Live in Cannes: SURPRISE! and other ways to win

[Music] Hello and welcome back to the Walk Podcast. I'm Anna Hamill, Senior Editor at Walk. It's day three of the festival and this is our third daily podcast from Canlines. Every day this week the Walk Podcast team is interviewing speakers fresh from the stage and reviewing new research as it drops. It's just like being here. Minus the sunburn of course. So if you're loving a can coverage please follow the podcast on your favourite podcasting platform and if you're feeling especially generous maybe leave us a review. A big thank you for all of the messages we're getting from our listeners who are enjoying the coverage so far. On today's episode we're talking about the power of surprise based on new work from Adam Morgan at Eat Big Fish and John Evans from the Uncensored CMO podcast. We're also talking about why Gen Z media habits are reshaping advertising strategy in sports with Twitch and TNT sports. And finally we're digging into B2B by Ability based on new research from LinkedIn with Mimi Turner and Jim Lesser. But before we get into the headlines of me our guests, a quick word from our sponsor, Sucana. Social commerce is transforming how consumers discover and buy products with more than 60% of consumers purchasing an item after seeing it on social media. Sucana's latest research on influencer and commentality explores how marketers can move beyond engagement metrics toward a clearer understanding of business impact sales lift and long-term growth. Powered by its AI-driven marketing mix solution, liquid mix, Sucana helps brands measure the impact of creators, video and commerce media with fast actionable insights. Download the latest insights today at Sucana.com/walk. Let's get into the news. First up, a quick wrap on the Can Lions Awards. Last night we saw Lions being awarded in the Entertainment categories and Kraft categories. Today, Lions will be handed out for media, PR, creative data and the social and creator categories. The short lists for all of these categories are already live on lovethework.com for anyone interested. The Lions creator program has been absolutely huge in care this year, so we expect a lot of advertisers and creators alike will be watching that category especially closely as ads being continues to pour into that space. All of the award winners will be published on lovethework.com after the award show finishes around 10 pm france time. So what else has been going on? Brand power is being tested by the rise of ansularity according to new data released by Edelman at Can Lions today. In a debate style session at Can Lions earlier, Richard Edelman, CEO of Public Relations firm Edelman, said that two-thirds of people in the world now consider themselves to be ansular, with nearly half of those saying that they refuse to buy brands from people who are different than they are. Data from Edelman's 15 market study revealed that 80% of people were unwilling to buy products from one of the top 10 exporting countries. 40% refused to buy Chinese products, while 30% refused to buy American products. Edelman argued that marketers are failing to pay attention to the segment because there is too much emphasis on "being in culture" and not enough in appreciating identity and community connection, two things that are important to ansular consumers. Trust for brands is more important than ever in a fractured environment, food for thought in these challenging times. Our last story on the agenda today, beauty retailer Sephora has found that fandom powers its sports sponsorship success, which is currently delivering 12 ex-returns. Sephora's sponsorship formula stipulates that every dollar spent must return an average of $3.50 back, according to the brand's VP of Partnerships Celessa Baker. Since starting Sephora's partnerships team two years ago, the continued rise of women's sports has been a boon for the brand. Baker noted that the duality of the female athlete and their more candid social media style has been essential to its success. Anchoring around fandom rather than reach forces a different selection criteria for partners with Sephora now prioritising loyalty, routine, co-creation and emerging fandom. These stories were brought to you by Walk News at free daily email newsletter. Go to walk.com/feed to read more. The power of surprise is underrepresented in advertising. Marketers tend to think of surprise as an executional device, but what they should be thinking of it as a strategic tool, a powerful multiplier for impact and effectiveness. As humans we all have the craving for surprise. It's a fundamental human trait, but we're also living in an algorithmically driven world where personalisation gives us increasingly less surprise in our lives, serving up content it knows we all really like, and herein lies the challenge, but also the opportunity. Joining us to discuss this in more detail fresh from the canline stage are Adam Morgan, co-founder of Eat Big Fish, and John Evans, the host of the Uncensored CMO podcast. Both are part of the team behind the extraordinary cost of Dull Report, which took the festival by storm Adam John, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much. Great to be here. And you've come bearing gifts. We have, we've got a little packet here that says it contains a little pill that says RPE on the top of it and the package says the most effective drug at Cannes this year. How very interesting. And John you had an interesting experience trying to bring these little RPE breathments into Nese Airport. I know, well Adam gave me a package just before we got on board the plane. You can try and blame me. I know, you know, I mean Adam such a trustworthy guy, I didn't even think to question this package. And of course the first thing that happened. It was your first mistake. It was my first mistake, I know. I trust it. No one. Exactly trust it. No one. John didn't get, indeed get pulled aside at Nese Airport just to confirm that they are one of the best giveaways we've seen this week. So well done on that. So what does RPE actually stand for? So RPE is not actually the name of a new drug. RPE stands for reward prediction error. And it comes from a series of experiments done by a scientist called Wolfram Schultz in the 90s where he was actually measuring the stimulus and response of monkeys drinking juice. And what he found was that actually the response, the dopamine hit from the monkey didn't come from when they actually got the reward. It came from the anticipation of the reward. And that once they started to predict the anticipation, the dopamine hit receded. What really spiked the dopamine was surprise, unpredictable changes, either positive or negative. And that is what reward prediction error is. It's a fancy scientific name for surprise. Now I should add a small caveat here. I wasn't actually arrested on my arrival to Cannes. Just to clear that one, I think, is anyone's listing thinking and these are not real drugs. But the point we wanted