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In recent years, the Cannes Festival of Creativity has been celebrating purpose-driven campaigns almost to the exclusion of all other work. The big winners have been campaigns like State Street's“Fearless Girl ,” Procter & Gamble's“#LikeaGirl ,” and Mastercard's“True Name ,” work that showcased brands taking a stand on social issues and (not incidentally) made advertising and PR professionals feel good about what they do.
But the 2024 edition of Cannes was dominated by a different kind of creative output. Eschewing purpose, a good number of Grand Prix winners instead tapped into popular culture, creating shared experiences-“cultural moments” was the buzz phrase heard most often on the Croisette-with an emphasis on fun rather than social significance.
Maybe it was the backlash against ESG and diversity and inclusion (in the US at least) or maybe it was just a response to the widespread anxiety created by economic uncertainty and political extremism, but the advertising and PR professionals on the Cannes juries were determined to celebrate work that put a smile on their faces.
There's no better example of this than the“Michael CeraVe” campaign, developed by Ogilvy PR for L'Oréal's CeraVe brand, which won the Grand Prix in Social & Influencer. It was a campaign that turned upside down many of our ideas about what“integrated” means-particularly in terms of the relationship between advertising and PR-and I would argue provided a blueprint for a new approach to PR-led marketing in an earned-first world.
Here are six ways the“CeraVe” campaign shows marketers a possible future:
1. The Brief
There was a time when integrated marketing meant creating an ad campaign and then asking a public relations firm to“PR it.” Even today, awards competitions see campaigns where that was clearly the brief. Of course, more enlightened clients have learned to pay lip service to the notion that“we don't care where the idea comes from” even as they continue to look exclusively in one direction for that idea.
That's why the initial request for proposals in this case was, if not exactly revolutionary at least unusual in two key respects.
First, it made clear that it wanted an earned-first campaign with an as, not an ad campaign with some earned support. Says Adam Kornblum, global head of digital marketing for CeraVe,“You of get what you ask for in life. So what we ask for needs to be pretty straightforward and clear. So tactically speaking, the ask was a 360 immersive campaign with a Super Bowl ad.
“The ask was not, we have a Super Bowl ad, it's got to be 30 seconds, we need social media cut downs, and maybe we can have like three influencers post about it, right? That was not the ask.”
And secondly, CeraVe was genuinely agnostic when it came o the source of the idea, The RFP was sent to many of the largest holding companies, with no stipulation about the response except that, as Kornblum says, CeraVe was looking for respondents to staff the business based on the brief.
“So how you even decide you're going to staff this work will also indicate whether or not you can do this work,” he says.“Because if you show me a program that has a lot of influencer and PR, but you show me a staffing plan with one PR person for 75 hours or 20 hours, whatever the case may be, that really wouldn't suffice.”
Ogilvy PR's president of social and influencer Charlotte Tansill confirms that the RFP initially came to Ogilvy-the parent company-but was quickly forwarded to the PR agency.“Adam was clear he wanted PR, social and Influence in the leading role,” she says-a perfect fit for the way the PR firm is structured.
The brief was also clear in terms of messaging. Says Kornblum,“CeraVe knows who we are. We're developed with dermatologists. It's in our name, right? Cera stands for ceramides, an ingredient naturally found in your skin. So we know what we stand for. This is our DNA. So it was really important that the program was rooted in what's made the brand great.”
It was also important that the campaign be rooted in social media, which has been responsible for much of CeraVe's growth.
Says Tansill,“CeraVe has had great momentum as a brand these last several years, particularly with Gen Z, by putting TikTok and creator marketing at the center of their approach. They wanted to expand on this cultural relevance and momentum-and reach a far broader audience through a Super Bowl campaign that increased brand awareness, brand love.”
There was no mention in the brief of actor Michael Cera, the brand's accidental namesake, but Ogilvy was not the only respondent to make the connection.
“It's really funny,” says Kornblum.“He hasn't really come up much in the past. But in the RFP process, there were a bunch of agencies pitching and almost literally 90% of them brought up Michael Cera. Ogilvy happened to have the best idea with the strongest execution, the strongest storytelling.
“A lot of people said, yeah, you should put Michael Cera in the ad. And it's like, okay, well, that's cool, but how do we go, how do we do more special?”
2. Earned First, Influencer Led
The way Ogilvy made it special was by creating an earned-first, influencer-led program that built anticipation for the ad but stood on its own as a way to get people talking about the brand and get involved in the campaign.
The campaign began, as so many do these days, with social listening, although in this case the idea came from a seven-year old post on Reddit asking a simple question:“Why is Michael Cera not the spokesperson for CeraVe? One is a moisturizer helping people look more youthful and the other is probably the most youthful looking man alive.”
