Unilever at Cannes: Modern marketing is about ideas, trust and transformation

Keith Weed, chief marketing and communications officer, Unilever, returned to the main stage of the Cannes Lions this year to emphasise ‘marketing to people’.

Weed based his presentation on learnings from conversations with over 20 C-suite thought leaders from the world of advertising, marketing and technology/media.
“I found three recurring themes in the course of these conversations: The Idea, The Trust and The Transformation,” opened the marketing head.
Weed also made the case that “size doesn’t matter” anymore in marketing but that the ability to scale good ideas and meaningful connections that matter does.
To illustrate his point and get the attention of his keynote audience at the 2015 Lions Festival of Creativity, Weed began by showing a “Funny or Die” parody of Unilever’s award-winning “Two Doors” campaign for its Dove brand — the one showing women confronting and going through two separate doors labeled “Average” or “Beautiful.”

Weed quipped that there is “no better gauge of whether you’ve really started penetrating the culture” then when a “parody arrives.”
He used the humorous setup to demonstrate that brands can tell engaging stories that permeate culture with important messages, even if other people make fun of them afterward.
Citing an increasingly popular stat about human attention spans eroding from an average of 12 seconds 15 years ago to eight seconds today (one second less than a goldfish), Weed told the Cannes creative community: “It’s not what’s your most creative idea. It’s what’s your most creative idea in five seconds.”
And that’s just to get consumers’ attention. The real task, he said, is to get “engagement,” because that’s when people connect with brands so much that they share them with other people.
To do that, he said, brands must focus on three things: “The idea. Trust. And transformation.”