Empower creativity with insights at Cannes Lions

It's hard to imagine a more significant festival for the creative industry than the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. This year it will be even more special because Insights will take the stage with its own program, thanks to Insights Lighthouse. 

While the creative industry seems more vibrant than ever—especially with the rise of digital -native generations disrupting traditional sales cycles and omnichannel —brands are grappling with an abundance of options. The challenge lies in crafting effective strategies amidst this diversity. Every brand manager dreams of excitement, creativity, freshness, and fun, often with user-generated content. However, in the end, it's the numbers that matter. It is the ROI on creatives that counts. 

Brands face numerous questions and challenges, all revolving around one core issue: How should they navigate this vast creative landscape, and how can they ensure their creatives are truly effective? 

To address these questions, we asked Joris De Bruyne (EyeSee) and Esteban Ribero (TikTok) four quick questions before they take the stage at Cannes on June 18th to discuss how to foster insights-driven TikTok creativity for brand success. 

How can insights not only foster creativity but also help brands navigate their investments and creative strategies? 

Esteban: As a Behavior Architect, I believe in the power of understanding something deeply to then create experiences that move people.

And once you have an open field with fresh perspectives, then you can also use research to build the creative structures that would bring ideas to life. Ideas that will resonate deeply because they are built on a solid understanding of what works and what doesn't, providing the context, the empathy, and the strategic direction needed to transform them into realities. 

Joris: Insights can, in fact open up new strategies and questions. Especially when it comes to behavioral research methods - we are constantly working to break previously established hypotheses, remove biases, and inspire a new way forward. 

What makes TikTok an interesting and distinctive platform for brand communication? 

Esteban: TikTok has become the leading destination for short-form video where entertainment drives discovery and action. The combination of TikTok’s immersive full screen and sound-on environment with the endless opportunities to create emotive and entertaining content makes it unique for brands to business in. The high-quality attention provided by TikTok creates a qualitatively different environment for the transfer of information and emotion in advertising.  

As consumers, we rarely change our judgment of a brand once one is made, and instead, we tend to look for confirmatory information in ads and brand touchpoints that reinforces our prior judgment. But when our attention is deeply engaged during an emotive experience, we do change how we feel about the brand, and this new brand affection becomes the next anchor point to filter future brand experiences. This creates a new reinforcing loop that has powerful and long-lasting effects. This may be the biggest contribution of TikTok to brand building.  

On top of this, TikTok’s ability to move people from discovery to action makes it a fantastic tool for performance as well as growth. The immersive skippable environment creates the right incentives for brands to build ads that people want to see, and so it tends to work disproportionately well, vs other channels, to bring net new customers to the brand that got interested in what the brand had to say. 

Joris: I can speak from the experience of our ad testing in replicated social media feeds. EyeSee has replicated feeds for all major social media platforms, and when testing ads on them, we clearly observe different user behaviors. Our recent global study revealed that 73% of TikTok users enjoy the ads, highlighting the platform's powerful ability to connect with its audience. Why is likeability important? We naturally gravitate towards and favor what evokes positive feelings in us; in other words, we tend to purchase what makes us feel good. 

What is the best way for brands to feel confident in their creatives and creative strategies? 

Esteban: Building a deep understanding of the audience, the environment, and how people process information in different channels is the key to sustained success. To do this, brands should embrace a test and learn mentality. The aim is to get validated learnings that enhance your mental models of how things work in a particular channel.  

To do this, create ads and content that people want to see, and then get them in front of consumers with curiosity and an open mind. The ultimate goal is not to improve a particular KPI or make sure the ad passes some thresholds, you can certainly do that, but you will always run into scale issues with the multitude of ads that brands are running nowadays .  

The ultimate goal is to depend on your understanding of what works and what doesn’t. That is building for scale. You can use real or simulated environments to test hypotheses as well as select or boost your most performing ads, but most importantly, and an often underappreciated goal, is to update your understanding of the system you are working on. Aim for deep understanding, so you start from a better place next time. That is sustainable confidence. 

Joris: Test your ads, and don't overlook the value of testing previous campaigns, even if they're no longer online. There are hidden gems of knowledge within these campaigns that can provide firm guidance on best practices. While simple analytics can reveal the basics, true understanding of creative effectiveness comes from thorough testing and align multiple stakeholders in the content creation process. Harness the lessons learned to enhance your future campaigns.

How can insights be a part of the process of making a creative strategy? 

Esteban: The first thing we need to recognize is that data is not a substitute for thinking. And second, is that insights happen in our heads not out there. What we call insights in our industry are mostly observations, and these are thinking tools, not hard truths. Having a dialog with these observations, and being open minded is key. Creative strategies are not made using recipes, they emerge with deep understanding, thinking and exploring. The data tells you something but your judgment is still important.

Insights will help you narrow the space of exploration and identify the creative areas that are more likely to lead to a successful creative strategy. Collecting insights at the beginning is as important as collecting them while developing the strategy. Start with what you know, make a bet and start creating, then put your thoughts to the test, update your understanding and iterate again.

For those of us who have worked on the creative side of the advertising business, you know that ads are not created in the linear way they are presented: "Here is the insight, here is the idea, here is how it will work to solve the challenge". They come from expert intuition, in an iterative process. So, use insights iteratively to enhance your intuition. Do it live on TikTok as you try with new ads you feel confident about, or do it in a simulated environment, when uncertain, to more purposefully test hypotheses. This is a mindset as much as a process. 

Joris: I must agree with Esteban. The research process has several points of resemblance to the creative one. They are not that different and can complement each other greatly. In areas where research and testing to gather insights require out-of-the-box thinking, having a creative strategy in mind can be highly inspiring. It works both ways—when a creative strategy needs guidance and a spark of inspiration, insights are there to provide it. Of course, insights ensure your investments are directed correctly, but they also inspire the exploration of new strategies moving forward. 

Eager for more? Join us on June 18th to hear Joris De Bruyne and Esteban Ribero share findings from our global TikTok study, "Creative that Works," which analyzed 60 ads from 20 brands.