← Behind the Numbers: an EMARKETER Podcast
Behind the Numbers: an EMARKETER Podcast
Cannes 2026: What Everyone Is Talking About | Behind the Numbers
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- [00:00]
A
When a consumer reaches checkout, they're no longer browsing, they're buying. It's a moment of peak intent, attention and engagement. That's where Rokt comes in. Rokt helps brands reach customers at the moment that matters most, delivering relevant offers and content that feel like a natural part of the transaction experience, not an interruption. Learn more@rokt.com that's R O K T dot com. Hey, gang. It's Monday, June 15th. Max, Nate, and listeners, welcome to behind the Numbers, any marketing podcast made possible by rokt. I'm Marcus and joining me for today's conversation, we have two principal analysts joining us. From Philly, Knicks fan, it's Max Willans.
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B
Go, New York. Go New York, go.
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A
We're also joined from New York by kind of Nick's fan. He's happy when they do well, much like myself, Nate Elliot.
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C
Go Syracuse Orange.
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A
Oh, okay, cool. Today's fact. Nurses walk about a marathon a week. So my friend just went to a Banksy exhibit in Austin and her favorite piece was called Game Changer. I hadn't seen it before. It's amazing. It depicts a young boy. It's made by Banksy the artist. It depicts a young boy playing with a nurse superhero doll. And it's got Batman and Spider man in this, like, discarded in this basket next to him. So he's preferring, he preferred to play with this nurse superhero doll. He's got a cape and everything. And it's a tribute to healthcare workers as the real heroes during the pandemic. And so when I found some facts about nurses and there was some NHS research, that's the UK healthcare system, NHS found that nurses walk about 6, 000, 60,000 steps a week. That's roughly 26 miles or a marathon's distance. Er, nurses often walk even more than that.
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C
Is that just on the job, I take it?
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A
Yep.
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B
Also, don't nurses mostly work like three or four day? We work weeks. I have some friends that work as, like, physician assistants and they like, they're not doing nine to fives, they're doing like 12 hour shifts.
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A
They are doing 12 hour shifts. Yeah.
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B
Imagining piling all that up in the space of like three work days. Remarkable.
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A
Remarkable.
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B
That's why they care about their shoes. You want to find shoes that are good for your knees and back. You talk to a nurse or a physician assistant.
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A
Absolutely.
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C
Marcus, can you make that the next fact of the day? What's, what's nurses favorite shoe brand?
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B
No free ads
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A
to the over 5 million actively licensed registered nurses in the U.S. thank you to you folks. They're probably none listening, but if you know one, tell them I said thanks. Today's real topic the most interesting conversations we expect to hear at CAN 2026. By we I mean them because I'm not allowed to go again.
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B
You know what you did.
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A
That's fair. For the episode today, we decided to look at some of the most interesting sessions being put on this year and talk about a few of them. So Max, you picked the Evolution of Creativity. It's on Tuesday, June 23, 1245 for people who want to go. The session description outlines how contemporary artist Daniel Arsham and Instagram VP of Product Tessa Lyons will explore the evolving nature of creativity, looking at the intersection of art and tech, from AI powered experiences to next generation creator tools. Max, what interested you most about this session?
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B
Well, I was initially I have a sort of a glib answer and then a more serious answer. The glib answer is that I thought it was very funny that Meta chose to pick as their kind of, you know, guest an artist whose, you know, oeuvre is basically defined by taking very familiar objects and corroding them, which seems like a really funny metaphor for the automated creative tools that Meta is trying really, really hard to sort of legitimize within the among the people that are going to be crowding the quasit next week. I bring this up because the more sort of serious answer to this question is Meta understands that there's pretty wide uptake of a lot of portions of Advantage plus their automated campaign suite. And and they are obviously well pleased with lots of that uptake because their ad business has just been on a rocket ship for the last couple of years. But they also are clearly really keen to try to drive more use of their creative tools among multinational omnichannel advertising companies, their brands, the agencies that they pay lots of money to make their creative for them and they understand where the gaps are. But it's really interesting that they, I think are staying so committed to trying to make the case that these tools can help big brands differentiate in a way that's kind of remaining harmonious with all of the activation that they do elsewhere.
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A
Max, you have some data on this, right? Do you want to throw that in?
