[PRESS OFFICE] I have been thinking a lot lately about how we, as an industry, keep showing up to moments versus how people live them.
Right now, the global stage is full. Soccer, tennis, cricket and Formula 1, not to mention that Cannes is currently underway, bringing us all together to celebrate the best creative work in advertising in the world.
From the outside, it looks like the perfect alignment of attention and opportunity.
But the closer you look, the more something feels off. Because while we organise ourselves around events, consumers do not. They never have.
At the centre of everything we do is a person. Not an audience. Not a segment. Not a data point. A PERSON.
They move fluidly through their day between sport, food, entertainment, work, family, culture. They engage with multiple brands, across multiple platforms for completely varied reasons. And none of that happens in neat, campaign-shaped moments.
We don’t own the consumer
Which raises a more uncomfortable truth for us as marketers:
We do not own the consumer.
We do not even own the data.
We borrow attention, briefly, when we are relevant enough to deserve it. And yet, so much of our thinking is still built around ‘the moment.’ The big event. The spike. The opportunity to be seen.
But visibility is different from value.
Dawn Rowlands captured something that has been sitting with me: “Good work is everywhere. Work that works is not.” And that difference becomes even more obvious during global moments like this.
Because it exposes how much of what we produce is designed to show up, rather than to connect.
She goes further: “A lot of work is visually compelling but does not hold up in the real world designed to be noticed, rather than to do anything meaningful.”
That line, “to do anything meaningful”, is where the shift needs to happen.
The true magic
When you step outside the lens of the global broadcast, you start to see what people are doing with these moments.
As Brenda Mongina, community manager at Dentsu Creative Kenya and football influencer/content creator behind Eleven Eleven TV, puts it: “The true magic of this tournament isn’t televised on the main global feeds; it is being generated organically inside local watch party areas.”
That is not just an observation about Kenya. It reflects something much bigger. People localise global culture. They reshape it to fit their reality, their constraints, their communities. And in doing so, they create something far more meaningful than the original feed.
She also calls out the disconnect we keep repeating: “Brands that still believe they can slap a standard graphic onto a scheduled post are missing the cultural shift.”
This is exactly it. We are still building for distribution. While people are building for connection.
If the consumer is moving constantly, across platforms, spaces, moods, and needs, then why are we still anchoring ourselves to singular moments?
Move with the consumer
The real opportunity is not to land on the biggest stage. It is to move with them.
And that requires a completely different starting point. Not the event. Not the media plan. Not even the creative idea in isolation.
But what we already know and too often fail to connect inside our own businesses.
- What does our data tell us about behaviour?
- Where are people engaging with us beyond campaigns?
- How do our creative, media, and digital teams share intelligence, not in reports, but in real decisions?
Because this is where things often break. We operate in fragments:
- Insight sits in one place
- Media strategy in another
- Creative in another
- Data somewhere else entirely
And then we try to assemble something coherent at the end.
Systems thinking
Dawn is clear on this, “The work that works exists in the intersection of ideas, media, and data.”
Not adjacent to each other. Not sequential. Intersecting. Constantly informing each other. This is where systems thinking becomes critical.
If the consumer journey is continuous, then our response must be too.
We need an operating layer that connects everything:
- Real-time insight
- Cultural context
- Channel behaviour
- Creative output
This is where tools and frameworks like Merkury come into their own, not as a data product, but as a spine. A way of holding the consumer signal across touchpoints. And then building around it:
- Disruptor thinking to challenge assumptions
- Curator thinking to shape what matters in culture
- Content Operating Platforms (COPO) to enable speed and relevance at scale
Not for the sake of reacting faster to moments. But for being continuously relevant, whether there is a global event happening or not.
Skipping the real question
Because if we are honest, the question is not: How do we show up at the World Cup? It’s: What role do we already play in this person’s life and how do we deepen that, consistently?
Brenda puts it simply: “Does the brand have a credible reason to be part of this moment, and does the content add something meaningful for fans?”
Most brands skip that question. Or answer it too late.
The brands that are getting this right are not chasing moments. They are building presence. They understand that:
- Sport is one expression of identity, not the whole identity
- Culture happens everywhere, not just on big stages
- Relevance is earned over time, not bought in bursts
And importantly, they are comfortable not always speaking.
Because silence, when you have nothing meaningful to add, is often more powerful than participation.
Dawn said something else that feels like the anchor for all of this: “You cannot separate creativity from effectiveness and you cannot understand this market from a distance.”
I would add: You also cannot build relevance from a moment you do not fully belong in.
As we head into Cannes, surrounded by the best work in the world, the challenge is not to ask what will win. It is to ask; Would this matter outside of the frame it is being presented in? Would it live in the real world; in a neighbourhood watch party, in a late-night conversation, in the everyday flow of someone’s life?
Because that is the real stage. And the brands that understand that who builds systems, partnerships, and ideas around that truth are the ones creating not clever work. But work that works.
Ingrid von Stein is strategic communications lead at Dentsu SSA.
*This is a sponsored post.
