Each month the Quantum Jump team will flag developments in strategy, creative and martech worth a marketer’s attention. For September, a bit of a catchup on three interesting themes of recent weeks. Creators, Cannes and a CRM launch that’s more interesting than it sounds.
Creators – a strategic input, not a distribution channel
Cannes Lions rebranded its Social & Influencer Lions to Social & Creator Lions (yes, they changed a word) last year. This year’s shortlist made clear why. Campaigns are increasingly being built from ‘creator insight’ – their language, their audiences’ behaviour, their read on what’s culturally live – rather than simply distributed through them once the brief is already locked.
At Cannes, the vibe has shifted towards creators too. They used to get a rooftop slot, two floors from where the actual festival was happening. This year they had the premium space. The most coveted invitations at Cannes were the exclusive, creator-focused experiences – and brands were courting the creators! Shows you the growth, and the power, especially in big markets.
At our end of the world it’s rather different. New Zealand’s influencer and creator market is estimated at just c.$50 million in brand spend annually (a bit over 1% of total NZ marketing spend, so see the difference!) We don’t have the population to support the same long tail of niche creators at scale. For most medium-to-large local brands, creator spend still sits under 5% of the marketing budget, and for a lot of categories, digital, TV, OOH and radio remain the better bang for buck. It does work harder for smaller brands and niche products who can’t afford a broadcast campaign and can afford a handful of creators who genuinely move their specific audience.
How this creator ‘value’ gets measured is changing too. Followers and views are becoming less useful as these metrics gets easier to inflate. Trust and sentiment – whether an audience will actually act on what a creator says – are becoming the real currency.
The work that won at Cannes wasn’t the AI-first work
Our own Wayne Pick was ‘reporting live’ from the Cannes Advertising Festival this year. His insight? Despite the wall-to-wall AI conversation across the tech villages, relatively little of the awarded work had AI front and centre.
Ideas were rooted in humanity: Columbia Sportswear offering the company to any flat-earther who could photograph the edge of the Earth; Adidas’s Supernova Adaptive, built for people living with Down syndrome; The KitKat Heist, which turned a genuine crisis into a cultural moment via a tracker rather than a cover-up. They all spoke to a human truth worth building around. As one Cannes jury president put it: “Technology can accelerate change, but creativity is what gives it direction.”
Watch the Columbia Sportswear case study
Watch the Adidas SuperNova Adaptive case study
Watch the KitKat Heist case study
Klaviyo’s headless CRM and the end of ‘set and forget‘
A smart practical development we’ve seen is Klaviyo’s new ‘headless CRM’. It has been built to run via autonomous AI agents rather than manual campaign builds. Yes, it’s faster. But more useful than that is what it does to marketing automation’s oldest failure: set and forget. Most teams build long-tail automated journeys once – welcome series, lifecycle emails, re-engagement flows – and then leave them running untouched for years, because properly maintaining them is resource heavy. (People come and go and it’s literally ‘set and forgot’. We’ve seen inhouse onboarding programmes break and no one has noticed for months).
AI-accessed CRM control changes that equation, increasing accessibility, removing the opaqueness of many CRM/marketing automation platforms and allowing for more nurturing active management. Done well, it means those same journeys can be kept current, contextually relevant and on-brand on an ongoing basis, rather than decaying in the background while the rest of the marketing programme moves on.
A thought to end
As the tools multiply, it’s vital to know which voices to build a brief around, to recognise which ideas are actually worth making, and to care about the 40th iteration of an automated email to keep improving it, not just the first. We’ll keep tracking developments like these each month, the ones that change how the work gets done, not just what’s trending.
