What marketers talked about at Tribeca Festival

Miley Cyrus, Bryan Cranston, and Billy Idol all made it out to the Tribeca Festival this year. So did the marketers.

Marketers have regularly made appearances at Tribeca Festival’s brand-centric track, TribecaX, since it debuted in 2016 as a way to honor entertainment-adjacent brand marketing, but a lot has changed in both the film and advertising industries since then. The brands and agencies at this year’s festival represented a broad swath of industries, but despite the variety, many of the marketers onstage stressed a similar message: Brands need to stay agile and keep up with cultural moments and make hard choices about what their brands do and don’t stand for—a departure, perhaps, from an earlier era of marketing where many brands openly embraced social causes before facing organized consumer and political backlash.

“Cause marketing is really interesting in that right now, everybody is re-identifying what their cause is,” Tamon George, co-founder and CEO of the Black-owned creative agency Creative Theory, said. “The last decade…society writ large had identified causes that, No. 1, it literally cared about and externally shared that they care about. This moment, and I mean literally since January, that has changed.”

Here are other takeaways from the event.

How to pivot a legacy brand: Modernizing a legacy brand like CPG giant Kraft Heinz requires focusing on brand marketing over marketing individual products that may feel stuck in the past, Todd Kaplan, a former PepsiCo marketer who is now Kraft Heinz’s North America CMO, said.

“Legacy brands are an interesting double-sided coin, because there’s a legacy, which means they’re famous for something,” he said. “The flip side of the legacy brand is you get so captured in time of being famous for something that, as time chugs along and industries change and consumer preferences change, you might be like, ‘Oh, that was a brand that’s stuck in the ’80s.’”

In a world where people are inundated with advertisements and often skip them—an impulse Kaplan himself isn’t immune to, he confessed on stage—one way to get them to pay attention is to make ads culturally relevant, preventing brands from feeling outdated. To that end, Kaplan spoke of an effort to bring Kraft Heinz into the cultural zeitgeist after Kendrick Lamar released the single “tv off.” The song features Lamar shouting out his producer, Dijon Isaiah McFarlane, whose stage name is Mustard, in the song—something of a perfect moment for Kraft Heinz, which partnered with McFarlane on a campaign for Heinz mustard in February.

Making authenticity more than a buzzword: Beauty brand The Ordinary embraces unconventional branding, Dakota Kate Isaacs, senior director of new ventures at the brand’s parent company, Deciem, said, starting by using the names of the ingredients in its products as product names, such as its Glycolic Acid 7% Exfoliating Toner. That choice, she said, came even after the brand was warned not to do so.

“We were told, ‘Change your packaging,’” Isaacs said. “‘It’s gonna get dirty on shelves. Change your [product] names. Nobody knows what hyaluronic acid is.’”

In an industry where trends are often fleeting, though, the brand bet that more straightforward messaging about the contents of its products would help it stand out.

“Nothing gets you more excited than, I think, being a little bit of a rule-breaker,” she said. “For us, what was original was telling the truth.”

Building brand values amid political turmoil: It’s no secret that brand approaches toward DEI and inclusivity have been affected by the Trump administration’s crackdown on DEI policies. That shift is affecting brand messaging, too, but George said that he doesn’t think anyone’s yet cracked the code on messaging in the current political climate. One way to address that uncertainty is to lean into cocreation: George mentioned star F1 driver Lewis Hamilton’s appearance in a recent campaign for the luggage brand Rimowa espousing the value of travel as an example.

But there’s no perfect formula, and the uncertainty, he suggested, is probably here to stay.

“Brands are scared of retaliation, they’re scared of policy change,” he said. “They’re scared of leadership being vilified in the media. They’re scared of rogue tweets. Right now, just cause [marketing] in general, nobody has identified what is a safe box to play within.”