Tinuiti @ Cannes Lions Interactive Festival of Creativity 2024
Tinuiti hit the ground and stages at the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the world’s most prestigious advertising awards and the largest gathering of our industry. We brought back the creative trends in marketing and innovation discussing everything from AI and measurement, to using empathy to build customer-centric strategies and cultures. Read on for some of the top insights and trends from this year’s event.
The Top Trends Shaping B2B Marketing
Tinuiti CMO Dalton Dorné joined the LinkedIn Collective to discuss what the future of B2B marketing looks like, including the impact of AI on personalization, how creativity and brand building is more important for B2B marketers than ever, and why measurement is critical for marketers.
“Measurement is something we’re really focused on right now with our clients. Being able to adjust your measurement strategy is going to be really critical…not just for validating what you’ve done in the past, but informing what is your next best move and what is your next best dollar to invest.”
– Dalton Dorné, Chief Marketing Officer at Tinuiti
Check out more of our Big Bets for CMOs and B2B marketers here.
The AI Double-Edged Sword
AI was unsurprisingly one of the biggest topics of conversation at Cannes this year. Artificial Intelligence is opening up a world of opportunities for consumers and brands alike as new platforms and tools come online every day.
“Creators have embraced AI tools and avatars, seeing them as a tool to make them more productive rather than a threat or substitute. However, they’ve expressed concern that their clients will think they can make 1000x as much content for the same or an even lower price.”
– Sean Odlum, Chief Product Officer at Tinuiti
“The biggest shift in the past year is that AI is being embraced as not just the enablement of efficiency but a part of the creative process. From examples using Gemini to create vastly differentiated creative experiences to how TikTok creators are leveraging TikTok Symphony AI options to expand their content creation, we’re moving from what felt like skepticism in 2023 to embracing and accelerating in 2024.”
– Dalton Dorné, Chief Marketing Officer at Tinuiti
Brands are already exploring the possibilities of generative AI, but marketers should take care to understand consumer comfort with the technology and its uses. To explore how consumers view the use of generative AI and what it means for marketers, Tinuiti surveyed over 1,000 US adults in June 2024. We discuss which AI platforms are the most popular, whether consumers think generative AI is being deployed too often by brands, and what the integration of AI-generated results into search engine results pages means for the user experience.
The report found that while many consumers don’t believe they can detect AI, brands using AI to create imagery still need to be careful, as 25% of respondents said that they would be less likely to purchase from brands using AI to produce images, video, or text in advertisements. This is nearly double the 13% who said AI use would make them more likely to purchase from a brand using AI.
Using Empathy to Create Customer-Centric Strategies
In a panel discussion with The Female Quotient, Tinuiti CMO Dalton Dorné shared some thoughts on how to incorporate empathy when analyzing customer data in order to balance the quantitative with the qualitative.
After conducting a consumer study with TIAA that looked at retirement trends in the U.S. to determine if working Americans are able and ready to retire. The study found that 40% of working Americans are not going to have enough to retire. And 50% of this group do not trust banks and financial institutions to develop a relationship enough to take the steps to actually get retirement-ready.
This consumer study led to the groundbreaking “Retire Inequality” campaign to raise awareness of the retirement savings gap facing underserved communities. By educating and inspiring savers, TIAA aimed to right this inequity and help people retire securely and successfully – delivering on its brand promise to close the retirement gap.
“This is a great example of how to marry the quantitative and the qualitative. You’ve got to take the personal storytelling, mixed with the hard data to put you in the right direction.”
– Dalton Dorné, Chief Marketing Officer at Tinuiti
TIAA saw an 8 point increase in overall brand recommendation since the launch of the campaign, as well as a 4 point life in unaided brand awareness. Check out the full TIAA #RetireInequality case study.
The Future of Connected TV
One of the hottest conversations at Cannes this year was the remarkable surge the Connected TV landscape is experiencing right now. Advertisers flagged challenges around the existence of “walled gardens,” which hinder transparency and control.
Tinuiti Chief Product Officer Sean Odlum joined Microsoft to explore some of the pivotal solutions that the industry must embrace to dismantle barriers and foster transparency in order to pave the way for a more effective and impactful CTV advertising landscape.
“CTV is absolutely a performance channel, not just a brand channel. It lends itself to high-precision measurement that inevitably leads to rigorous optimization, making it a performance channel.”
– Sean Odlum, Chief Product Officer at Tinuiti
However, Sean cautions against treating CTV as a traditional performance medium like search. “CTV uses the storytelling power of video to support discovery. Measuring upper funnel outcomes like awareness or search activity can be crucial.” Learn more about how Tinuiti worked with Brooks Brothers to utilize OTT Streaming to increase brand awareness, engagement, and conversions among a new audience here.