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B
Yeah, sure. I mean, the kind of broader backdrop that I think speaks to this situation in more concrete terms is, you know, we are right in the middle of a pretty weird era of mismatch between the kind of creative needs or the need for creative assets and creative raw material that brands have and what they are able to produce either on their own or, you know, via their agency partners. And I would say this has been a problem. This mismatch has existed for, I would say, at least a decade, depending on how you want to think about the rise of certain digital channels. But the rise of these automated campaign systems that the social networks have rolled out has taken a gap and turned it into a chasm for brands that are really precious about their creative assets. So a good kind of way of illustrating this is with data that I used in a presentation that I made a couple of months ago, which shows that before Pinterest rolled out its Performance plus Automated campaign suite, they recommended that each campaign have a minimum of two pins. They now recommend, if you're doing an Advantage plus campaign, that each campaign have a minimum of 10 pins. And then you think about Meta, where this is even more pronounced. Because what Meta now wants is rather than a lot of different variations on one kind of coherent theme or creative idea, they now want multiple kind of creative ideas. So imagine like if you're a coffee brand, instead of just, you know, six or seven different versions of, you know, a farmer in Guatemala, you know, holding up a big straw bag of beans, you now need six or seven of those. Six or seven of the mountains. Six or seven of, you know, two fit people at work, smiling and laughing, drinking coffee. Six, seven more yada, yada, yada. And the. The visual representation of this is from a case study that they, you know, Meta touted on their own website, where they had this one brand that went from producing three pieces of content a week for their output to 50 to over 50. And, you know, if you're a CMO or even just someone who's several tiers down and thinking about how to feed these. These beasts every week, as you try to drive progress, you're probably fumbling around for anything that's going to make that easier. And I don't know if this contemporary artist is going to change anybody's minds, but it is important to point to the tension and the pressure that is being exerted on the creative community from another angle to the next session.
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A
Nate, the one you picked forward. Not flawless. The creative tension between values and scale. In this session, Alex Weller, VP of Creative at Patagonia, will explore how brands can stay true to their values whilst operating at global scale and grow their influence without losing sight of who they are or why they exist. Nate, what made you pick this one?
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C
A couple of things. First, I'm a Patagonia Stan. I own far, far too many things. With their little mountain logo on it. I do a decent amount of hiking. I've been lucky enough to sail across oceans a few times and, and their gear has, has kept me in good stead on those adventures. So I'm just a big fan of the brand and honestly kind of would hope that maybe I would walk away with some free gear. But I'm also a big fan of their values and I think it's really fascinating to see what happens when a company leads with values even more than they lead with product. I don't think there's a lot of debate that Patagonia products in general are very good. You know, there is definitely debate about whether it's worth the price tags they put on those products. But the products are generally very good. But they don't lead with the quality of the products. They lead with what they stand for. And it just is a really fascinating dynamic to watch a company say, we are not the things that you buy from us. We're something bigger than that. It's know, I, in a quarter century advising brands and, and a lot of technology vendors, I've, I've had a lot of conversations with technology vendors who are trying to go beyond the thing that they do really well and look for ways to expand their offering and grow their business. And, and I've gotten a lot of quizzical looks in that quarter century from CEOs when I've said things like you're really good at this thing and there's nothing wrong with being really good at this one thing that's important and profitable and not trying to become something else. Most founders have the drive where they don't understand that idea. And I love that this company, whose products I really appreciate, has a founder and a current CEO who do understand that it's not just about getting bigger, but it's actually about standing for something and being really good at the thing you stand for. And I think it's a, you know, it's a cool story and I'd love to hear more about it.
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A
As a fan, customer, and an analyst, how have they been able to communicate those values better than others? What are one or two things that they do that really stand out to you?
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C
I mean, more than anything else? I think they're just fearless. I think they have very few flips to give to make this podcast language friendly. You know, you're willing to publish full page ads in newspapers and, and industry magazines calling elected officials out for deceitful statements and harmful actions. That's pretty remarkable. There are not A lot of companies who would be willing to just completely alienate half of the country potentially by saying, you know, this politician lied to you and it's bad for our planet and we' not going to be quiet about it. That level of fearlessness is pretty remarkable and, you know, among other things, tends to engender even greater loyalty amongst the portion of the population who agrees with those statements.
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A
Yeah.
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C
All right.
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A
I chose two sessions. I'm going to flip them. I was going to go with Max's first. I'm going to flip them based on we're talking of talking about having a brand, you know, that has such a loyal following in Pasagia is a good example of that. And so one of the sessions, one of the two that I chose, I wanted to talk about with the gents here was one that was called Stop listening to the customer build brands that last forever. And so this session has folks on Vacation Inc. And Thinker Bell, and they're going to talk about why the strongest brands don't listen to the customer. They put the brand at the heart of the business. When the brand is powerful, clear and ritualized, creativity shifts from advertising to the entity itself, reducing, if not eliminating the need to. To advertise. And so, Nate, back to you for this one. What's your take on this session? Stop listening to the customer build brands that last forever.
