The Magnum Ice Cream company has once again used the Cannes Film Festival as a launch platform for its summer campaign. This year’s edition is called “Crack into Pleasure.”
The social-first experiential effort is aimed at positioning the brand as an ice cream for adults that offers adult pleasures. This time around, those adults are Gen Z.
“Gen Z was born into a world of abundance, of options, of copycats, of different propositions. It has not been easy to treat them the same as Millennials,” said Tugce Aksoy, global brand director at Magnum, at the Brand Innovators Entertainment Marketing Summit at the Cannes Film Festival. “Before, when we were targeting Millennials, we could actually rely on getting to them through TV and through one message. Now we are being faced with different communities with very strong passion points, very strong fandoms. You need to actually customize yourself into their attention span.”
The brand, which sells more than 1 billion units of ice cream a year, has customized themselves into that Gen Z world by partnering with pop star Charli XCX and creating an experiential pop up at Cannes. Working with partners Golin and The Edje, the company built out a beach on the Croisette with customizable ways to enjoy their ice cream including a pistachio matcha milkshake in Charli’s signature green, green Brat ice cream sticks and the Magnum Bakery – a place to enjoy an ice cream sandwich croissant.
The brand hosted one of the biggest parties in town during the festival, attended by Charli XCX and 300 influencers. The idea was to bring the creative to the influencers and to give Gen Z the chance to remix the brand.
“We have come a long way from an experience where it was all around a lone big celebrity and it was quite exclusive and fans didn’t get access to it and they could only see one picture in the newspaper,” explained Aksoy. “Now we are doing it by finding the most relevant icon to this audience and giving them the creative keys to the space.”
Half of the party attendees were content creators and the friends and fans of the space. “They are all there. They love her. This interaction creates an incredible amplification that goes way beyond Cannes.”
“Gen Z wants to see things that are truly curated by that talent and they want to see the talent that has had a real say in things and that sometimes makes us so nervous,” said Askoy. “We’ve never handed that level of creative control over before but we knew she was the right partner for us.
The creative will be rolled out for the rest of the year and will support the Crack into Pleasure effort. The idea behind the campaign came out of research the brand and agency did. They used AI to read grocery store reviews and identify what was happening when people do and do not buy a Magnum to figure out what they love about the product.
“We really needed to understand what created that emotional connection,” explained Katie-Jo Flynn, head of consumer at Golin. “The resounding thing that came out across all of the different supermarket reviews was that actually it is the crack of that chocolate that has that real emotional connection. That’s what has been that real moment of pleasure, so when we looked at all the distinctive brand assets that were in front of us it gave us the confidence to take the crack into so many different places –earned, social and it’s a part of our global campaign.”