to make back to what Adam just said about reward prediction error is we're in the business of creating dopamine hits for our audience. And that can be done by basically using reward prediction error in our communication to deliver something surprising to people. So it is effectively a drug, but it's not the of the illegal kind. So fortunately, I won't be spending the rest of the week in Cannes jail. So the cost of dull was a smash hit. What prompted the focus on surprise for this year's talk at Cannes? Well, we wanted to, with the cost of dull projects and our collaborators, do a couple of things. One is obviously to shine a light on how expensive dull was and put the data around that. But clearly, we want to actually do something that helps people stimulate themselves out of dull. And as John and I have been speaking about it, we have been talking a little bit about a sociologist called Murray S Davis who in 1971 wrote something called That's Interesting, which was a study of the great social theories of the previous hundred years from Freud and Marx all the way up to Marshall McLuhan and our D-lang. And his brilliant observation was that things that we talk about of those social theories today are the ones that are not just because they are true, but because they are in some way surprising, they challenge our assumptions about the world and about ourselves. And we really like this idea that actually surprises about much more than just a narrative twist in a story. It's about something that could deeply challenge our assumptions. And it led us to think that actually marketers, as he was saying earlier on, are vastly underestimating surprise. If you look at professional entertainers, they'll talk about the fact that surprises the heart of comedy, drama, magic surprises, central to all of these things. And yet as marketers, we think of it as a little kind of option for the creative director to put in the execution. So how could we look in a more kind of data-driven approach at what the real power of surprise might be for marketing? Really interesting job, what's your take? Well, I spent last year, last seven years working at System One, and System One believe in the power of emotion to predict human behaviour. So how we feel about something predicts how we then go on an act. And the core thing that most people know about System One is that the more you feel about something, the more you buy, and when you want to make people feel happy. And that's what the data shows. The data also shows that most people, when they see an advert, feel absolutely nothing and therefore drives their results. And that was one of the reasons why we did extraordinary cost of dull because we wanted to show people how costly, not-casing emotion was. But there's one something else in the data. And that's surprise. And the actually surprise correlates very strongly to both short-term and long-term results. But System One, we hadn't really talked about surprise. We were kind of almost known as the people that always talk about happiness but support. The price is a very, very powerful force when it comes to advertising effectiveness. So we wanted to go and look at the data and uncover why that is and how it works. And two great sources emerged. So the first one, the great Orlando Wood, did some work with Lumen on attention and emotion. So what features in advertising will grab your attention and encode it into memory. And of course, as marketers, our primary job is to be thought about at the moment where people are buying. So we need to create memories. And then, out of the ordinary, in other words, surprise is the most powerful way to capture someone's attention and create an emotion. So that was really interesting. The second thing, completely different bit of research, last year, with TikTok on social media saw the same thing, but it's slightly different. So again, high attention, high emotion, but it had the biggest possible impact on memory. So in other words, people being able to recall the brand that they just watched, surprise was the most effective tool. So again, as Adam said, it's something that the data massively supports, but marketers are not using it in the right way. Yeah, it's really under-discussed, which I think is why this presentation has really connected. What makes surprise such a powerful multiplier of effects for communicators? Adam. Well, we know from the neuroscience, for instance, that it is an amplifier of feeling. So that actually, positive or negative, it amplifies the positive or negative feeling that you have about it. We know also, I mean, one thing's other that we found out from our research is also it's an amplifier of fame, actually. So surprising communications have five times the chance of generating fame as dull ones do. And actually, if you were there when Byron Sharp and Mark Ritzon were talking the other day about what they agreed on, one thing they agreed on was the primary of primacy of mental availability. So therefore, surprise is as incredibly powerful driver of mental availability is something that people just aren't really talking about at all. So there is lots of evidence that it works. I think the key question then is how can we start to give a useful and usable framework for marketers about how to think about it and how could we point to people who are really using surprise well in a systematic and deliberate way. And that's what the rest of the presentation looked at. Really interesting. What are the different kinds of strategic and executional surprise, which seems like a crazy phrase to say, executional surprise. But here we are. But marketers can use them. We think about using each of those. Yeah, well, we're very much inspired by Les and Peter's framing of things working in the short and working in the long term. Actually for surprise, Adam came up with this branding, the short, oh, or the long, oh, because. That's very good. Yeah, no. But if you think about surprise, surprise can either be something that grabs your attention for a purpose of making you remember what you've just seen. But there are also examples where actually surprise is designed to change how you think and feel about a brand itself. So if you take Monzo, for example, I switched my bank provider from Tidebank to Monzo a couple of years ago. And I've been constantly pleasantly surprised by what Monzo gives me, you know, the ability to undo a payment in 30 seconds. So I can even get my salary paid a day early. And they're constantly doing things that get me to sort of basically surprise me in terms of how I feel about what they do as a bank. And it changes how I look at the brand. And I think that's what we mean about the difference between the short term and the long term is you can think tactically or you can think strategically. Adam actually should talk about Audi as well because there's a really good case study with a German retailer, Audi in the UK, and how they use surprise. So Audi obviously is a discounted. It's been a challenge