Stars Anderson .Paak and Kai Cenat showcase creator collaborations on day three at Cannes Lions

During the "Evolving your brand through the ages" session at HAQM Port, Iooss was joined by Grammy winner Anderson .Paak and executives from Unilever and Team One to explore how brands can forge authentic cross-generational connections. “I love to see a brand that just holds a mirror up to culture and goes for it. What I love to see is not only total boldness but making sure that you're staying relevant within the current culture—and sometimes that culture is nostalgia. I think a great example of that is our very own Fallout series on Prime Video," Iooss said as she highlighted how the 1997 video game was transformed into a 2024 streaming hit by focusing on community passion that transcended age. “Watching Fallout turn into this epic, renewed-for-a-third-season show has been fun because it's really engaging the people who loved the game. We've seen communities on Twitch take that show and have Watch Parties and, you know, let the audience sort of do their thing with something they love. That's when a brand is doing their best.”

Kathleen Dunlop, Chief Marketing Officer, Beauty and Wellbeing, at Unilever North America reiterated the need for a community-first approach to marketing today: “We need to build a brand across these little communities, but we've got to build a coherent brand across many different passions. And so, we are in the comments. We are listening to what people are saying. We're getting ideas from that, and then we're trying out ideas on our communities and then turning that into a bigger campaign.” Dunlop further expanded on this by sharing some guidance for brands: “I think a fundamental thing is you need to know who you are, and you need to have your tone of voice very clear so that you can then show up in all these disparate communities but still add up to one coherent brand.”

Anderson .Paak shared insights from his own brand partnership experiences, emphasizing the importance of authentic creative collaborations and reexamining the past, “Even when working with brands. I just did something with Lexus that was really cool. They needed a new song, and I was able to pull back into my catalog that's about to turn 10 years young and then I got to pick one of the old songs and reimagine it for what they were trying to do. So, things like this do wonders for my brand legacy and exposes it to new people.” Chris Graves, Chief Creative Officer at Team One, expanded on this point, “Two entities collaborating—and brands are doing it all the time—now leads to a kind of shared ownership of an idea, and helps evolve and modernize certain brands and bring new audiences to new ways of thinking.”

Graves then shared how Lexus approached its Twitch collaboration, “Just paying the money and putting your logo on things isn’t going to help anybody. So, we try to inhabit the space and be a partner. The idea being, ‘Hey, we're going to actually help you create the stuff that you're really good at creating.’ And that's the role we took with the Twitch partnership.”

With a focus on collaborations, the session demonstrated how brands maintaining multigenerational relevance leverage passion points over demographics, consistent with HAQM's "Beyond the Generational Divide" research presented earlier in the week.

“I live by and do business by just going with what’s organic and what's authentic to me as a person. Not everything deserves a yes. It doesn't matter how much money is being offered or anything like that. If it fits you and it's organic to what you got going on and authentic to your audience, and if your audience will enjoy it, that's all that’s important,” declared Twitch streaming phenomenon Kai Cenat during the "A seat at the table: The power of co-creation" session at HAQM Port, challenging brands to rethink traditional marketing approaches.

Cenat joined a panel with Jo Shoesmith, Global Chief Creative Officer at HAQM, and Maverick Carter, Co-CEO of Fulwell Entertainment, to demonstrate how creator partnerships are reshaping advertising effectiveness.

Shoesmith explained HAQM’s approach to facilitating partnerships that aren't just transactional, but transformational. "Within all the work that we do, we really get a lot of opportunities to partner with celebrities and creators. And I would say, over the years, through mistake and error and learning and experimenting and trying again, we've gotten pretty good at how to co-create. And co-creation is really about giving a voice to the creators that we're partnering with and making sure that we're hiring them and allowing them to input on the work, not just dictating and inserting celebrities.”

Carter, whose team also produces the popular podcast Mind the Game featuring NBA legends LeBron James and Steve Nash, also emphasized the importance of having the right support in place for creators and celebrities: “Having the right team and then choosing the right partners, not just maybe those paying you the most today, but are going to help you achieve the most you want down the road.”

This is especially important for athletes. Carter explained, "Athletes live a very different life than the rest of us. Think about if you got the biggest job in your life and got paid the most when you were 22 instead of right now—that's hard to think about. So, their life is really flipped. Then all of a sudden their career ends when they're still a young person in the world. So, I think for them, it's always about taking that into consideration and maximizing that window. You have to, because you only get that window."

Cenat, whose Twitch streams seamlessly blend entertainment with brand storytelling, described how livestreaming helps bring audiences closers to the stars they see on other screens, ”When I have people come through and enter my world, I just want them to have fun. That's my main goal. When they come over to my house, we gonna turn up, we gonna have fun, and just act like friends pulling up and just having a good time,” Cenat continued, “For example, athletes. We see them on the court, but we don't really get to see them too much off the court or off the field or wherever. But when we do get that chance to [see them], it opens a whole new world for the audience to be able to see [them] in their purest form. And I think that's super important.”