In a Sea of Sameness, Who’s Actually Making Waves? Notes for Brands

As brands battle to prove they ‘get’ culture, many end up recycling the same sentiments in slicker packaging. Same letters, different font. As these industry leaders tell it, cultural impact isn’t found in the middle of the bell curve. It’s made at the edges, through smart risk-taking, and stories that speak to someone, not everyone.

Read on to find out what they said during conversations with LBB at Cannes Lions.

Ronald Ng

Global CCO
MRM

To avoid cultural sameness, we need to stop creating for algorithms and start creating for actual humans. People who want to be treated with respect and uniqueness. There isn’t enough conversation around the importance of one-to-one communication. Let’s stop asking, “What does the audience want?” and start asking, “What do Jane, Pedro, Mahmoud and Shantini want?” Culture isn’t shaped by one-size-fits-all brands – it’s shaped by the ones who speak to someone, not everyone.

So how do we get there? Data. When we use data to understand people’s needs, wants, and motivations, brands build relationships that feel personal, not programmatic. Culture doesn’t move through mass messages. It moves through personal ones, one person at a time.

Dave Rolfe

Global head of production
WPP/ Hogarth
Entertainment jury president

Who better to exercise their right to mythology than brands? From brands, we get the products we need or prefer and meanwhile, when done in earnest, we get their purpose to boot. Humans love things – distinguishable things. Brands seek to build culture around those things, which eclipses pure product experience.
All forms of identifiable brand storymaking are purposeful, in one way or another. Brand distinction does not come from perfected tactical positioning; it comes from benignly orchestrated cultural adoption and co-creation. Which means, like mythology, the most fertile and distinctive properties of a brand are carved by the people they serve.

Also, homogeneity is a falsehood. Sameness is presumptive and illusory. Both things and perceptions naturally seek differentiation, even if subconsciously. So that's why, in the end, we'll never really suffer from sameness in marketing or product or brand, because people will always revert to perceptive differentiation. Shared experience is itself differentiation; it's just more communal. Because the experience had, en masse, is shareable or collective because it is different from previous precedent-bearing past or ‘other’ scaled experience. Even conformity is differentiation because it is co-identifying, or tribalisation, against something else.

So I never worry about homogeneity because the existence of organic and even inorganic matter is fundamentally distinctive. Which I'd say means craft, mythology, artifice, etc., are all functions of effectively exploiting this.

David Ohana

Chief communications and marketing officer
United Nations Foundation
Health for Good jury president

It's official; doom and gloom is no longer working to get a message across. Just looking around the world right now, there's enough of that already.

Right now, to meet the moment, my message to brands would be, spend less money on advertising, especially ads that say you care, and spend that money on helping to solve a social issue and then tell that story really, really well. What we're looking for at the moment is big ideas that help people fall back in love with the idea of helping others. And I think with that, that will be one way of changing, using creativity for good and once. Again, helping get things back on track.

Steven Erich

Co-founder and president
Erich & Kallman

We've got a philosophy that we start with a brand's DNA. We go through the whole process of mapping out each brand's DNA and focusing on those things, rather than bringing culture into the brand.

What we want to do is create culture with the brand – not take something from culture and put it into the brand. Sometimes that doesn't happen. We've done work with celebrities, like Jennifer Aniston for SkinnyPop. That was taking something from culture and sticking it on the brand – but we did that very effectively.
But we'd rather do something like what we used to do at our old places. With me, it was Burger King – creating the King and all those characters that could move the business and go into culture. Or my partner Eric [Kallman], who created ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ and the Terry Crews character. We'd rather do that kind of thing. That's our philosophy.

So hopefully, the work we put out into culture isn't the same as everything else. If you're using celebrities or music or anything like that, it's going to be a sea of sameness. It's really hard to stick out. It doesn't matter how great that talent is, or how famous it is – it's really hard to differentiate.

Eugene Park

Global Marketing Lead for IMX, Creative & Design
CJ CheilJedang
Health & Wellness Jury

Advertising still has the power to shape culture by amplifying under-represented voices and driving meaningful conversations. But when every brand jumps on the same "woke" narrative, it starts to feel repetitive.

I believe the key is depth. Don’t just react to trends – immerse in them, challenge them, or better yet, create your own. True culture-shaping work comes from tension, not comfort.

Franklin Williams

EVP, executive experience director
AREA 23, an IPG Health company
Pharma jury president

I'll maybe start by saying, we don't advertise, right? We talk to people, we talk through experiences that are real, and we do it in ways that allow people to be able to make a real difference. Because if we're not actually doing that, then we're creating content that is for us, not for our audiences. When we start to create more user-centric – not just experiences, but have those user centric thoughts – those are the ones that are actually going to drive change. Everybody here is talking about information, disinformation, it all ladders up to responsibility, if we all take responsibility for the content that we put out there, so that we can actually make meaningful differences, then we actually set out to make change.

David Ohana

Chief communications and marketing officer
United Nations Foundation
Health for Good jury president

It's official; doom and gloom is no longer working to get a message across. Just looking around the world right now, there's enough of that already.
Right now, to meet the moment, my message to brands would be, spend less money on advertising, especially ads that say you care, and spend that money on helping to solve a social issue and then tell that story really, really well. What we're looking for at the moment is big ideas that help people fall back in love with the idea of helping others. And I think with that, that will be one way of changing, using creativity for good and once. Again, helping get things back on track.

Eric Perko

CEO
Apollo Partners

By taking smart risks and being specific. Culture isn’t made in the middle – it’s shaped on the edges. When brands stop trying to be everything to everyone and start speaking clearly to someone, they actually start to matter. The sameness comes from fear – fear of offending, fear of exclusion, fear of taking a stand. But real cultural contribution requires conviction. The most interesting brands right now are the ones rooted in a point of view that can’t be easily copied.

Keith Cartwright

Founder/ CCO
Cartwright

Advertising is a conversation. At its best, it shifts perception, even resetting norms. But it can only shape culture when it reflects it with nuance and adds something of value. The sameness often comes when we chase trends instead of interrogating truths. We avoid that by listening more than we talk. And by building teams that reflect the world we’re speaking to.

Mark Smith

UK sales director
Bauer Media Outdoor

There's always a risk of cultural sameness. If you look at some of the work that's in the outdoor category this year, there are some trends that are in there. There's some beautiful art, lovely copy, beautiful vistas or collections of people, etc., but there are quite a lot of ads that look a bit similar. But maybe that's always going to be the case because, as human beings, we are influenced by what we see.

Things come into fashion and things come out of fashion in all walks of life, and I think that will always continue. They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery, right? So if your ad or your creative work inspires others, does that really matter? I think that's okay. As long as it connects with its audience, it does its job, it sells the product, and it builds the brand. What you don't want to end up with is a situation where the quality diminishes. You want to raise the quality all the time.