of kind of all its life, but it's a very ambitious challenge. It wants to kind of grow, share very quickly. And it's consistently done surprising things. The challenge are assumption about what we're getting for our money and what we can find at Audi. So for instance, we might kind of think, well, you know, you get what you pay for with a discount retailer. So they will produce a mince pie at Christmas, for instance, that will match the quality of weight roses mince pies, either most expensive in the market, in taste test with the media. And what does that say? Oh, okay, my assumption that you get what you pay for, that's not true anymore. Well, yes, okay, but that's fine. But it's not really for special occasions, Audi. It's for every day. Lobster tails for five quid. Oh, okay, it is for special occasions. Well, you can't get a decent bottle of wine there. I've got to go for a wine somewhere else. They have now got the world's best tasting champagne, as voted the world champagne awards last year for 15 quid and Audi. And by the way, oh, it's a really bell-shopping experience, you know, shopping for food, kayaks in the central aisle, scuba scooter. Do you never know what you're going to get there? So all those are very deliberate, structured approach to a consistent drum beat of surprises that are just constantly expanding our sense of what this could be in our lives. Because we interviewed Kirsten Halley, who was the XCMO of Audi, who just left earlier this year about what was the most important element for her in a marketer, creating surprise. And she said, "Rigger undiscipline." She didn't say, "Are you wreak a moment in the shower?" Or, "Surrounding yourself with fantastic agencies, although those things are important, it's actually rigor and discipline." So you're going to create those kinds of things. If you're going to beat you, if you're going to match weight-trose at Christmas, you can't start in November, right? You start a long way back. You have great relationship with the buyers. They look at their kind of equality and the value engineering. So we really like that idea that this is actually not just about getting more creative. It's about actually being more rigorous and disciplined in the way that you think about and apply surprise. And also bringing surprise and delight to the customer experience, which is really foundational to marketing as well. But it's become a meaningless cliche. Right. Everybody says it. Nobody does it. And they think it's about offering free biscuits with your cup of coffee. What can we learn from people using surprise brilliantly outside of marketing? John, do you want to take this one? I'm not going to put it outside of marketing. I love that. Well, I think that, well, back to Adam's first point originally, actually, is that if you look at who uses surprise well, it's magicians that suddenly reveal something or it's comedians that lead you down a path on one way and then suddenly you discover it's the other way. Or children's entertainers. And surprise is such an important part of how we connect to human beings and how we grab attention and create memories. And I think the main thing is what we're trying to do is shine a light on the role it can have for marketers, both in the short and long term. So we're trying to force a bit of re-appraisal about how people use surprise. I can be a very interesting example. I think of surprise being used well. So in Serbia, eagles are in decline. So the Serbian eagle goes on as the crest of Serbia, but eagles have been hunted and poised into more or less extinction. They're trying to get eagles to research again. They are going into the villages to try and persuade the old farmers not to shoot or hunt these things. And what they're doing is they're going to these little village bars and they're saying, do you realize there are more people drinking beer in this bar than there are eagles left in Serbia? And that, they say, is when people really connect and start to care because they hadn't thought about it in that way before. It's challenging their assumptions. So there are lots of examples of people using surprise really well. I've got one last example for you, which is I have a comedy dentist. And dentistry and looking after your teeth is the kind of important but boring category. She says things to me like Adam, you don't have to floss all your teeth. Just the ones you want to keep. All right, really good example. That bit of comedy, it sends you one way. It's called Construct and Confound, but actually it gets me to remember and tell you all about the good practice of flossing your teeth. So lots of examples, I think, in education, in kind of good works, in boring but important topics. And even in finance, like Monza, where people are using surprise to actually get us to rethink boring topics. Really interesting. So what would you say are the key takeaways from this piece of work that marketers can start applying from day one? John? Well, I think I love Kirsten's advice here. I mean, that's surprising in itself, discipline and rigor. So we need to think about what's our brand stand for, what are we trying to achieve, how are we trying to get consumers to think differently about our brand? So these are basic challenges we have. And we are bombarded with communication. Most of the communication is dull. So we need to do something to stand out. And most people don't have the budget to literally kind of communicate to everyone all the time. I mean, Greg Hahn has this amazing phrase that I always borrow. You don't have the budget to be boring. So how do we not be boring? And surprise is one of the most powerful ways to do that, both as we said in terms of like tax execution and also in terms of long term re-appraisal. And one example, that's just to add, which is my favourite one from presentation, is the streaming platform 2B in the US. Now most people haven't heard of 2B, right? Most people have got Netflix, they got Prime. And they do something very surprising. So they were trying to capture people's attention on the biggest stage for advertising in the world, the Super Bowl. Now the Super Bowl is on Fox. So how do they do it? Well just at the critical moment in the game, tied 35 all in the final few seconds of the game where everyone's on the seat, you know, at the edge of their seats, they cut to the commentators. And then what they did, they hired the actual commentators to pretend to do the commentary. And then they showed the channel being changed at just the moment to 2B, the menu popping up, you know, a film in 2B being played. And then they filmed people's reactions in lounges up and down the country. And they're going wild because they thought, oh no, someone sat on the remote. What's going on? Right. And so what they're able to do is basically by creating the surprise, you know, challenging people's assumptions they're about to hear from the commentators talking about. And then this happened. They got 70,000 people to download the 2B app in response