Says Kornblum,“So the Ogilvy team goes deep in social listening and finds this years-old Reddit post conspiracizing about Michael Cera's connection to CeraVe. And then there were a few other YouTube posts that really played into it with great engagement. So culturally speaking, it was relevant because people did really engage with that content. This was already something consumers were talking about. It wasn't like an idea that everybody came up with randomly.
“It was actually already baked in something that was cultural. We just poured water on the seed.”
There was one potential problem as the idea for an influencer campaign began to take shape: Cera himself had no social media presence. No Twitter account, no Instagram account, no TikTok account, no followers. There are some in the social media arena for whom that would be a deal breaker, for whom value is measured by the volume of followers. But at Ogilvy, Tansill and her team-including head of influence Ansley Williams and head of social Christine Cotter-were confident that the campaign would take hold organically.
The campaign developed in three phases.
Says Tansill,“The first phase was where we spread the conspiracy” that Cera was the true developer of CeraVe. The agency posted“paparazzi” style photographs on Reddit, picturing Cera in New York, carrying a bag full of CeraVe products, handing them out on the street. A pharmacy sold bottles of the product signed by the actor and social media went wild.
Crossing over into the media realm, The Daily Mail published a story about the actor's involvement with the brand. YouTube star @thebobbialthoff interviewed Cera about the rumors, and the interview was picked up and amplified by People magazine. Meanwhile, other influencers were receiving gift bags from Cera and fueling the conversation. Cera launched his own website, IamCeraVe.
Says Tansill,““We partnered with conspiracy theorists and newsbreakers on TikTok and spread it into their niche audiences to get a lot of dialogues and different conversations to create the swirl.”
But Cera was the beating heart of the campaign.
“He's an incredible actor, incredible person,” says Kornblum.“You know, he really, once the idea was presented and he was a part of it, he really put a lot of effort into weighing in on the content. There were poems, he wrote those. He had his own website. Throughout the process, in his mind he was like, if I were to be the developer of this brand, what would I say? What would I do?”
At the same time, though, he was“playing coy and not necessarily saying he's the developer of the brand, but letting other people say it. He really he took part in the campaign and really helped creatively make it amazing and better.”
If there was one complaint about the campaign when it won in Cannes, it was the apparent deceit. In an age of disinformation, the argument went, do we really want to celebrate a campaign based on a lie? Ogilvy PR global chief executive Julianna Richter has a simple response to that question:“People loved it. So I don't think we need to be defensive. You don't have to be precious. Let's not lose our sense of fun.”
If people feel deceived, they will let you know. And ultimately, CeraVe was rewarded for its courage and for its sense of humor rather than pubished for any attempt to mislead.
3. What Immersive Means
The biggest reason the strategy worked was that people on social media felt like participants in the narrative than“targets” of a corporate campaign.
Kornblum draws on his personal experience to make the point:“When I started my career, I was an entrepreneur. I created a game. And I ended up selling the game to Hasbro. And I did this because I created a fictitious billionaire on Facebook and MySpace and built all these websites and I noticed even then how people really want to be a part of something. They want to feel like they're a part of a community or they want to be told a story and they want to wake up and kind of have an extension of that story the next day: I wonder what's going to happen next? It's the same way we love TV shows.”
As far as this campaign is concerned,“I think that for the audience, especially with TikTok and the younger audiences, they're looking to be brought into a story, right? And people are looking to be a part of a story. And this was a fun way to bring people into a narrative. And it was playful at the heart. So it was effective.”
With the conspiracy taking hold and social media buzz building, the campaign evolved and the second phase began. Says Kornblum,“Phase two is where we refuted it. We had dermatologists and our loyalists say this isn't true, we can't believe anyone's saying this.”
This was critical to the messaging of the campaign.
“CereVe's core message is that they're developed with dermatologists,” says Tansill.“It's incredibly central and important to them. They're a medical brand. They're a medical product.”
Adds Kornblum:“As long as the dermatologists were really at the heart and the messaging was about dermatologists, then it was okay. I think that Michael pretending to have developed the brand and then for us to have to be able to refute it and take it back and say no, this brand is developed with dermatologists, that allowed us to deliver the core message in a way that resonated.”
Tansill explains:“What we did was enlist dermatologists in the fight, the pushback. So we spread through all these voices across different categories, and then we enlisted derms to push back because every conspiracy needs two sides, you need that tension. And so things escalated.”
Tansill points out that in the past, a typical Super Bowl ad might be preceded by a few social or earned media“teasers” in the week leading up to the big game. But in this case, the momentum had been building for a month, and the core of the campaign was truly earned first.
“Getting people, journalists, the media, and consumers interested in a story, without a lot of paid media, is a difficult tactic,” says Kornblum.“The goal was we need social media buzz and we also need PR pickup, earned organic pickup around that content.”
