The Lions Creator’s Beach hosted a session, ‘Stop advertising, start entertaining: crafting social content people actually want’ on day four of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. 

The speakers included Nick Gallo, founder and CEO, Loop; and Jennifer Richardi, head - brand and creative, DoorDash.

Opening with a stark assessment of the industry, Richardi noted, “Advertising is dead, people hate us. We are a collective of people here in the city right now who think, dream, live, and breathe ads. And I would imagine that 75% of people walking around these streets are paying a premium to avoid those, or at least skipping them every chance they get.”

“Ads by nature are meant to interrupt our lives, and we don't want to be interrupted anymore. Stop interrupting people's lives and start instead being native to it. Be a part of the conversations they're in and be a part of what is relevant to their niche world,” she said.

She argued that social media is the natural starting point because it is where culture is constantly being created and shaped. “Start on social media because culture lives and dies there. It is the biggest source of inspiration you could ever have. Go to social to understand your audience, what they like and what they don’t, what they are talking about, what they're doing and why they're doing it. While they are desperately avoiding ads, they are consuming content like never before," she explained.

Richardi highlighted that to break out of it, marketers need to rethink some of the industry’s principles. “For marketers, it is super important to unlearn the shit they know. I have learned that ads are meant to break through and interrupt. I don't know that that's true anyway. I need to unlearn what I've learned in order to collectively make content that people want to swim around in. Make content that they actually want to consume,  content that entertains and surprises them.”

Building on that point, Gallo argued that even the strongest creative ideas face the challenge of capturing attention. “Even with the stickiest of ideas that we know we love and we think will be great, there's still a giant challenge ahead for all of us. There's absolutely no attention left, even when you love it. There are people who are spending 12 hours a day on screens, and they don't even know what they're watching. Even if we do get their attention, we've got one or two seconds left before they start getting hit with notifications left and right. There's no attention left, and we are all truly fighting for it,” he shared. 

According to Gallo, the key to earning attention lies in disrupting established behaviours. “How do we fight for it and learn? We found that when you surprise people just right, you will break behaviour. That's really the name of the game. If you break behaviour, you're gonna earn the attention that you're setting out to get.”

He added that achieving this requires brands to embrace a degree of discomfort. “Whether you are playing it super safe or you lean fully into the unhinged, you still need to be comfortable getting uncomfortable. There's always gonna be a place of discomfort, even if you play it the safest. And that's how you keep pushing your brand on the journey to keep working towards the stuff that will break behaviour and earn attention,” said Gallo.

Adding to that, Richardi mentioned, “The discomfort zone is my happiest place to be. The challenge is actually how do you drive relevancy in a moment in which you are not naturally relevant at all? That's quite exciting. When you are able to shift what one perceives of your brand to be able to do in your everyday life and drive meaningful behaviour that fundamentally changes a very traditional retail moment.”