to that. So it was like an enormously successful thing. But it was born of constraint because 2B didn't have the budgets, they didn't have the brand recognition. So they had to do something surprising in order to cut through. And as Greg says, not be boring. Yeah, creativity. There you go. Still working after all these years. Edmund, do you have any final advice? Well, I mean, I think the thing about this born out of constraint makes it particularly relevant to challenges, doesn't it? So LD is a very successful challenger. A lot of the examples of 2B is a very successful challenger. Lots of people who see using surprise really well are challenges because. because it allows them to punch above their weight. It gets them attention, it gets them memory, it gets them the fame. And the question, I think, really, is not so much why would we use surprises? When you see all that data, why on earth wouldn't you surprise? It's kind of one of the most powerful tools in a strategic toolbox. And we're just not really thinking about it at all. - Really interesting stuff. Thank you for being here on the Watt podcast. - Thank you, thank you. - Thank you, you're having us. - Thank you. - There's no shortage of opinions in marketing right now. But the brand's winning in today's market aren't adding to the noise. We are helping marketers navigate through it. Lions advisory partners with the world's leading brands, agencies and media platforms to transform their point of view into game-changing thought leadership. That means evidence-based research, frameworks, and expert commentary all built on decades of expertise from walk, can lions, effe and contagious. In today's market, it's not enough to just have an opinion. You need to be a credible authority. Take the next step at lions.co/thoughtleadorship. The future of sports media isn't just about who owns the broadcast rates. It's about who owns the relationship. And the next generation of sports fans is spending as much time with wraparound content, athletes, and communities as they are with the game itself. The game is still at the centre, but attention now extends to creative reactions, athlete content, podcasts, memes, fashion and much more. Sports leagues are turning to creators as a central way for their audiences to engage with them. And athletes are becoming creators themselves. Today, we're joined by two experts in how Gen Z is reshaping the sports marketing playbook. Mike Menton is Chief Product Officer at Streaming Giant Twitch. Adam Davidson is Vice President Sales and Strategy at TNT Sports and the Head of Sales and Strategy for both Bleacher Report and House of Highlights. They join me fresh from the Lion Sports stage now. Thanks for joining us on the walk podcast. Awesome. Thanks for having us. Thanks so much, Ramonus. Let's start with you. One thing that stood out in your presentation is that 68% of Twitch users watch sports, but nearly half don't pay for traditional sports subscriptions. How are you seeing the rise of creators and streamers disrupting the traditional model of sports media? Yeah, I guess I would push a little bit back on the disruption framework. I mean, I see it as an expansion. Expansion of the conversation around the game as opposed to replacing the traditional broadcast format. I think that's where live streaming and creators are doing some really amazing things and just because it's very relevant right now, I show speed and the world cup is probably the best possible example of that. Where he's out in whole cities, creating content, et cetera. Does that excite you as well, Adam? Yeah, for sure. I mean, we use creators in a multitude of ways, but what I love without we're doing best is using our access to League IP through TNT Sports and essentially overlaying an authentic and authenticity layer with creators over that by having them essentially be social first sports reporters with our access to IP. So yeah, that for sure rings true. Yeah, really love that. Mike, what advantages do Streamer-led or Creator-led Sports properties have that established leagues can't necessarily replicate easily? Yeah, it's really super interesting. When you see these events and just to maybe give a couple quick examples, Squeezy, French Dreamer, put on GP Explorer, which is Formula Four, Prase and France at Le Mans, incredibly, a buy does a boxing event, and he's a Spanish Dreamer. These attract millions of fans. And it's that deep connection, I think, that's unique. They are all there for their favorite creators and participating because they want to see this. And it goes beyond like that a traditional fandom with the depths of engagement with those creators. Totally. How's the highlights has been distributing league highlights for the last 10 years. And a couple of years ago, they asked themselves the question, what would it look like to create a league of our own, a modern day sports league for Gen Z? And what would that look like? Is that the players would be the best in the world at creating content and pulling in their own audiences? So we have a property called Creator League, where we pull the top Twitch, YouTube TikTok creators together to compete in different competitions, like Dodge Ball or 5 on 5, Basketball. And they pull their own unique audiences into our audience as well. And you have this multiplying effect that is really unique. And I think what is continued to grow as creators continue to grow. Really interesting. What leagues are you looking to internationally to kind of inspire that work? I'm thinking of like Bola League in the UK. They're pulling in over 100 K live YouTube streamers at the time of the matches, everything's live broadcast. We actually just partnered with the US I Show Speed Baller League out of Miami to do a similar model. So we can amplify leagues that are doing it. But Creator League is actually an owned and operated league by House of Highlights, where we hired the refs, we set the locations. And from where I sit on the brand sponsorship and sales side, brands have the ability to-- because it is our league, impact and change the game. We can gamify these things in a really unique way. So we partner with leagues or properties that are putting on creator competitions. What Creator League is our own. And we continue to grow it, you know? Yeah, what are some of the really exciting successes of that so far that you've seen? So our temple event takes place during the summer at a conference called DreamCon, which is in Austin, Texas. And it's the largest African-American owned anime and gaming conference in the US. And for the past couple of years, we've been the nightly entertainment. A couple of years ago, we did a five on five basketball game, Tyson Not, Mark Phillips, a bunch of others. We're in this basketball game that was live streamed on House of Highlights. And on YouTube, it had 450,000 live key currents. So that is more than a professional game in some regards. So that was one of our most exciting moments and really unlocked something for