CANNES – As CMOs face mounting pressure for short-term sales results, they’re overlooking their most powerful performance driver: creative itself.
“One of our major CPG clients did a major study [on] what’s driving incrementality within their media. And they found 51% of that incrementality is from the creative itself,” Tyler Murray, chief enterprise solutions officer at WPP Group agency VML, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
This finding, consistent within a 5% margin across different studies, reveals a fundamental disconnect in how marketers approach performance. “It’s often overlooked as part of that consideration set,” Murray said, noting that most performance marketing conversations center on media technologies, placements, and retail media networks.
The false choice
Murray rejects the notion that performance marketing must be purely transactional at the expense of brand building. VML’s nine-time shortlisted campaign for Ziploc demonstrates how brands can achieve both.
The campaign originated from Ziploc’s strategic shift from food storage to food preservation. When research showed that strawberries last longer in Ziploc bags, the brand came to VML with a retail media brief demanding short-term sales results.
“We had this great insight about the consumers. A lot of younger consumers who have low disposable income as inflation and tariffs were starting to come on, they were really, really hurt by that,” Murray said. “And they were really living off of coupons. And one of their biggest pain points was coupons expire.”
The solution VML found was “Preserved Promos.” Whenever shoppers bought any food item with an expired coupon, Ziploc would honor that coupon as long as a Ziploc item was in the basket. It literally extended the life of coupons just as the product extends the life of food, Murray said.
Tearful creative commerce at scale
VML’s Kleenex campaign for Kimberly-Clark shows how creative thinking can transform a basic retail media brief. Asked to sell more Kleenex on Amazon, the agency looked beyond standard retail media solutions to Amazon’s broader network, including IMDb.
“What’s a creative insight that can combine IMDb to Kleenex? And we thought, well, movies. Some movies make you cry and you need a Kleenex box with you,” Murray said. The result was the “Kleenex Score” — rating movies based on their likelihood to make viewers cry, with prompts to add Kleenex to their Amazon cart when renting tear-jerkers.
Culture as conversion driver
When asked about brands’ impatience for immediate results, Murray was pragmatic. “It probably is not possible” to build slowly, he said. “Culture moves so fast, and I think brands need to learn to be agile.”
But culture can be a multiplying force. VML’s Golden Lion-winning audio campaign for Oreo, “Nomius Oreo,” typifies this approach. The agency discovered a TikTok trend where people created a secret language using Oreo cookies. They called the black parts “oh” and the white center “re” to make combinations like “oh-re-oh” or “re-re-o.”
“Cookie itself is iconically visual, but it’s not an iconic audio expression,” Murray said. VML created a Duolingo-like app teaching people to speak Oreo, partnering with Kroger’s retail media network. The better users became at speaking Oreo, the bigger their discounts at Kroger.
The new CMO mandate
The pressure on CMOs is real. “Very few of them feel like they have the money needed to deliver on their CEO’s expectations,” Murray noted. This has pushed many into performance marketing, but often with a limited view of what drives results.
The solution isn’t choosing between brand and performance. “I need to do both, especially if most of my media is moving towards retail media. I have less dollars for brand building,” Murray said, articulating the CMO’s dilemma. “Is there a way to be both brand accretive and conversion driving at the same time?”
For Murray, the answer is clear: stop overlooking creative’s role in performance. “Cannes is a perfect place to look at what is the creative’s role, specifically in performance marketing, especially as a multiplier on what is supposed to be accountable media.”
You’re watching “Dispatches from Cannes Lions 2025: Interviews on Innovation”, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at Cannes Lions 2025, presented by DirectTV, EXTE, Fandom, Future USA, Jivox, Kroger, New Tradition, Ogury, Pentaleap, Perion, Topsort, VuePlanner, and Walmart Connect. For more videos from this series, visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2025 here.
