Now that Cannes is behind us, it’s value reflecting on what that was all about and what, if something, we will be taught from it. Cannes Lions festivals usually blur into one however, coming off the again of a worldwide pandemic and upstaged by environmental protests, Cannes 2022 ought to stick within the reminiscence for some time. For many who need to hold the religion, and their sanity, on this business, listed below are 5 Cannes commandments. I’d have performed the complete ten commandments however too knackered and coughing like a Bronte heroine.

Steadiness the advantage signalling with motion

As Satisfaction Month shortly was a parade of manufacturers which have beforehand displayed little to little interest in LGBTQ+ rights, rainbow-washing their communications and merchandise, it’s clear advantage signalling isn’t going away. However what number of manufacturers are following up their messaging with precise assist or donations to the trigger?

Manufacturers who prefer to get by on performative activism have gotten to start out setting their sights larger. Take inspiration from the manufacturers that again up what they are saying, just like the winner of this 12 months’s Glass Lion (and the Inventive Information Grand Prix), WeCapital and DDB Mexico’s marketing campaign “Information Tienda”, which helps girls achieve entry to loans in Mexico, a rustic the place 83% of girls don’t have any credit score historical past.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuybgo3H6wQ

Let the small ones in

Cannes Lions ought to begin permitting younger start-ups and smaller firms to attend and enter the competition free of charge for his or her first few years or at a reduced charge. Cannes Lions is prohibitively costly for individuals who aren’t Mark Learn or Arthur Sadoun. A part of the business’s downside is that the dialog is all the time dominated by massive tech gamers or holding firms. Time to go the mic to somebody who doesn’t work for an enormous company.

Work with activists

Manufacturers desperately looking for their ‘objective’ will discover it quite a bit faster by being attentive to precise activists and funding and supporting their work. Greenpeace went to the lengths of getting on a hearth truck and scaling the venue of the most important advert occasion on the planet to ask promoting retailers to chop ties with the fossil gas business. In the meantime, the non-profit Creatives for Local weather launched an anti-greenwashing coaching program referred to as Greenwash Watch, to provide advertisers the instruments to push again on greenwashing of their work. Activists are greater than keen to work with manufacturers, they usually’re ready on your name.

Be extra Colleen
One of the crucial inspiring talks at Cannes this 12 months got here from Colleen DeCourcy, former president, and chief artistic officer of Wieden+Kennedy, who was awarded the Lion of St. Mark. A real trailblazer, she thanked each her supporters and her enemies, and reminded Cannes simply how a lot, as she put it, “girls actually matter” on this business. Life could be higher if extra folks channelled Colleen.

DEI – “They don’t need us to be Black, they need us to be current.”

is a quote from an attendee in a wonderful LinkedIn piece by Belinda J. Smith, founder and world CEO of The Second Arrow. Within the piece, Smith highlights the shortage of substance, curiosity and the nonetheless ‘otherness’ of Individuals of Colour at Cannes. She reveals the small audiences on the many DEI panels: “the identical 3-5 regulars at every.” Additional, she was gate checked, badge checked, credentials questioned at each single occasion whereas others weren’t – even refused entry to an occasion till somebody got here to substantiate she was the speaker.

Though there have been extra POC than in earlier years, many people on the events can have seen that POC had been collectively and never built-in into the white-dominated occasions.

Jane Austin is Founding father of Persuasion Communications.
{Photograph}: Bronac McNeill