us that this is a really unique and powerful strategy where creators can pull their own audiences into our world. Yeah, and I think just to build on that, the Kingsley is probably another really good example where creators are innovating, they're adding interactive components to the broadcast. So they're not just taking the sport and having creators play it and manage it, but they're also making it a more interactive experience, which is incredible. Yeah, I love this distribution strategy of having the creators' co-stream or doing all cast of the competition themselves. So we have House of Highlights has 100 million followers. So we can provide distribution. But then pulling in the creators audiences to that is just, as I said earlier, a multiplying effect and something that we love to see. Yeah, really interesting. So you've been working on the sports broadcast side for about a decade now. Yeah, don't mind me. What are some of the major differences in media consumption and consumer expectations and how those have changed over the last few years? What are you seeing around Gen Z fans and what they expect compared to older sports fans? Sure. I Gen Z wants content delivered to them in rhythm where they're spending the most time and not necessarily always need to seek it out. So we have taken this cross-platform distribution strategy with our league partners where we won't just post highlights during the game and say, OK, that's enough for Gen Z to understand what's going on in the game. We take the full live game product and translate it into snackable, entertaining formats across the different platforms and deliver to them in rhythm, making it frictionless for their daily non-stop scrolling. So in pre-game, we'll serve them a interactive Instagram story where they can vote on who's going to hit the most home runs on tonight's matchup. And then during the game, we'll have a different approach of instead of just highlights, we'll look for the best fans in the stands. Everything that we do is super intentional. You'll see graphics and overlays and just design our content of breaking down the full game into ways that we're confident that Gen Z will consume. Really? And have you been able to restructure your teams and the type of people that you're hiring to reflect those new priorities? For sure. I mean, we consistently evaluate the algorithms and what our content strategy is. And luckily, we have an amazing talent within TNT Sports and Bleach Triport that are familiar with a multitude of programming techniques and content strategies. So we like to keep our friends within the close. And yeah, I mean, we try to look within Bleach Triport to find those specialty roles as we move to new platforms. Interesting. Mike, what are you seeing that's different from this generation of sports fans coming in? I think it's that desire to have a conversation to react in the moment, to respond to other members of the community, and really just have a conversation also with the athletes, which I think is really super interesting. In a good example, Jalen Brown has been streaming in between his games, connecting with his fans. And I think Gen Z loves that ability to really connect in that authentic way, live, right? For example, Jalen's doing amazing things like launching new shoe brands in his live stream. And I think it's just really incredible how this is expanding beyond not just the broadcast. And I think in that moment, things that creator cast, which is something we've partnered with the NBA in Prime to do, where they can spend time in the game with people they trust, the creators that they love, and have a conversation around the game in addition to watching a really fantastic broadcast. Yeah. Interactivity, I think, is huge in that ability to have that two-way conversation with the talent or personality. Similar to Jalen Brown, we have YouTube shows with Micah Parsons and Mukhi. bets, both who go live from their studio the day after they're playing or in some muckeye cases days off because that's a long baseball season. But that's a unique strategy that we're talking about because a lot of the shoulder sports content, a lot of the sports media world has a lot of recently retired athletes who are providing color and commentary on sports, but to hear from someone who's playing in the action, I think is really unique, a strategy that we share, and then the ability that we give fans to interact. We're prioritizing YouTube distribution, but in the same fashion, right? Like we have interactivity within the chat that increases the engagement on the content, and then that's from the long form, and then once you have the clipouts of that long form, yeah it just makes it that much more authentic. That was a great lead into my next question, which was about athletes becoming creators themselves. You got there ahead of me, but athletes streams are on Twitch grew 20% year over year, and there's now almost 1,000 athletes streaming in 2025. I'm willing to bet that you've passed that milestone now. More broadly, we're also seeing professional athletes podcasting, they're becoming influencers, and they're building direct relationships with fans. Outside of maybe what was previously the official post-match press conference, right? Very controlled environment. Where are the implications of this change for where sponsorship money is invested? Yeah, I think it's just really important for brands to think about the entire conversation, not just the broadcast, right? And be able to be present in those moments. And I think good ways to do that is, you know, you can sponsor broadcast, but to do an activation, good example, DoorDash did something with men and blazers who are commenting on the World Cup and participating. And what they're doing is doing this really awesome activation where fans can vote on the food based on who they think will win the game. And then at the next match prediction segment, they'll eat the food that the fans voted on. So I think that's a really awesome way for a brand to participate, not just in the game itself, but in the conversation around the game. Sports as a business with mass reach is an upper funnel solution for brands, right? Just naturally. So I think athletes as creators and as media brands themselves holding influence over younger audiences have the ability to help move brand programs a little bit further down the funnel with their influence, right? So, you know, we can reach a massive audience, but the influence of the athlete and how they're producing content and how they're creating becoming media brands in themselves. When brands work with them and media companies or and platforms, they have the ability to have the scale, but then also the influence and the influence is, okay, if you have a brand promotion, you don't just hear the brand promotion, what action are you taking in the brand promotion? Maybe not immediately, but later you'll hear about that, that code that you want to put in for a discount or you want to go into a store