Cera himself was full of praise:“They did a great job of it with social marketing too, whoever did this,” he said.“It was brilliant. I don't have any social media or anything. I don't even have a smartphone.”
And Kornblum was delighted with the response.“For this program, the storyline made so much sense and I think Ogilvy PR truly did deliver on the promise. We ended up going viral very, very quickly, quicker than I even thought. I did think that it would pick up steam. We had a lot of layers and a lot of different people posting.”
So by most measures, the campaign was already a massive success before the Super Bowl ad aired.
4. Creating a Cultural Moment
It's worth remembering that while using PR to create buzz around an advertising campaign is rarely a good use of the industry's talents, deploying an ad to amplify a successful public relations effort is a perfectly sensible tactic. The rivalry between ad agencies and PR firms is such that we sometimes forget that paid advertising is a legitimate tool of public relations: if you're trying to build a relationship with consumers, an ad can reach millions of them with your message.
As far as the“Michael CeraVe” campaign was concerned, the social media, influencer and earned media work had built, very intentionally, to a crescendo. Phase three of the campaign was the Super Bowl ad , which revealed the truth of the whole program to an audience of 120 million.
Says Tansill,“By the time it got to the ad, the investment in Michael Cera and CeraVe and the story that the consumers, the audience had, was amazing. They've deepened their engagement in the conversation and therefore their commitment, so that by the time you get to the ad, which you know has significant investment behind it on the client side at a Super Bowl, you've built it up instead of just treating it like a moment in time.”
In truth, Tansill says, the campaign had already delivered so much by the time the game came around, that it would have been considered a success even without the ad.“In a way, the New York Times was actually the culmination of the campaign, with a story in the style section, they gave the schtick away and concluded the story before the Super Bowl even happened.
“But you know, the Super Bowl gave it kind of a long tail, right? Because all of the Super Bowl ad reviews.”
The campaign had generated 15 billion earned impressions before the Super Bowl-a statistic cited by both Kornblum and Tansill. After the game aired, that number rose fo 30 million, with the ad doubling the earned reach of the PR effort.
But beyond the additional reach, the Super Bowl ad served another critical purpose: it created a cultural moment that CeraVe could own.
Says Kornblum:“I think for it to become a cultural moment within a bigger cultural moment, and the Super Bowl stage is a big one, is a remarkable feat. But that was always the goal.”
The ad mirrored the tone of the whole campaign, which Kornblum sums up:“The goal was always for the brand to be its best self and for that to be serious but funny, clinical but also like entertaining. We actually call it edutainment internally, or sometimes medutainment, where it's medical, education, entertainment. As long as we hold true to ourselves and tell a good story, it should work.”
And, critically, it came from the same team:“The day-to-day operator of this whole project was the head of influence,” he says.“That's pretty remarkable and also unconventional. A typical TV spot, you would think you would be specific people that work on it, but actually the head of advocacy and influencer for CeraVe global ran the day-to-day project management and all the strategies inside.
“So that's how you can really see every tentacle of this program had Influencer baked in, because the person who was day-to-day in charge was the Influencer guy. So that's a little bit behind the scenes of just how we operationalized this to make sure it was truly earned first.”
5. Impact
The purity of that earned first, influencer-led approach is worth bearing in mind as we consider the campaign's impact, starting with the ad itself. AdWeek named it the best commercial of this year's SuperBowl (as did Forbes), while AdAge opined:“It's executed flawlessly with layered humor that feels modern but also lighthearted and not overly concepted. It's silly and smart at the same time, with great extensions beyond TV-one of the most fully realized campaigns of the year."
On social media, not surprisingly given the fact that the campaign was born of and developed by influencers, CeraVe had the highest rate of earned engagement among the 29 Super Bowl advertisers. The brand was trending on TikTok, where it had five times as many views as any of its competitors, and on X. Google searches for CeraVe related terms increased by 1350% after the ad aired.
“it was incredible even to see like on Google Trends, the spike of interest in the brand on search, during the game,” says Kornblum.
Sales of CeraVe creams and lotions surged in the immediate aftermath, and there was an increase in revenue across all the brand's lines. And the success has been sustained.“The category is actually down since January, and they're up,” says Tansill.
But sales results are only part of the equation. For public relations people, the relationship between the brand and its consumers should always be front and center, and in that regard Kornblum is convinced that the campaign will deliver long-term benefit:“You know, we're still just a few months out of the Super Bowl and have seen strong results across the board. If you look at a word cloud of the campaign, we really were able to see that the messages we wanted to land, like 'developed with dermatologists,' were at the forefront of the messaging.”
