Marketing, branding and luxury: The Cannes Lions debrief

The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity this week awarded its first-ever Luxury and Lifestyle Award. The winners of the top Grand Prix and Gold prizes were Loewe, for its collaborative campaign with Japanese ceramics studio Suna Fujita; and Lancôme, for its documentary on global ambassador and French artist Aya Nakamura, respectively. 

The awards signal just how much luxury has morphed in meaning and context. Luxury is culture, and culture is luxury. Context matters today in the world of branding, and even the most powerful brands must find new ways to show up and new people and partners to collaborate with in order to get in front of the right audiences. At this week’s festival, conversations outside of the Palais and up and down the Croisette revolved around this idea.

On Thursday, Hugo Boss CMO Nadia Kokni and women’s basketball player and rapper Flau’jae Johnson spoke about the intersection of fashion and sports, and why two massive industries with their own significant pull are coming together now. It comes down to fandoms, and the ability for athletes to build their own profiles on social media. “I’m a big brand, and I want to work with big brands,” says Johnson. With 2 million Instagram followers, she fits into the orbit of creators that are key to unlocking passionate followers and turning them into customers. 

Here’s what else happened at Cannes Lions this week.

The new creator playbook

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.

Discover the new playbook for luxury brands and creators.

Award watch

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

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.

Was AI in action…?

Vogue Business's Hilary Milnes is 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.

Elsewhere in the industry this week:

• Julie Bornstein raises $50 million for AI fashion search startup.

• In a surprise move, Alessandro Michele dropped his first collection for Valentino on the last day of Milan Fashion Week Men’s. Here's the industry's reaction.

• The latest direction in fragrance is focused on scents that act as emotional antidotes — and newcomer Noyz aims to take this to a new dimension.

• As performance among luxury companies becomes increasingly polarised, a winning strategy takes account of the full spectrum of consumers, a Bain report says.

• The fashion industry in Paris reacts with dismay to the forthcoming snap elections that could put the far right into power in France.

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