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Commerce Isn’t Just Transactions—It’s Creativity and Innovation, Too

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2022 saw a big and welcomed change: the launch of the Creative Commerce Award to honor innovative commerce approaches. With weighting of 30% idea, 20% strategy, 20% execution and 30% results, the new category of Lions addresses a renewed industry-wide focus on measuring true creative effectiveness.

This renewal goes beyond brand memorability to understanding how marketing campaigns are changing the behaviors of customers and ultimately driving true marketing ROI.

David Ogilvy said, “We sell or else” to describe the purpose of marketing. In essence, this Cannes Lions category has engrained real-world activation and commercial success at the heart of its judging criteria. The “selling” has become an integral part of judging the creative.

With Cannes Lions behind us for another year, it’s important for brands and their marketing partners to take stock and reflect on how creative commerce thinking will have an impact on planning and identify some foundational principles to help deliver this.

Focus on integrated objectives

The very best creative commerce campaigns are almost always grounded in integrated objectives that balance the creative vs. the commerce. Considering the holistic consumer, shopper, retail and commercial objectives at the strategy stage is the beginning of a more holistic campaign ideation and better performance measurement. Brands need agencies and marketing partners who understand this and can deliver.

Lead with data and insights

The very best campaigns on show at Cannes Lions 2022 were data and insight led. Building data-first thinking into creative campaigns has often been taboo to agencies but creative commerce demands a fundamental rethink. “Data-tivity” or the ability to analyze and interpret data at-scale across media, social, consumer and retail activation data as a foundation to creativity, is today’s great brand and agency differentiator.

Rethink the shaping of the customer journey

Creative commerce is grounded in “New Retail” thinking. This is a Jack Ma, Alibaba-inspired retail mindset that breaks siloed marketing planning to motivate brands to think of the end-to-end customer journeys where ideas are brought to life across multi-connected omnichannel moments.

The world of creative commerce recognizes that shoppers can move seamlessly between media and retail channels. This is a world where in-store conversion may have been inspired by online product experience, and likewise, where an ecommerce product purchase may have been driven by a brick-and-mortar store experience. Managing, inspiring and shaping the brand experience across a customer journey is a fundamental creative commerce capability that needs to be equally embraced by clients and agencies.

This thinking changes the way we plan together. When marketers are forced to think about creative ideas in the context of an end-to-end journey, it also forces them to create solutions that work across media and online and offline retail channels. This type of planning simply cannot be done within the old marketing and sales siloes. Brands and agencies that adopt a more holistic way of planning will be better positioned to meet customers’ needs.

Lean into commerce with a purpose

While the emergence of creative commerce at Cannes Lions brought a welcomed focus on the importance of marketing execution and results, the parallel theme of “commerce with a purpose” is equally important. 

Many of the Creative Commerce Grand Prix and gold Lion award winners’ ideas were deeply rooted in purpose which reiterated the power of delivering good commercial results while doing good. Purpose marketing is, at its heart, also commercial marketing. A study by Deloitte showed companies that are driven by purpose tend to grow faster. This theme will become more and more central to creative commerce.

At its core, creative commerce is about consistently bringing brilliant creativity together with real-world execution and measurability. It’s an old idea that has found its time again with brands and their marketing partners, although David Ogilvy might describe today’s call to action as, “We sell creatively or else.”