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C
Well, I. First of all, I would imagine you would get some very, very short odds on how quickly Apple was mentioned in the session by, by far the most cited example of a CEO and a product development team that doesn't listen to customers. Supposedly. You know, there are probably a handful of others. Harley Davidson tends to get thr a fair bit in conversations like this as well. I don't know what to think about that. I mean, if you happen to be a product genius along the lines of Steve Jobs, and by all means feel free to ignore your customers and do whatever you think they should have in their hands and whatever you think they'll buy from you. I don't know that that's a replicable playbook for most companies. So I'd be curious to go just to see if it's. If it is as I suspect it might be, look at what Steve Jobs did. You should do the same thing, which unfortunately, I don't think is terribly realistic. But as I said, I'd be really curious to hear more and see how much further the thinking goes than what I just said.
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A
Max, will this fall on deaf ears? Just because people will say very few companies can relate to that way of
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B
thinking, I think on some level. But I also think that maybe it's valuable for brands to look at sessions like these and engage in some self reflection where there are some brands for whom quality and kind of timeless craftsmanship are frankly secondary. Right. Some people turn the lights on in the office every day going how can I make this as cheaply as humanly possible? And so that's something that sort of needs to be reckoned with. But I do maybe naively kind of cling to the hope that a lot of the stats you see about Gen Z for example, sort of making their purchase decisions based more on a company's values versus things like price. I'm hopeful for a world where that shapes more purchasing decisions. And I again to what all three of us have said, I don't know how universally applicable it is, but a guy can dream out there in France.
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A
Monday, June 22, 1:00pm that's that session and the other one I had was a session called Stop Working in Advertising. To engage you need to entertain. That's on Thursday, June 25th at 11:15. In this session, Sir John Hegarty, co founder of the Business of Creative, discusses what it takes for a brand to stop behaving like an advertiser and start acting like a movement. It says to create work that doesn't feel like advertising at all, but like something you choose. A song you play again, a film you remember, an idea you believe in. Max, what's your take on on this session? The Stop Working Advertising focus more on the entertainment side of things.
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B
I here again I have kind of a a glib answer and a serious answer. When we were preparing for this, seeing this session description reminded me of a thing that happened to me approximately years ago when I was working as a social media strategist. And at the time there was this really big push by Facebook at the time to get every brand and company out there to start their own Facebook page. And I was explaining this to my mother and she was like, why should my toilet paper have a Facebook page? And I remember thinking like, well okay, fine, fine, Fair enough, fair enough. Maybe Orca Pacific doesn't need to have 600 Facebook pages. But I bring all this up to say that there are some brands for whom this kind of call to entertain is going to sound a little silly. But I think that the, the kind of more interesting industry level story that this aligns to is the pressure that cmos face. Right? Like we have. There's always been kind of an ambient, you know, not hostility but an ambient sort of dissatisfaction with, you know, how much money every organization spends on its, on its advertising and marketing. But we are in an era where, you know, if you, if you are committed enough, you can build a measurement framework for, you know, where you want to drive your organization. And I do think that it is possible now to measure the downstream effects of being funny or being heartening or being inspiring, as Sir John Hegarty would call them all to do. But you've got to develop a coherent vision of how you measure it. You can't just kind of take all the raw material outputs from the different channels you invest in and go, well, is this working? And so I think that, you know, I doubt there's going to be a lot of discussion of, you know, like media mix modeling in that session. But like, I do think it's interesting that we are in an era where if you're again, kind of resolute enough, it is possible to sort of take an entertainment first approach to your media and marketing strategy.
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C
It feels like a huge stretch for so many companies. I mean, Max, you talked about toilet paper, you talked about, you know, B2B but, but just even on the B2C side, so many companies simply cannot do this effectively. Think about the Super Bowl. Every company who makes an ad for the super bowl spends millions on the media placement and millions more in most cases on the creative. And the vast majority of them fall flat. And that's been true ever since, once again, Steve Jobs showed the world how to do it 30 something years ago. Geez, 40 something years ago. Now with, with the Original Mac AD, 1984, I can remember maybe one advertiser who I think did a great job at this year's Super Bowl. I think most other people who watched all the ads would have a similar number in their head. And that's out of dozens and dozens of executions by dozens of advertisers. So this notion that you need to make everything entertaining is great until the rubber hits the road and the ads aren't entertain entertaining and the brands aren't entertaining. But because I mentioned odds in, in, in one of my other answers, I'll again say you'd get very short odds on, on seeing the Cadbury gorilla Phil Collins drumming ad that has to come up in this conversation. And it's a great example of how well this can work when it works. And if you want an example of how poorly it works when it doesn't work again, just watch all the super bowl ads this year.
