The Consumers The Ad Industry Isn’t Talking To — And Why We’re Going To France With LSKR To Change That

At the Cannes Lions festival in France, the most prestigious gathering in advertising where awards are given for effective campaigns, they’ve spent decades talking past right-of-center consumers entirely. Not represented in the work. Not studied in the research. Not discussed on the panels. Treated as a problem to manage rather than an audience to understand.

This year, we want to help change that. At LSKR Connects, sponsored by The Daily Wire, we’re building the day around the consumer conversations the industry too often avoids: overlooked audiences, the dangers of brand safety, and creative conformity. It’s a full day of fireside sessions focused specifically on the consumer, and the marketing strategies that actually can connect with all Americans.

Introducing LSKR Connects, sponsored by The Daily Wire

Matthew Mazzone, LSKR’s Chief Creative Officer and Christine Hoffmann, Executive Vice President of Ad Revenue at The Daily Wire, joined heads to make LSKR Connects, with the goal of forcing the conversation Cannes has spent decades avoiding. A full day of sessions on June 24, built around four topics that the rest of the festival won’t touch:

• The Market You’re Missing — Addressing brands antigrowth strategies 

• The Influencer Orbit — Where trust is won and lost

• Institutional Pressure — How brands drift from their core consumers

• Original Thinking in a Conformist Market

Mazzone, the Chief Creative Officer at LSKR, an advertising firm that’s focused on appealing to the whole consumer market, says that the advertising executives who descend on Cannes later this month are focused on the wrong type of creative. 

“Brands deserve agencies that understand their customers and respect the value they deliver,” Mazzone told The Daily Wire. “LSKR exists because a massive segment of American consumers has been overlooked by the advertising industry, and brands are paying the price.”

“Creative should not be designed to impress the industry,” Mazzone told The Daily Wire, describing what typically happens at Cannes. “It should be designed to connect with the customer. At the end of the day, every creative decision should answer one question: does this help the brand connect with its core consumer and sell more goods and services?”

Surveys consistently show that a majority of consumers are increasingly willing to spend extra with brands that align with their values, and are less likely to buy from a company that takes a political stand they disagree with. 

Credit: Ipsos Global Trends

A whopping 62% of Americans buy brands that reflect their personal values, a double-digit increase in the last decade.

Credit: Ipsos Global Trends

Hoffmann, the Executive Vice President for advertising revenue at The Daily Wire, knows first-hand from her experience in conservative media how important it is for products to “reach the right audience.”

“Consumers who genuinely align with a brand’s products, values, and customer base are ultimately more valuable than passive scale alone,” Hoffmann said. “Our audience is highly engaged and deeply invested in the content they consume, which creates stronger and more authentic opportunities for brands that show up thoughtfully in those environments.”

“We want to join the broader conversation around how marketers can move beyond overly broad, one-size-fits-all strategies and think more intentionally about resonance, trust, and audience alignment,” Hoffman said.

The Daily Wire has led the charge against the politicization of the advertising industry, exposing how advertising industry executives colluded to keep advertising money away from conservative news organizations. Last year, the top advertising agencies in the world were forced to pledge to the federal government that they would no longer allow political bias to influence their actions.  

The forgotten consumers

These conversations about “left out” consumers aren’t just a gut feeling. It’s based on real data.

Kim Whitler, a professor at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, has studied the negative impact on companies that choose to engage in activism. Whitler finds that executives think they’re doing the right thing, even if it hurts their company. 

She says too often business leaders are acting on their “own agenda” and end up making what she calls a “value-destroying activism decision.”

“Having worked with over 1,000 business leaders navigating reputation- and value-destroying activism decisions,” Whitler, a speaker at LSKR Connects, told The Daily Wire. “The most common and most consequential is the belief that ‘doing the right thing’ is a matter of personal conscience rather than legally prescribed responsibility.”

Anne Marie Malecha, who runs a top crisis communications firm, Dezenhall Resources, says the companies get themselves in trouble when they “start performing for someone other than their customer.”

“Somewhere along the line, a brand decides the people whose opinions matter most are not the people actually buying the product. The activists. The trade press. A loud sliver of social media. A consultant that told them what the ‘modern consumer’ wants,” Malecha said. “Whatever it is, the company stops asking who their actual customers are and what those actual customers need from it and starts asking what would make a smaller, vocal noise makers approve of it.”

“Trust and revenue are declining before most brands know they’re in the middle of a crisis,” she said.

Anson Frericks has seen the consequences firsthand. He had just stepped down as an executive at Anheuser-Busch InBev when it brought on Dylan Mulvaney to promote Bud Light. The marketing team was so far removed from the customer base that the company didn’t even see the backlash coming. 

“When companies hire only employees from NYC, agencies from only NYC, and look at their customer base through the lens of NYC, they are missing the needs of a majority of their customers and only realize it after sales suffer,” Frericks told The Daily Wire. “No one wins.”

Josh Culling, the president of Dezenhall Resources, says the “groupthink” created by the fact that these advertising executives are often clustered together in the same coastal cities is a critical issue for the industry.

“Consumers in the middle of the country have a fundamentally different frame of reference to those on the coasts, and are too often ignored or dismissed,” Culling said. “Brands that are too comfortable living amongst their geographic and socioeconomic peers, and too uncomfortable wading outside that comfortable cohort, leave billions of dollars of shareholder value on the table.”

It’s not only a bad thing for the companies leaving money on the table, it’s a bad thing for the consumers. They deserve the industry’s attention.  

So here’s the questions worth asking at the most prestigious creative event on earth: Can creativity really be called creative if it only speaks to half the consumers? Why are we drawing inspiration from only half the talent and only half the consumer base?

Cannes has spent decades celebrating creativity while quietly enforcing conformity. LSKR Connects, sponsored by The Daily Wire, is the first time the other half of the conversation gets a seat on the Croisette.

The cream of the industry will be there. The question is whether they’re ready to hear something they haven’t heard before.