Sarah Tilley

The last rosé has been drunk, Elon has vacated the building and advertisers from around the world have had their final walk down the Boulevard de la Croisette. C’est fini for the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity 2024. But rather than rehash who won which award and which speaker had the most insightful (or not) things to say, we are going to share with you the 5 ways that the Challenger Mindset showed up at Cannes this year.

1. Challengers recognise that playing by incumbent category rules is the real risk to their business

This year, brands from McDonald’s to the Sydney Opera House rejected the notion that playing it safe was a good tactic. Speaking at the ‘Convince Your C-Suite: The Real Impact of Creativity’ session, Ian Borden, McDonald’s Executive Vice-President and CFO, said, “My view is you've got to take risks, to deliver the best creative outcomes for the organization…I think it can be tempting, in more challenging external environments to kind of go, ‘Oh, well, you know, we're gonna peel back on risk’…And I actually believe it's the opposite of what we need to be doing. We need to be really empowering our partners and our marketing teams to drive great creativity, because that's what distinguishes our brand and business from the others in this space.”

Coca-Cola also took a risk this year when they highlighted all the ways that people unofficially represent their brand and put their own spin on it. While protecting brand assets and IP is traditionally paramount, Coca-Cola embraced the rebrands in ‘Thanks for Coke-Creating’ partnering with local creators, shop owners and sellers to amplify their designs through products and adverts.  

2. Challengers embrace constraints and see them as the fuel for their creativity

In the talk, ‘From Inspiration to Manifestation: Behind the Scenes with 'Poor Things'’, James Price, Production Designer of the Oscar-Winning 'Poor Things', spoke about his need for constraints, “One of the things I really like about design is that blank paper thing where you've got a blank paper, so do something. You need constraints. Or at least I do.”

Demonstrating the power of constraints and winning a Grand Prix in the process, ‘The Square Meter’ from German DIY store Hornbach and Heimat/TBWA, was filmed in a series of tiny rooms to show that the size of your space shouldn’t impact the size of your dreams. The 60-second film aptly ends with the line “Every square metre deserves to be the best in the world.”

3. Challengers inject new emotions into their categories

This year humour was definitely on the menu and brands that sit in normally dry or even emotion-driven categories broke free from the sea of sameness to show off their funny bone. It’s no surprise then that CeraVe’s ‘Michael CeraVe’ campaign, in which the actor claimed to be the brains behind the product, won big this year. In a category filled with the standard trope of a woman splashing water on her face, this was a refreshing take on skincare advertising which ultimately brought the brand’s point home that certified and highly-trained dermatologists were the real developers.

 Dramamine, a motion sickness medicine, rejected the OTC medicine category norms to develop a tongue-in-cheek 14-minute documentary ode to barf bags which the brand claims to have made obsolete. ‘The Last Barf Bag: A Tribute to a Cultural Icon’ included interviews with barf bag collectors, flight attendants and doctors all paying tribute to this now apparently defunct product.

4. Challengers aren’t constrained to their category when picking a fight

While the classic challenger example is Pepsi vs. Coke, these days brands with a challenger mindset go beyond their category to find someone or something to fight against.

German stationary manufacturer Faber-Castell along with Ogilvy chose to go after the Apple iPhone in their award-winning outdoor campaign ‘Shot on Faber-Castell’. À la Apple’s ‘Shot on an iPhone’ campaign, Faber-Castell’s billboards showed incredible works of art created using only their coloured pencils.

5. Challengers use Can-If thinking to tackle their outsized ambitions

When facing a tricky brief, filled with a lot of ‘You can’t do that because…’ many incumbent companies would just stop there and go no further. Challenger brands however reject ‘We can’t’ in favour of ‘We can do x, if we do y’ in order to achieve their goals.

Oatly showed off their Can-If thinking at this year’s Cannes with their campaign ‘Rue Des Archives’ outdoor work. With legal constraints around branded murals in Paris forbidding the use of products or logos, Oatly figured out that they could put up their advertisements if they used strategically placed (and branded) objects in front of the murals which seen from the right angle would form a complete picture. So while the mural might say, “This piece of art is here to tell you we know that ads are not appreciated here” once the artwork covered van was in front, it would read “This piece of art is here to tell you we are here!” with a picture of an Oatly carton.    

Challenger thinking was alive and well at this year’s Cannes Lion Festival and these are just a few examples of how it showed up. While being awarded a Lion is an achievement for any brand, the ones that will truly be successful in the long run challenge themselves to take risks, break free from the norm and make their categories more exciting, because in this day and age, no one can afford to bore their audience.  

If you’d like to know more about how eatbigfish can help you tackle your strategic challenge with a challenger mindset, get in touch at www.eatbigfish.com – we’d love to hear from you.