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B
I do think it's interesting though, to sort of tie this together with the previous sessions. One of the things that I think contributes to that phenomenon that Nate just described where you watch the lion's share of the super bowl ads in a given year and go really? But then if you kind of sit with most of them for even a half second, it's pretty easy to sort of understand what they were going for. It's an ad that's got to appeal to moms in the Midwest, but it's got to have something a little more contemporary so that the zoomers that the CMOS children talk about all the time will also find it relevant. And then all of a sudden you've got this kind of Franken ad that nobody really finds relatable or interesting or engaging in any way. But if you instead kind of tune the customer out and just speak purely from this is going to sound really silly. But your truth as a brand, then maybe what comes out isn't necessarily relevant to hundreds of millions of people, but it might be relevant to an incremental chunk of your potential consumers. God, I'm not even in France yet and I'm already sounding like someone who.
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C
You're there, Max, you're there. I am.
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B
I'm like half and half sunburn. And it's happened to me already.
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C
Don't worry, I'll be all rose and all sunburned by next Friday. So if you think about the ads in this vein that do well, if you think about the Apple 1984 ad and the Cadbury Gorilla ad, those are bananas ads, who would make either of those? And most of companies who are going to sit in the session just simply don't have the willpower or the organizational support to make a two minute dystopian ad based on a George Orwell novel or to put a guy in a gorilla suit behind a drum kit to sell chocolate. I mean, these were really weird ads and that's what tends to work in this category. And I just, I don't see the amount of bravery in, in marketing at this point for that to be something that can happen every day.
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A
But even if you can't, I think you guys are right. And even if you can't reach that level of disruption in terms of creating something that's entertaining, I found a couple of charts that really speak to just how important the idea of being entertained is to folks. And so this chart on the screen you can see entertainment is the content type that makes us adults feel more favorable towards brands the most. According to April data from Ipsos, more than sports news, political AI generated, controversial, etc. In the second chart here, you can see the most popular social media content type across every age group is Entertainment According to impact.com&e marketer survey. And more so than authentic content, storytelling, educational. So I mean, we've seen this movement towards, you know, away from social media, towards social entertainment. It just seems maxi, you can't stress enough this important point of all the importance of people want to be entertained and a way to maybe get around, you know, people feel exhausted being advertised to is to focus on entertaining them first and then the product kind of gets through to them by osmosis.
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B
Yeah, I mean, not to talk my own book too much here, but I think that this kind of broader 10,000 foot conversation definitely, you know, has shaped the significant investment that we've seen the industry make in creators. Right. I mean, if these big problems are we have a significantly expanded need for creative raw material, we need to be entertaining. We as brands, you know, themselves and maybe as you know, middle aged, frazzled, overly busy executives at those brands are not entertaining and don't know what's cool or interesting. How do we solve all these problems? I know we spend a ton of money on people who have like built their whole careers out of being entertaining on the Internet and let's throw money at them and if one of them says something that's out of bounds or it doesn't land, we can just blame them or just, you know, people will forget it in 45 seconds and we'll hire 25 more of them. And so I do think that these kind of pressures and anxieties that are weighing on, you know, the creative community and on the marketing community, you can see why there's been such an embrace or at least a, you know, increase in curiosity about creators as a sort of investment opportunity. At the end of the day, it really does come down to a really amazing idea. And I'm excited to be in France and sort of see and hear people talk about where those big ideas come from because to me that's still kind of the engine of this whole thing and people lose sight of that all the time.
- [24:52]
A
Well, that's what we have time for for this episode. I hope everyone enjoys can the two folks on this episode who are going, I hope you have a great time and thank you so much for being here. Thank you. First to Max and to Nate.
- [25:06]
C
You totally stole my gag, Max. Thanks, Marcus. It was a pleasure as always.
- [25:12]
A
Save trip, gents. Thanks to the production crew and everyone for listening into my marketing podcast made possible by Rokt. Susie will be here Wednesday talking to the head of marketing at Thredup, and I'll be back Friday discussing Americans summer travel plans.