Long Idea for Creative Effectiveness” paper details how the Big Long Idea (BLI) provides an actionable methodology to guide the development of creative ideas that deliver the greatest commercial impact. Full disclosure: this is not a three-minute read, it’s a whole hour’s worth of commitment. But, for the level of commitment all of us need to dedicate to creative effectiveness, it’s a commitment I’d urge you to make.
To read “The Big Long Idea for Creative Effectiveness in B2B,” visit: https://www.steinias.com/bli/.