for a sale. And I think the resonance and influence of the athletes being more in media will bring the fans a little bit further down the marketing funnel, which is what we'd like to say. Yeah, and that I like to think about it as like reach, broad reach, of course, into that target audience. But what they're doing is this deep, deep integrations that drive people to, they get more brand exposure, which ultimately may lead to conversion or at the end of the day. So it's like, it's the, but you need both. It's not an either or proposition. And I think that's where these, these conversations that happen either from athletes or creators themselves are driving new opportunities for brands to have a deeper, deeper conversation. Yeah, I just wanted to mention we have a really unique, stradded access driven strategy. So because we were part of with pretty much every major league in the United States, where TNT sports has broadcast rights, we can create unique social content with athletes or creators from within the arena, where the live game is playing. So we have a series called Courtside Correspondent, where by Courtside seats for your favorite celebrities or sports stars, mic them up, filming them with the long range camera because we're in the product we're owning the production TNT sports and then capturing the full conversation of them sitting courtside posted to YouTube and then the, the clipouts on social. And when we work with official partners of said league, they're able to be integrated into that content. And we're seeing great brand results of more than upper funnel and moving down, moving down a little bit based on that level of authenticity and access. This trend for creators going into the media space and building their own empire. So to speak is really, really interesting. And from my perspective, it looks as though there's a lot more accessibility for different personalities. It used to be, you know, you would retire from sports and maybe hope that you get the call from ESPN and you would get that commentating spot from a broadcast studio, but those opportunities are very limited. We're seeing athletes now grow their own audiences. Do you think that's a major reason why athletes are so interested in becoming creators, building their own podcast brands? I mean, we're seeing so many now. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, it's obviously an, an opportunity to bring their experience and build a, you know, deep relationship with their fans that may follow them into this type of post, you know, post career type of experiences. It gives them new opportunities. Like we've been talking about to activate with brands. And importantly, it's, keep some connected, right? Keep some connected with, with their sports and their fans that, you know, they've spent a lot of time building up. Really interesting. I think people like Alonamar as well are now bringing in and highlighting, spotlighting sports that are more emerging in the US market. Like women's rugby, for example, when she moved over to the UK to play in Bristol, all of a sudden, the stadium was sold out. People want to see her. So there's very real impact for the game itself from having these athlete creators join and bring their personality and audience to the game. Yeah, I think I'll just give you one example I saw that I think is builds on this like brings new audiences piece, which during the WNBA finals Natisha and Courtney for Minnesota links players at the time did hosted 72 hour livestream on their Twitch channel stud butts. And it was unscripted. It was live behind the scenes and built tremendous interest in the WNBA through this new audience that wouldn't normally probably have seen that. Yeah, we applied a similar playbook to Unrivaled, which is a property that TNT sports has partnered with. It's a three on three women's basketball tournament in league. And we essentially set up a studio right outside the stadium. So every, after every game, we'd pull in celebrities, the athletes themselves. Nafishakali, I would, you know, lead a ton of content and be able to really, yeah, provide fans with a unique access point. And yeah, the line between athletes and creators continued to be blended. Yeah. It seems really interesting to me that there's these two trajectories happening. You have the huge influx of money into women's sports and you also have so many female professional athletes getting into the content creator space building their own media brands. Do you see those two things as kind of intertwined in terms of investment and being able to grow those sports while also growing their own brands? I think the talent personalities are leading the way. I think they are intertwined, but I think it's the female athletes and then creating brands for themselves that are helping open new avenues and new audiences for the leagues and maybe not, you know, the other way around. And I think that's part of the thesis of Unrivaled is, you know, the players have equity within the league and they're bought into it. And I think them leaning into the league and as helped grow the sport, you know, I think it's really important because, you know, just stating the obvious, it tends to be those leagues are getting less promotion. They're getting less of the prime time spots. And so having less pay, well, less pay, but having the, you know, the talent and the athletes and the people that are investors, etc. in the sport out there promoting it, talking about it helps build that fan base. Yeah, really interesting stuff. So my final question for you is what advice would you give to brands who are looking to get this right? They want to tap into sports. They want to tap into these new streaming audiences coming in, hyper engaged fans. What's your advice? Mark, I'll start with you. Yeah, it was just repeating kind of what I said earlier. It's thinking about ways to activate that's authentic and into the creator's space and being comfortable in that space knowing that it's going to be deep engagement and it's, you know, be creative and talk to the creators too. A lot of creators have amazing ideas like if you're a brand and you want to do something like the best place to go for an idea, maybe your agency, don't get me wrong, smart people too, but talk to the creator. They'll do something that'll authentically work with their community. And I think they'll drive and see amazing results that, like if you just get away from the top line that the broadcast is going to drive, but then focus on the depth of engagement. That's I think what I would encourage them to think about. Love that, Ed. Honestly, I'm going to listen to the audience, you know, like go to the comments, our content team goes to the comments of our posts. We spend time in the live chat and we think the fans that are there interacting will tell us and brands where they want to go before any report does, right? So just listen, listen to the audience and actually spend personal time on how they're consuming with content