Why this Cannes juror thinks community-building is a winning strategy

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If a group of chief strategists get together at Cannes Lions to judge creative strategy, it’s pretty much guaranteed that no stone will go unturned.

“We were all having a bit of a joke at dinner one night, where we were saying, what do you call a table full of Cannes jury strategists? We don’t know—we’re still talking about it,” Ellie Bamford, chief strategy officer, North America, VML, told us.

This year, Bamford served on the festival’s Creative Strategy jury, awarding work including Heineken’s “The Pub that Refused to Die” documentary campaign highlighting a community’s effort to save a pub in rural Ireland and the movement it inspired to train other locals to run their own pubs.

At Cannes Lions, we spoke to Bamford about some of the takeaways from the winning work, and about the different ways that human-centric marketing is showing up.

On community as a creative theme: There was such an over-AI theme last year on everything—on how everyone was looking to justify and show how they used AI to do the work. [This year], it was almost the opposite issue of people wanting to show, well, we didn’t use AI. This is all very real. This was human-made, human-crafted. There was a lot of that throughout all of the work, which makes me very happy…In the two pieces of work we actually did reward with a gold, and ultimately won with the Grand Prix, was work from Heineken, which is unusual. Why would we give two of the biggest awards to one brand? They were two completely different activations and campaigns, but they were about community. They’re about supporting small communities, supporting people…It was about trying to bring people together to help other people, and I think that was the big theme through what we saw in a lot of the work.

On creativity in B2B: There was a piece of work for Faroe Islands Space Program that just won the Grand Prix for B2B, that also we gave gold to in Creative Strategy, and there was such respect from everybody about being able to be that inventive, that creative, with B2B work, where often people are like, well, [B2B is] over here, it’s kind of boring. This was brilliant work, and such a strategic leap, and so there was actually a really deepened respect for being able to do that in the B2B category…Creativity and this kind of level of excellence, it can happen in any area of our business, in any vertical, in any industry. We all really wanted to make an effort to show that it doesn’t have to be the big brand with the massive budget and a Super Bowl ad and the blah blah. It can be something really small, it can be something that’s speaking to tech and B2B in a way that’s so specific, but the creative and the strategic leap was so brilliant, and I was really pleased that we could all come around and celebrate that, too.