Insights from the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 

By Joanna Stringer   

And so we have wrapped up our week at Cannes, our second time as an official sponsor. With more than 30 delegates from BCG attending, we covered and contributed to a very broad spectrum of the conversations both on the Croisette and around the Palais.

For those who were not able to attend, or who experienced only a slice of the program, here are our thoughts on the biggest takeaways.

Brands are back—and they’re driving growth.

Both the nature of the conversation and the mix of attendees gathered on the Croisette highlighted a shift back to brands this year. The importance of stressing the longer-term trajectory and on building future value through present-day emotional connectivity were threads that cropped up again and again.

It was encouraging to hear so much focus on growth, with brands clearly the driving force. There was notably less overt focus on sustainability and purpose, with both now clearly assumed as key fundamentals in any brand or innovation strategy.

But the question of performance is also shifting, with a recognition that brands now play in a world where precision and personalization are crucial. CMOs are asking themselves how to bring big data to their brands, how to build emotional connectivity most efficiently at scale, and which creative metrics to use to predict performance.

Creativity remains key to marketing culture.

Data, digital, optimization, and efficiency were the buzzwords that ruled the road for a number of years, but 2024 saw the energy recenter on the critical contribution that creativity plays—reemphasizing the importance of getting the balance right between left and right brain.

There were conversations about the many ways companies are using AI to drive creative acceleration, the here-to-stay role of creators and community-generated content (with some brands planning to produce more than 60% of their content this way), the metrics that are best deployed to assess and predict the impact of engagement, and more.

Whichever way you looked at it, it was refreshing and reassuring to see the Festival of Creativity once again place creative rightfully back at the top of the marketing leaderboard. 

AI will win with adoption and integration.

Last year, Cannes buzzed with talk about the potential that AI would unlock. This year, we celebrated and compared both successes and failures as well as learnings taken.

The more obvious use cases of efficiency, productivity, and automation (content creation, social media engagement, ad copywriting) have led the way in most businesses, but many we spoke to concurred that it will be deployment in innovation and growth (insight generation, personalization, customer experience) that will be the greater game changers.

Across every example, however, there was a common theme: an acknowledgment of the challenge we now face in delivering this value potential at scale—to move from pilot and proof of concept to integrated, adopted, organizational change. There is also the challenge of blending the AI that employees bring in from the bottom up (BYOAI) with the AI that organizations introduce from the top.

And so the real challenge with AI is becoming clearer: it’s not a technological sprint but a human marathon, with change management at its heart.

The role and influence of the CMO continues to expand.

Four things became clear this week about the evolving role of the CMO:

1. As the marketing function takes on ever more responsibility for the growth agenda, a networked CMO function is critical, with CMOs themselves needing to play a central role in championing connectivity with finance, technology, and operations.
2. CMOs are leading the way on AI, with 60% driving the AI agenda within their companies, according to a recent survey by BCG and the Association of National Advertisers.
3. Despite the increasingly critical role of technology, human leadership qualities still define the top CMOs; how they lead and inspire change will most likely divide the good from great in the year ahead.
4.  Given the above three shifts, CMOs are growing in influence both within the executive team and with the board. The number of CMO candidates for CEO roles is likely to increase in the year ahead; for this to happen, CMOs need to draw on the other themes outlined above to credibly demonstrate not just business acumen but their ability to design and deliver growth strategies that align to business metrics.

There is so much more to cover than the four key themes above: the rising role of retail media, how to empower personalization, the next frontier of modern measurement and marketing effectiveness…the list goes on, and we’ll be sharing deep dives on these topics in the days and weeks ahead.

But as we packed our cabana and savored the sand between our toes for the last time, we reminisced on all we had learned as a team from the hundreds of conversations we’d had. We talked about the shifting sands of marketing as a function, but there was also much personal reflection: where and how we focus our own energies, and how we support our own personal growth.

 It’s a genuine privilege to be a part of this community, and I leave more inspired and thoughtful about the role we can and should each play in the continued evolution of our function in the year ahead.

More of our top reads for CMOs: 

• BCG at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 
• How CMOs are Shaping Their GenAI Future 
• Mindshare Matters. How Marketers Can Measure It. 
• How Retail Media Can Top the CMO Agenda 
• The Pragmatist’s Guide to GenAI in E-Commerce