What Oprah’s Cannes talk can teach us about making audiences feel understood
Oprah Winfrey was at Cannes Lions this year to collect the coveted Lion Heart Award, given in recognition of a career spent giving back well beyond her day job. Chairman Philip Thomas had been inviting her to the stage for 14 years. This time, one of the most famous people on the planet, and a genuinely successful brand in her own right, finally said yes.
With the room packed with brand and marketing experts (and let’s be real, some serious fans) looking to Oprah for wisdom, Philip Thomas asked her the question so many people there wanted to know: how do you build a brand like Oprah?
Her answer wasn’t what most expected. She said she’d spent years resisting the word “brand” altogether. She’d never wanted to be one.
What she’d actually spent four decades doing was trying to connect with people. Understanding them was how she got there.
In the early years of her show, Oprah used to sign autographs after every recording. At some point she stopped, and started sitting with the audience instead, asking where they’d come from and what was going on in their lives.
She kept doing it after almost every show, for years, while her producers waited to bring in the next audience. She called those conversations her focus groups. She knew that connecting with her audiences meant knowing them first.
She noticed something else, across almost every interview she’d ever done. However big the guest, they’d turn to her at some point, on camera or during a break, and ask some version of the same thing. “Was that okay?” “How did I do?” She said even Barack Obama asked. Even Beyoncé!
“Am I okay is really the common denominator in the human experience,” she said. Then she pointed to something most of us recognise far better than a green room: an argument. It’s in the middle of an argument, when two people feel furthest apart, that this need shows up most clearly.
Strip away whatever’s actually being argued about, and what’s left is always the same three questions: “Do you hear me?” “Do you see me?” “Does what I’m saying mean anything to you?” When we don’t feel understood, we disconnect. Whether it be from a person, or a brand.
We’ve never had more information about our audiences. Behaviour data, search data, segmentation, AI, personalisation down to the individual. All useful. We’ve got very good at collecting information about the people we’re trying to reach, but do we know them as well as Oprah does?
Binet and Field have spent years showing that campaigns built for long-term emotional connection outperform short-term activation on nearly every measure that matters commercially, from pricing power to profit. System1’s work points the same way: it’s emotional response, not recall, that predicts whether advertising actually grows a brand. Kantar’s Meaningfully Different Brands research tells a similar story from the customer’s side. Knowing people well builds emotional resonance. That resonance builds trust. And trust is what eventually turns into growth. The brands that shortcut the first step tend to feel it further down the line.
It’s a key reason why creators have built a kind of trust that advertising has struggled to match. Authenticity counts for something, but understanding counts for more. Many creators have spent years actually listening to their communities: reading comments, noticing what resonates, adjusting when something doesn’t work. Their audience doesn’t just watch what they make. They help shape it. This ongoing attention to real people is exactly why the trust is there.
AI raises the same question at industry scale. Every brand now has access to the same tools, the same automation, the same ability to personalise and optimise in seconds. Once everyone has them, they stop being an advantage. They become the price of entry. What’s left to compete on is the thing none of that can manufacture: a genuine understanding of the people you’re trying to reach. The brands that invest in that will pull ahead. The ones relying on the tools alone will start to sound like everyone else.
Audiences have also become more fragmented than I can remember them being, shaped increasingly by identity, culture and lived experience rather than the demographic categories our industry has relied on for decades. In the UK, over half of adults identify with at least one characteristic that’s historically been left out of mainstream marketing, whether that’s disability, ethnicity, neurodivergence, mental health or sexuality. That raises the stakes on understanding, not just representation.
The more varied a society becomes, the more any single perspective misses. No one person, however senior, has lived every version of that experience. Which is exactly why real, varied lives need to be in the room before a brand decides what to say, and how to say it.
Listening to Oprah reminded me why we built The Folk Group around one belief: brands grow when their audiences feel understood.
When people feel seen for who they are. When people feel seen for the experiences that shape them. And when people feel seen for the things that make them human, they feel connected. And that’s the sole reason we exist: to keep brands human.
We help brands stay close to the real people behind their audiences, from the earliest strategic conversations through to testing and refining ideas as they develop. Sometimes that’s through our Real Folk Panel, communications and cultural consultants who combine lived experience with specialist expertise, helping brands spot what they’d otherwise miss and get it right before a campaign ever goes live. Sometimes it’s through our Real Folk Community, giving brands access to up to a thousand voices for qualitative and quantitative research, so decisions are grounded in how real audiences actually think and feel, not who a brand assumes they’re talking to.
Because connection doesn’t happen through talking. It happens through proper understanding.
Just ask Oprah.