Adds Richter, summing up the takeaways from this work:“There's a reason why political campaigns run several months. It allows for that ongoing movement and for the ideology to permeate and people to start moving from conversation to action. It's about taking that attention and the advocacy and turning that into true business impact beyond just the conversation that it's driving. And beyond just impressions, which is one of the issues that we have all struggled with over the years.”
From my own perspective, there is one additional lesson, and it has to do with the way social and influencer marketing-and allowing PR to lead on integrated campaigns-might change the economics of the industry.
Because make no mistake, this was a big budget campaign. It combined every modern marketing element from influencer to earned, and included a huge, high-profile paid advertisement, and it was conceived and executed by a public relations agency. That lays down a marker.
6.
More of the Same
And so the big question becomes, was the“Michael CeraVe” campaign a one-off, o does it signal a sea change? Did Ogilvy PR capture lightning in a bottle, or will it be able to replicate what it did here?
Richter, not surprisingly, is convinced that the answer is the latter. With more clients coming to Ogilvy and asking for the same approach, she says, the agency has decided to codify what it did, christening it“immersive communications” because“it's surround sound, it's multi-channel, it's multi-layered, it rolls out over time, and it invites audiences to play a key role, not just listen.”
There is a slide the agency shows when it talks about it's CeraVe work that lays out the planned timeline of the campaign in its three phases across earned, influencer and social, the company's website, and more. It shows that just how the campaign was“meticulously planned and orchestrated for virality,” as Richter says.
“This is the slide that every client we talk to, they're taking pictures. This is immersive communications in action.”
As proof of scale, Ogilvy PR points to its work with Coca-Cola.“If you think two years ago, it was all about advertising,” says Richter. But one of the beverage companies most successful new efforts is the Foodmarks campaign , which is about“destinations and experiences crafted with a blend of three essential elements: the perfect moment, the perfect meal, and an ice-cold Coca‐Cola.”
This, says Matt Buchanan. Ogilvy's EMEA president, integrated communications and global brand PR lead, is a campaign“where there wasn't a TV ad, it was all influence-led, social led. For Coke to launch a global campaign, a significant investment with no TV ad, is a huge breakthrough.”
The firm has also led a campaign for Coke Creations that has a lot in common with the CeraVe work. The brief was to create a social campaign that would launch Coke Creations Y3000, a version of Coke that is meant to taste like“the future,” and pique the curiosity of Gen Z consumers.
The brand collaborated with AI to create a new flavor“showing Gen Z that the future with AI is pretty sweet.” It partnered with a gaming company for the first time ever, launching Coca-Cola Creations Ultimate. It dropped“selfie-flavored” Happy Tears on the TikTok shop. And K-pop fans got their own flavor with K-Wave.
Much of the work was celebrity-led, but all of it invited Coke consumers into the storytelling process, making them participants and co-creators.
Says Coca-Cola global vice president of creative strategy and content Islam ElDessouky:“Coca-Cola has been founded on clear pillars like its authenticity, connecting people, positivity and uplifting all the time. So I think as long as you anchor yourself in a timeless foundation it gives you the timeless effects. So that's the what.
“I think the how is dictated by people, by consumers, by humans. So we started redesigning the how, and it starts by certain mind shifts. So we are moving from exposure, which is the traditional model, to experience. People want to contribute, want to participate, want to co-create.”
The immersive approach can also adapt to different budgets, Buchanan says, pointing to the firm's work in the UK for the Mayor of London, on the“Maaate” campaign , which was designed to persuade men to call out misogynistic behavior by friends, and which was a pro bono effort.
Says Buchanan,“This is a great example where we started talking as a group about immersive communications. It's a campaign where it ran probably 30 days similar to CeraVe. We seeded the language, the main piece, with media, with influencers, but with no brand association. We were putting it out into the culture. And then off the back of that, we launched the campaign with the very hard-hitting research attached to it and the call to action.”
Even beyond Ogilvy, there are signs that this“immersive” approach is resonating with clients and with consumers (as well as awards judges). The“Misheard Version” work from Golin, which won the Cannes Grand Prix for PR, followed some of the same principles, using earned and social to create a cultural moment by combining 80s pop star Rick Astley with hearing loss for Specsavers.
Kornblum, for one, is convinced that the approach Ogilvy PR designed for CeraVe can be replicated-if clients are bold enough to try something unconventional.
“I think it can be replicated and scaled. It's going to depend on the team and the client, what gets put through and what speed. Because I think that a lot of ideas, especially at the start, they probably have that potential. Then as it goes through the process, will the idea remain that good?
“But I think it's definitely replicable, it's definitely scalable, to make a formula around it. If you were to see the presentations that we had, it was very formula-driven. Like, we're going to do X, Y, Z. We expect ABC to come from that. And then we're going to do this. We're going to launch this content on this day, wait two days, this content on this day, wait three days. I mean, it was a real formula around it all
“And it worked.”
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