and that'll lead you there. Yeah, I love that. You've got to be acting in real time now. If you're not acting in real time, you're out of the conversation. Yeah, totally. Yeah, love that. That's a great place to leave it, Mike. And I'm thank you for joining us on the What Podcast. Thanks so much. It's been a busy day over at the Lions Beach. to be summit. We're linked and launched new research and rising 700 B2B campaigns in partnership with Walk and Lions Advisory. B2B is a $20 trillion category with a creativity problem because marketers for B2B brands aren't always clear on the emotional levers that drive commercial and brand success. The research reframes the role of creativity in driving B2B business outcomes, proving that creative campaigns scoring high on relatable buying situations and relationships significantly outperform those that don't, based on LinkedIn's 7-point biability framework. Joining us to discuss the research findings in more depth are Mimi Turner, head of Marketplace Innovation at LinkedIn and Jim Lesser, Chief Brand Officer at Service Now, they presented on the canline stage earlier today. Mimi, Jim, thanks for joining me. Hi. Thank you for having us. Mimi, for those who may be less familiar, how does this research build on LinkedIn's previous work on B2B biability? Well, we've spent a couple of years trying to answer the question, what makes buyers in B2B feel confident to buy and how do marketers actually influence that confidence? So last year we came to can, and we were on the written stage, talking about the levers of viability, the kind of marketing signals that actually influence what buyers say makes them feel confident. And what we've done this year is actually added that we've looked at a whole set of campaigns, best in class B2B campaigns, to look at whether the outcomes of high-biability campaigns, so campaigns that score highly on those signals actually do compare to campaigns which have low-biability, which have few of those signals. And we've worked, it's been very interesting also to see Jim's work because when you look at the work that Service Now has put into its creative system, it really builds on those signals and really drives that to success. So we've looked at 700 and we've got some really key findings and actually the other part of our session was really walking through how you build the creative system at each stage of the bias journey in a really innovative and interesting way that builds on recommendations, relationships, and the ability to build that defensiveness of a buying decision. You've just mentioned a few of them, are you able to give us a whistle-stop tour through some of the viability frameworks signals? Yes, yes, yes, yes. So if there's one thing to remember from Cairn 2026, it's the more viability signals you stack into your creative system, the more likely you are to be successful. And those signals fall into three categories. Number one is recommendations. So recommendations from your customers, especially if they're similar customers to the people that you are trying to attract as prospects, are very influential. Also, peer and expert recommendations, recommendations from influencers, recommendations are very, very powerful because we can use them to say, to explain why we bought something. And the more similar they are to us, that also matters. So, relatability to your buying situation, you know, a company, a company like this bought this thing, and we're like them, is a very profound kind of matching mirroring signal. And the other dimension is relationships. Like, what's your existing relationship? And how does this business want to build a strategic relationship with you, a partnership over the long term, not just a one-and-year-done transactions? So recommendations, relationships, relatable buying situations, that signal set influences how successful your campaigns are. Really interesting stuff. So, one of the stats from the report was that high-biability campaigns, so campaigns that score well on that list that you just mentioned, are 63% more likely to report increased ROI, and 2.1X is likely to report increased incremental revenue. What specific parts of the biability framework that you mentioned are really accelerating growth for B2B brands? Well, I'd start back for a second, because I think one of the things that was really interesting is, you know, when I say to you like recommendations, relationships, relatability, you actually, everybody clocks it as yes, because we know that that's what we actually look for when we make a buying decision. But in the 700 campaigns that we looked at, actually we found that more than half didn't have had either zero signals or just one signal. So, I would say before we looked at which signals are driving most output, I think we just think that, you know, not using signals has a really different outcome from using signals. I think that recommendations are widely understood. I think there's a lot less about relationships and the relationship potential that you need to embody as a brand, and the relatability how similar you are. Those are very, very powerful things that actually accelerate growth. But I think Jim has a really interesting perspective on some of those, because he's actually embedded a whole creative campaign and system with these ideas. Jim, tell us about it. You've been in marketing leadership at ServiceNow for five and half years. So, this is of course right in your wheelhouse. How are you thinking about viability when you're building your own campaigns? So just to zoom out for a second, when I came into ServiceNow it was coming from a world where I was in the world of consumer NB to be marketing and then bringing a lot of the best practices of B2C into B2B. So when we started developing our work, our campaign, our system, the I was on best practices of consumer marketing. Let's face it, a lot of B2B marketing. Oftentimes gets kind of weighed down by the rational and we were trying to bring something more emotional and more of a best practice from the consumer world. So what we have now with this great viability study is the work that we've done is kind of a pressure test of how do you apply it in the real world because we've been developing our campaign system and seeing incredible growth. So our brand has gone from in three years less than 2% awareness with the C-suite and our BDM audience to 22% unated awareness, tremendous growth. And so when we look back now at this viability study, we can look at the seven levers and say, "Oh, interesting. We went strong on this and strong on that. Maybe we could dial this up next time." But the way that we sort of approached it was to think about the buying group. So in our campaign system, we talk about it as a system, not a campaign, because it's so much more than advertising. In B2B marketing, you have a tremendous amount of content and full funnel marketing. So with thousands of assets in a system, you want to have something more than just a design system to hold