It’s high time the ad industry acknowledged the barbarians* at its gate and gave small businesses their own category at Cannes Lions.
GroupM estimated that global ad spend surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in 2024 and, in our hearts, I think we all know big brands weren’t the ones driving that growth.
There is no research — at least, not that I’ve seen — that breaks down global marketing spend by size of advertiser, but you can glean what’s going on well enough from other data points.
One indicator is that advertising investment is increasingly out of whack with GDP. These two metrics used to move in sync, but in the UK in 2024, UK ad spend increased 7.6% in real terms, far in excess of the country’s 1.1% economic growth.
ThinkBox’s head of research, Anthony Jones, points out that these benchmarks have untethered because of the outsized influence of search and social media advertising. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) treat these channels as online rent that must be paid, as opposed to tools they can use at their discretion to create or harvest demand, and consequently, advertising investment figures tell us increasingly little about companies’ performance or their confidence in the economy.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say Jones is chatting mince, and it’s something else weakening the once-strong correlation between ad spend and GDP. We still know for sure that advertising investment has been disproportionately driven by search and social media, and both of those channels are distinguished by a long tail of small advertisers.
‘One of the main reasons Google and Meta now own circa 50% of all digital ad spend is simple — they removed all the friction for SME advertisers,’ wrote Shane O’Leary, a marketing director at Zoetis, on LinkedIn earlier this year. ‘The most transformative thing these platforms did was to create intuitive, easy to use, self-serve platforms meaning any advertiser could plug in their credit card and be ready to spend in minutes.’
Broadcasters now, too, have cottoned on that a long-tail of small advertisers is about the best thing that can happen to a media owner, offering insulation from downturns and (should they need it) boycotts, as well as opening up an entirely new revenue stream.
At the Advertising Association’s Lead conference in London in February, ITV’s managing director, Kelly Williams, told the audience that the ‘fat end of the long tail’ (meaning the largest of the small businesses) represented broadcasters’ most lucrative opportunity.
In a bid to attract that fat end of the long tail, ITV last year put together an AI ad production service, targeting small brands that want to graduate from search and social advertising to TV but don’t have the budget for a proper shoot.
For the same reason, Comcast in the US announced in January that it had built a self-service platform, called Universal Ads, that would make it easy for SMEs to advertise against video content on traditional TV’s streaming businesses.
And then during Cannes Lions this week Channel 4, ITV and Sky announced that they would work with Comcast to launch their own self-serve marketplace in 2026, allowing SMEs to run a single campaign across all three sales houses.
If broadcasters can entice small advertisers up the funnel, the main argument for ignoring what is rapidly becoming the growth engine of the advertising economy — that their activity amounts to little more than petty digital shelf wobbling, which has no place at the International Festival of Creativity — starts to lose clout.
Opening up Cannes Lions to SMEs presents some organisational challenges for the festival, of course. Defining SME is the first one. Governments often use employee numbers to classify companies, but WhatsApp only had 55 employees when it sold for $19bn, so using headcount as the criterion would probably result in some absurd disparities. It’s probably not realistic to expect SMEs to fly en masse to the Riviera every year, either. In fact, expecting them to shell out more than a peppercorn sum to enter the awards would be a big ask. The organisers might even want to consider substituting the Lion trophy for a cash prize in this category. But it could be worth the effort and expense, for Cannes Lions and the entire ad industry, to make it work.
The vast majority of what we know about consumer behaviour and effective marketing comes from data from large organisations. One of the criticisms levied by Oxford marketing professor Felipe Thomaz against the laws of growth described in How Brands Grow is that they only apply to brands that are already big (and operating in a static market).
Similarly, The Long and the Short of It was written using case studies from the IPA’s Effectiveness Awards, and I’d hazard that there weren’t a lot of SMEs in that data bank, either.
A well-stocked repository of effective campaigns from SMEs could yield all sorts of new insights and revelations about how people buy and how marketing works. But it’s not just in the aggregate that these case studies could prove instructive.
I’m not suggesting that the advent of self-serve TV advertising will mean that Sparshatts Of Swanwick will start producing films at the level of Honda’s Cog, or that Polhil Garden Centre is going to come up with a strategy as rigorous as Snickers’ You’re Not You When You’re Hungry. (Although, the reaction to a John Lewis-esque Christmas ad put out by a small pub in Enniskillen in 2023 suggests you shouldn’t rule out the prospect entirely.)
But you should never underestimate the invention that can spring from the lower leagues and even the amateur ranks of an industry. Just look at how many publishers today take inspiration from the formats and language that emerged out of the blogosphere or were honed on social media.
That’s not to denigrate multinational marketers or the creatives and strategists who dedicated themselves to their craft. If anything, this industry needs more professional standards, not fewer. It’s just that being a part of a large organisation and dealing with substantial budgets usually engenders caution, process, and adherence to established precedents and ways of working. SME advertisers are free to experiment in ways that big brands and agencies can’t, and probably shouldn’t, because they don’t make sense based on what we already know about how advertising works.
Granted, a lot of those marketing experiments by SMEs will fail, but a fraction of them will perform better than anyone would have expected for reasons that aren’t intuitive, and these could point the way to new, more effective ways of working.
So, broaden the church of Cannes Lions and welcome SME advertisers. The industry has nothing to fear but potentially lots to learn.
*Metaphorical barbarians, of course. Some of my best friends are small-business owners.