LONDON – Strong businesses lead to strong creative and marketing strategies, and vice-versa. Simon Cook, the managing director of Cannes Lions, believes that companies who win awards at the festival are directly impacting the health of the brands they work for.
In a conversation with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions headquarters in London, Cook says that recipients of creative marketer of the year consistently worked for companies that were experiencing all-time high share prices at the time they won the award. “Winning a Lion translates to business success and that’s what the clients are telling us every year,” says Cook. “Brand marketers are coming to the festival every year, because they believe that creativity is a lever for driving growth.”
Cook says that Cannes Lions’ goal is to give marketers the tools to help accelerate that growth. One such tool is the CMO Growth Council, a joint venture between Cannes Lions and the ANA that started in 2018 to bring together 25 global CMOs in Cannes every year to discuss the barrier for growth in the industry; each CMO works throughout the year on a particular initiative, engaging local communities and hosting events around a specific cause. At Cannes 2020, these CMOs will meet again to reset the agenda, deliver main stage talks around their findings, and “hopefully democratize those learnings so everyone can benefit and get back to growth,” says Cook. Beet.TV interviewed several members of the CMO Growth Council earlier this month in Orlando. Listen to those interviews here.
Beyond the Growth Council, Cannes Lions is checking in on what can be updated, added or improved in order to continue reflecting the industry it’s in. Next year, the festival will introduce the Creative Business Transformation Lion, which recognizes a “new breed of work” that focuses on the reconfiguration of business models, and “ultimately will be recognizing anything that has a tangible business result,” says Cook.
“We need to reflect what’s going on in the industry,” he adds.
Here is the press release on plans for Cannes Lions 2020