that together. And so we created this group of personalities led by Idriselba, who's our CEO. And then we have a cast of characters around him who are real and relatable and imperfect representations of the buying group. So IT and HR and CRM. And what they do is they can have entertaining interactions that actually dramatize how service now can bring AI into every corner of your business and make you more productive, make your work work better. So the levers that we've seen, some of them are really fascinating because things like saying something is relatable to a buying group. You can express that outwardly. You can express it by saying somehow you're more relatable or you connect to your audience. You see them, you understand them, or you can just show it. So what we've done is just show it. And that has, we think, had a big impact on the results. I think what I really love about the whole Idriselba campaign system is how it's scalable for every single individual member of the buying group because they all have someone that they directly relate to. But it also is doing all the showing and none of the telling. You know, it embodies the idea that if you demonstrate a relatable buying situation, the customers that you are trying to attract will be attracted by that. And actually in our session, Jim took us through, you know, the big campaign at the awareness level. Then there's a consideration campaign. Then there's a performance demand campaign. And each of those actually has not just the information that you think you'd give at that stage, but it, all of them are woven in with these viability signals that tell you who the campaign is for. So typically, lots of people could do an awareness campaign, which has a celebrity. And it's just about, here's the celebrity. And here's our, our sort of slightly abstract brand statement, but he says it. So, you know, believe it a little bit more. And, and service and I didn't do that at all. They built into the highest level of their awareness campaign, their big campaign, an opportunity for all the buying group and customers to see themselves reflected. And I think that's tremendously powerful. And I think certainly the results demonstrate that. But also the experience of watching it shows you how, how straightforward it is to do. And I think that really came across. Really interesting. Jim, there's been a huge amount of change in marketing over the last few years. What are you spending more time thinking about now than you did five years ago when it comes to how your marketing is making an impact? I think again bringing kind of some of the BDC principles into B2B. The first thing is are you breaking through and it's something that I think oftentimes many B2B motions are built on demand generation and so they're built on the rational and we've come at it from the other side saying let's look at the marketing science and let's all understand that it's very rational to be emotional and it's very rational to have a sense of humor or to make people feel something because they're much more likely to remember you and getting them to remember us is the key first step because when we look at our total addressable market 95% of them are not in market at any given moment so we want them to think of us when they get to that moment when they are going to make their day one list and the day one list we want to be at the top of that list so that's the mental availability right mental availability you got it absolutely and I think the stakes are so much higher in B2B purchasing because you've got a buying group you've got a significant impact on your career if you make the wrong decision or if you make a politically bad decision in your organization and so when the stakes are higher actually being able to reach those understand them the the messaging that converts is fundamental there are two kind of critical stages in any kind of B2B buying process one is are you on that day one list have you got the discoverability and credibility in the marketplace in order to be trusted enough to be in the consideration set and then how do you navigate from being considered to actually being bought because if you don't get that part of the journey there's no there's no additional revenue into the business and then all the activity becomes expensive because it doesn't drive results. Jim what are the lessons that B2B marketers should take from this research both in the short term and long term what are you going to be taking from this new iteration? I think the the biggest thing is not to look at the byability levers as a recipe necessarily it's not it's not a handbook for how to go make a campaign system it is something that you can check off or think about as the work that you're creating should should sort of ladder up to so you know when we made this work we did not take the byability levers put them into an LLM and say create us an idea we used something called taste and best practices for marketing seconds and now the byability levers prove it so the last thing I'd want someone to say is okay well let's go now and start checking off the byability levers. There's no silver bullet. There's no silver bullets you still have to create something that breaks through that gets noticed remembered and understood. Maybe what snakes for this research? Well we've actually had an incredibly you know positive response and actually I was with a a large group of B2B CMOs only this morning at a beautiful breakfast and what is very interesting is this actually gives us a way of trying to provide a route map to ROI business growth the kind of investment that we need to get from CFOs. We're seeing that brand is something that CFOs sort of distrust in B2B and I say incredibly enlightened but if you stop using the language of brand and use the the language of byability and the activities of byability you're actually demonstrating differentiated results and CFOs are much more willing to invest in campaigns that show your customers that you are focused on customers like them show them that you are recommended by people they trust and respect and show them how similar and how important their ability to work with you is. I don't think CFO say oh you know actually I don't think we really you know that doesn't seem like a thing to invest in but if you see oh we need to invest in chair of what is that's actually much more abstract so we've actually created a way to think about how you have the conversation and actually being able to demonstrate results. Thank you so much Jim Mimi thanks for joining us here on the walk podcast. Thank you very much. Pleasure thanks. That's all we have time for today on day three of Can Lions. We'll be back with more original programming tomorrow and on Friday. Make sure you don't miss an episode of our daily can series by tapping follow wherever you get your podcasts and to read more content from Can Lions be sure to subscribe to WalksFreeDailyNewsletter at walk.com/feed. Thanks for listening and see you tomorrow.