Cannes you tell who it is yet? Why emotion is useless without branding

Unfortunately, we’ve seen the opposite happen.

To examine this further, System1 has tested a representative set of creatively awarded ads with 30,000 consumers since 2010. We’ve found that testing how emotional and distinctive work is through the consumer’s eyes easily explains how it performs in the market. It’s a fundamental truth of marketing. As Mark Ritson always teaches, market orientation is key.

So, what have we learn from all this testing, including the new Cannes Lions 2025 winners?

Creative awards are starting to select more emotional work again.

Back in the day, creative awards were incredibly good at selecting campaigns that scored higher on System1’s emotional metric (Star Rating), which predicts and explains the long-term effects of campaigns. However, between 2021 and 2023, we saw a slump.

Two things primarily drove this. As Peter Field has pointed out, the focus on short-termism pulled us away from emotion. And an obsession with rewarding purpose as the main campaign idea.

However, over the past two years, we have seen a shift as creatively awarded work is moving away from technical aspects and toward more emotionally driven content, viewed through the eyes of the consumer. This is fantastic news. It’s subtle but should be celebrated.

I dug deeper into this year’s 20 AV Cannes Lions winners. There are some cracking emotional ads. However, we are also seeing a new trend: These campaigns forget the brand.

‘Cats Lose Their Cool: DJ Cat’ is utterly hilarious, with a brilliant human insight, but it is exclusively branded at the end. This meant only 31% of viewers could correctly recall what brand it was for.

31%.

And that’s after we’d paid people to sit and watch it. Apple’s ‘Find my Friends’ is also brilliantly emotional, leveraging a content partnership. Again, though, only 69% of viewers linked the ad exclusively to Apple.

No slander for Apple there, though, because its fluency score is actually above the average of Cannes Lions winners this year at 65%.

In fact, 35% of people we asked to view Grand Prix Cannes Lions winning ads couldn’t recall the brand. And we were literally paying them to pay attention.

Enter the creative dividend

I fear this is because we are victims of our own success. Effectiveness agencies, like System1, have been flying the flag for emotion in advertising for 25 years now. Primarily led by the wonderful System1 founder (John Kearon) and our chief innovation officer (Orlando Wood).

We mustn’t forget another key principle of advertising and brand management: brand codes.

Selecting a few things our brand positions itself for (or against) and a handful of distinctive brand assets to link these associations to our brand. Advertising, in all channels, simply must consistently build and refresh these assets.

In new early charts released at Cannes from Effie and System1 from our upcoming publication, ‘The Creative Dividend’ (for free to download), we analyzed 1,250+ campaigns across Europe and the Americas. Linking all the brand and business effects from $140bn of marketing efforts to their creative strength, we’ve given fluency (or call it brand codes, or ad distinctiveness) some focus to really demonstrate the power of emotion’s less sexy cousin.

We have not only shown that the more assets you pack into your long-form AV advertising, the more fluent it gets, but we’ve also shown that not all brand assets are equal.

Audio and characters win again.

We’ve also reconfirmed the power of emotion.

Explicitly, that emotion can be used to help small brands punch above their weight. The more emotionally charged your work is, the more brand effects you’ll see. But, crucially, if you fail to brand hard enough, you lose all that advantage.

This is becoming increasingly important as we stretch our budget further into skippable media. In another publication, my brilliant colleague Josh Fruttiger and I have worked with TikTok (launched on the main stage at Cannes by Jon Evans), and we’ve shown that it’s simply not good enough to brand. You really must brand early. You can also grab this 50-page publication free here – The Long and the Short (form) of it.

And it gets even harder to achieve. We must relearn how to brand in skippable short-form media. A logo isn’t a hook. We’ve found that short-form assets that simply slap a logo upfront sure grab lots of brand recognition, but it causes a reduction in attention. Using characters, audio assets or using your logo in context is a much better way to achieve results in modern skippable channels.

It seems obvious, right?

I keep getting feedback that non-marketers know this is obvious. So why is this new insight? The obvious insights are always the most important. I suspect we’ve lost focus on branding ads properly to make them fluent because we are too impatient as marketers.

Sure, emotion and branding are important for creativity. But so is time.

We can see the benefits of creative strength only get more pronounced over time. I dread to think how many campaigns are now run only for six months to a year. We see little benefit in terms of profitability during this time. It’s been over three years since this creative strength started to pay back sevenfold.

So, as we see emotion start to regain importance in the fantastic world of creative awards, I guess this is a quick plea from me not to let proper branding fall out of focus as well. If you refuse to give your famous and unique brand assets attention in your ads, we will really struggle to differentiate or build more distinctive brands.

The brilliant team at System1 has worked for over a year finding these insights with our partners at TikTok and Effie. We’ve made both publications available for free. The early charts from The Creative Dividend and full The Long and Short (form) of it publication. Enjoy them. And remember, it’s emotion AND branding AND time. These are marketers’ best friends. Just like the Cannes - Lions-winning Uber Eats campaign that brilliantly integrates its brand assets into emotional work that they have committed to.

Andrew Tindall is a senior leader in the advertising industry and SVP of Global Partnerships at System1, where he champions creative effectiveness and evidence-based marketing. Known for his sharp thinking on out-of-home, emotional advertising, and brand growth, he’s become a go-to voice on how creativity and data can work together. With experience across major brands like Diageo and Bacardi, Andrew now helps global agencies and marketers make better ads that actually work, contributing regularly to panels, podcasts, and the occasional punchy LinkedIn rant.

Get in touch with Andrew on LinkedIn.

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