Cultural relevance has to be an immersive process, not a practice that can be outsourced, said marketers at the Cannes Lions Festival.
Speakers at the second day of the Brand Innovators Beach during Cannes Lions 2026 agreed that marketers need to focus on the core of their brand and make that their guide to immerse themselves in rapidly changing trends. Once that foundation is established, technologies – including artificial intelligence – and channels such as creators can be leveraged more effectively and cultural relevance will come naturally, they said.
Dara Treseder, chief marketing officer at Autodesk
“Don’t follow the trend. Pick the values that are core to your business and do it consistently. That is how your brand will stand the test of time,” said Dara Treseder, chief marketing officer at Autodesk.
Brands get caught up in chasing virality and hooked on buzzwords, but culture surrounds all they do, said Mark Kirkham, chief marketing office at PepsiCo Beverages US, PepsiCo. They need to focus on being immersed in it, not just being viral, he said.
“Too many brands try to create culture out of thin air,” said Ben Sylvan, senior vice president, connected media at Keurig Dr Pepper.
“You’re either part of culture or you’re buying into culture,” said Damon Berger, Senior Vice president at marketing shared services at Gap Inc.
NBA great Carmelo Anthony
Many brands only want to go fast and follow the trope of moving at the speed of culture, said NBA great Carmelo Anthony. Instead, they need to identify who they are at their core, he warned.
Speed is great, but it needs data and insight, said Anthony, now Head Coach of Cerave.
“If you don’t know who you are, you’re speeding for no reason,” he said.
Conversely, many brands know who they are, but don’t want to go fast to meet the cultural moment. It’s a balance, said Anthony: “Talk it out. We don’t do that often.”
Mark Kirkham, chief marketing office at PepsiCo Beverages US, PepsiCo.
Marketers make their jobs unnecessarily complicated, when what they need is to understand the foundational concepts like creativity and what’s core to the brand, said Kirkham. Marketers need to understand how the company makes money, he said.
Kirkham noted he spends time with cross-functional partners in finance and other functions within his organization. Marketing connects many functions in the enterprise, so its leaders need to make friends across all of them, building personal relationships early on, not just calling when they need money, he said.
“That is what gets s—t done,” he said.
Passing the mic
Striking a balance requires identifying moments that are true to the brand and can be built on, said speakers. Consistency has served Coke well over its long history, but it is experimenting with new tactics to channel culture, said Arnab Roy, president, global category at The Coca-Cola Co.
Coke’s focus on fundamentals and sales hasn’t changed, but Roy acknowledged that brands need to become curators of culture. “You have to give the mike to the consumers,” he said.
This adaptation requires a change in approach for brands, said speakers. Data and measurement can help ground brands and guide them as they cede some creative control to users and fans, they said.
IBM Corp. is a 150-year-old company that knows its identity well, but it has changed the way it operates to become more agile and flexible in how it speaks to its clients, said Jonathan Adashek, senior vice president marketing and communications at IBM. Having data to support decisions is key when moving a 300,000-person company, he said.
When marketing suggested partnering with UFC to leverage its AI models and Watson computing in the ultimate fighting league “everybody thought we were crazy,” said Adashek. But having data to support the proposal helped him to fight any blowback.
Many brands are too focused on the brand guideline book and keeping control, so they don’t have enough flexibility to meet culture where it is now, said Angie Smith, chief executive officer of Invision.
“We don’t have to control the narrative. We just have to have enough flexibility so the narrative is talked about,” said Smith.
Giving up control can be the hardest part of the cultural effort, said speakers. “You just have to be comfortable with that,” said Roy.
Marketers can’t create culture, but they can channel creators’ virality, said Dave Kersey, global head of media at SharkNinja. He told how the home appliance company learned through social listening about a user creating chicken smoothies with his Creami machine. The posts hit a nerve among the protein-maxing trend followers and the company rode that wave.
Finding those moments and amplifying them “is critical to our business,” said Kersey. But it does require “a bit of risk tolerance,” he said.
“People don’t join campaigns”
Working with creators is a big part of negotiating cultural relevance, speakers said. Influencers are a human media channel, Kirkham explained, but brands often misunderstand them and outsource them to agencies, when they are crucial to telling the brand story.
It starts by building a relationship that goes beyond the transaction, said Kirkham. “It’s important to know what do they want to be when they grow up,” he said. Some just want to be famous, while some have a real purpose behind their posts, and it’s important to tell those apart in order to know why a brand would want to work with them.
Authenticity is possible, even when working with a celebrity influencer, but it must be someone with a true connection to the brand, said Sylvan. He noted Dr. Pepper’s Snapple iced tea, a popular brand in New York bodegas, got an unprompted viral moment when Knicks MVP Jalen Brunson shared his game day order of peach Snapple and purple Doritos.
Sarah Reinecke, senior vice president salty category and global brands at Mars
Opening up the brands to collaborate has “really opened up the aperture” for storytelling, said Sarah Reinecke, senior vice president salty category and global brands at Mars. When marketers tell stories about brands that sound new, but talk about the core components of the brand, while still letting consumers have fun with it, “this is where the magic happens,” she said.
“We’re writing our stories and our brands together now,” she said. “That is a phenomenal opportunity for marketing.”
Storytelling is a strong engagement tool at a time when consumers are being bombarded, said Behnaz Ghahramani, senior vice president of global marketing at Marriott International. Consumers remember stories, so brands that persevere in the market are those that are clear and consistent and able to connect though storytelling and emotion, she said.
“Nobody cares what you have to say. They care about their own lives,” said Treseder. She advised marketers to focus on the audience and build any storytelling around their interests. For example, she noted Autodesk technology was used in the restoration of the cathedral of Notre Dame after a devastating fire. But the technology is secondary to what people feel about that landmark and about Paris, she said.
In an environment where AI content is pervasive, brands matter more than ever, if their storytelling is authentic, said Sara Brooks, chief growth officer at BetterHelp, the online mental health platform.
“Just think about how to connect with our audience in a way that is true to them and to you,” she said. “People don’t join campaigns, they join conversations.”
