Cannes Film Market 2024 Taps LinkedIn PDF Carousels

We have joined the tens of thousands of people who converge on the two-mile seaside boulevard, La Croisette, for the Cannes Film Festival many times so have followed the global film event’s marketing, especially the promotion in news feeds on major social nets for a while. 

As the 77th edition of Cannes kicked off its 12-day run yesterday, we share one of our marketing takeaways from this year’s campaign.

We noticed the Cannes Film Market, the co-located B2B component of the Festival, running a large volume of LinkedIn PDF carousel posts, a format which lets you share multiple pages in one post and enables viewers to swipe through the content like it is a slideshow.

LinkedIn has more than one billion members around the world but getting your slice of this audience is not an easy task.  It is a competitive platform.  We highlight Cannes’ execution here as the carousel format is one tactic that can help you stand out and maximize engagement on this platform.

Here are three examples of LinkedIn PDF carousels the Cannes Film Market ran…

8 Benefits of the Market Badge

9 Palais Venues You Should Know

8 Upcoming Highlights at #MDF24

We counted around 70 carousel posts for this year’s event.  Based on the ones we viewed, the number of pages ranged from 2 to 14. 

One other interesting takeaway from the Cannes Film Market is that in a job posting they ran for a Social Media Manager, they specifically mentioned under key responsibilities: “Choose the best suited format (e.g. video, still, carousel) to convey our different messages”.

Here are five reasons you may want to consider this format…

Engaging way to share your content.  The interactive nature of the carousel format encourages viewers to engage with your content, increasing the potential for them to remember your message and take action, especially with multiple eye-catching visuals.

Larger creative canvas.  People attend events for different reasons so the more benefits you can promote, the better, in engaging attendees.  The larger screen real estate provided by carousels gives you the ability to include multiple value propositions in one post and tell a much richer story.

On-platform content consumption.  Carousel posts don’t require your audience to leave the platform i.e. they don’t need to click a link to view the content on your website as the content is hosted on LinkedIn.

Increased performance metrics. While every campaign is different and you will need to test this format to see what works best for your shows, carousels have the potential to deliver higher reach and engagement rates compared to traditional posts.

Standing out from the crowd. This format is certainly not new but it is relatively underemployed by event marketers so it provides an excellent opportunity to differentiate your marketing, especially in the busy news feed environment.

Perhaps you have heard that LinkedIn carousel posts were discontinued and are wondering how these posts are possible.  Well, you would be right in that LinkedIn eliminated organic “photo carousel” posts in 2023 so to leverage the benefits of the carousel format, you must now upload your content as a “document carousel” i.e. a multi-page PDF as Cannes did here for organic posts. PowerPoint and doc/dox files can be used as well for document carousels.

LinkedIn’s change last year only affected organic carousel posts – you can still run paid/sponsored native carousel ads on the platform the traditional way i.e. using images vs. documents.  Carousel ads offer benefits not available with organic carousel posts, so they are worth checking out too.

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Posted on May 15, 2024