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CaptainPuffy, a Twitch creator and gamer (real name Cara), has some advice for brands: learn to hand over the reins.
“At a lot of brands, their marketing creative director is a 70-year-old man who doesn’t know how anything works,” she tells me on Tuesday at the Cannes Lions Festival, possibly striking fear in the heart of the PR rep seated beside her. “When I accept brand deals, I want creative freedom,” she explains. “If they give you a boring briefing or not natural verbiage, that’s not going to perform well. But you’re paying for it, and now no one’s going to be happy.”
Cara has been streaming since she was 13 and now counts 1.5 million followers on Twitch. She’s worked with beauty and fashion brands and claims to have a female-heavy audience, especially on her Instagram account. Her fandom is exactly the mix that brands are keen to tap today.
The dominant presence of athletes, creators and celebrities at this year’s festival reflects just how much the power balance has shifted. To tap new audiences, brands must first identify their obsessions, whether that be a sports team, a gamer or a ‘get ready with me’ TikToker-turned-podcaster.
“For brands, creators represent a direct-line into new and engaged audiences and a chance to ride the wave of our ever-evolving culture,” says Grace Kao, head of business marketing at Spotify, which featured influencers Robyn DelMonte of GirlBoss Town and Jake Shane on its stage at Spotify Beach.
This means forsaking control in favour of building trust — a concept that doesn’t come naturally to brands with images carefully crafted for decades or more. Tugce Aksoy is head of brand engagement for Magnum ice cream, which is owned by Unilever, this year’s Creative Marketing Award winner. When Magnum first partnered with Miley Cyrus on a campaign, the artist wanted full creative control. “I was scared — you want everything to be perfect,” Aksoy says. She knew it had paid off when fans lined up at music festival Lollapalooza to get their hands on a Miley-branded Magnum bar. “Now, we look for people who like the brand, who want to be involved in the creative direction and want to make it theirs. Tell us what you want to do.”
It’s not about being ‘authentic’, although that’s the word marketers may use — it's about recognising where your brand now fits within culture. People are overloaded with content and ads; when they find a person they truly enjoy following, they tend to fully attach to them. Show up in that person’s world, and you unlock a potential customer.
In a world where creators hold the keys to super fans, brands are obliged to come to terms with the idea that they’re not the main draw. In the creator economy, relevance relies on who recommends your products to the fans. This entry point will only become more important as Gen Z and Gen Alpha acquire more purchasing power.
Listen to CaptainPuffy: “My advice to brands is to make it fun. If the creator is engaged and looking forward to the brand deal, it’s good for everyone,” she says. “The creator knows their community best. If a creator believes in the product they can sell it to their community.”
Here's what else has been going on at Cannes Lions.
Award watch. The winners of the Luxury and Lifestyle Award will be announced on Friday, so stay tuned to see who takes home the gold. On Tuesday, Cannes Lions presented the bronze and silver awards for the category. Ebay’s partnership with Vogue on the “Twiggy Full Circle” campaign, which recreated an original ad featuring the icon from 1967 to promote Ebay’s vintage goods, took home a bronze award.
Creators on the Croisette. ‘Creators’ is now the catch-all word for anyone with a platform or a creative output who can make money on behalf of your brand. This includes athletes, celebrities and influencers. I heard one panellist call musicians the ultimate content creators. At this year’s Cannes Lions, creators were simply everywhere. Here’s a sample: TikTokers Tinx and Jake Shane, and musicians John Legend and Janelle Monáe at Spotify Beach; snowboarder Chloe Kim, NBA stars Carmelo Anthony and Sue Bird, and NFL player Joe Burrow at Sport Beach; and Paris Hilton DJing at Meta Beach.
The year sports took over Cannes. The lighting of the Olympic torch on the steps of the Palais in the middle of the festival was as fitting as it was disruptive to everyone’s Tuesday lunch meetings. The sports universe had a significant showing, with multiple people telling me that Stagwell’s Sport Beach was the highlight of the festival. It feels like a tipping of the scales: sports are going to go from big to huge as a force of culture, and the power of the individual athletes’ platforms has a lot to do with it.
Get into gaming. While metaverse chatter has been quiet this year, it’s not yet gone – consider how much gaming’s presence has grown. Brands have an opportunity. “There’s a human piece of it [that] I don’t think has been recognised by marketers. People find their people on Twitch,” says Sarah Iooss, head of US agency and Twitch at Amazon Ads. “Gaming is culture and I wanted to help bring brands along.”
AI in action…? I am still searching for any real evidence that this is the year AI went from idea to execution. That’s what multiple people told me has been the difference in conversation between this year and last. Please get in touch if you have AI projects and results to report.
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