The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity took place last week and prompted fundamental discussions about what is being celebrated in Le Palais and along La Croisette during this five-day assault on the senses.
More to the point, it raised questions about the very future of creativity, its primacy at the festival, and where marcomms is going in the next 12 months and beyond, given that Cannes is purely a reflection of the wider trends happening in the industry.
Certainly the beaches and locations at Cannes were dominated by the tech platforms such as Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Spotify, Snap, TikTok, Reddit and many others.
First of all, let’s get the navel-gazing out of the way. It was a poor year for the PR sector in terms of main idea credits in the industry’s eponymous Lions, but also across the other discipline categories.
Last year’s excitement over multiple Grand Prix wins in PR, Social & Creator and Brand Experience & Activation, plus Titanium, was pretty much extinguished in 2025, where Gold Lions were the apex of achievement and metal was only brought home by Edelman, Weber Shandwick, Golin and Ogilvy PR — plus MSL and U.K. indie Ready10 in the PR Lions.
Omnicom PR Group, which numbers FleishmanHillard, Ketchum, Porter Novelli and MMC among its agency brands, didn’t take home any metal at all. Burson MENA won a Gold Young Lion in the PR category, but nothing else in terms of idea creation.
Shortlisted entries are nice, but as we have seen, the picture often changes dramatically between that stage and the announcement of the winning work. PR credits are not the currency anyone should be boasting about — the industry has moved beyond that.
For what it’s worth, I’m not overconcerned about the downturn in recognition at Cannes this year for the specialist PR firms. I’m sure they’ll all be back competing strongly in future years.
Omnicom’s Ketchum is the winningmost agency in the PRWeek Awards and used to be a regular winner in Cannes, especially with its Wendy’s work. FleishmanHillard has also won at Cannes and achieved Agency of the Year status more than once in the PRWeek Awards in recent years.
At WPP, Burson’s constituent and former constituent firms Cohn & Wolfe, Hill & Knowlton and BCW have good records at Cannes in the past.
There’s a lot of transition going on in the holding company agency space, and I feel Weber, Edelman, Golin and Ogilvy PR have cracked the code in terms of putting effective films together to represent their work more than some of their rivals.
And remember, the raison d’être of Cannes is only one segment of the operations of most of the global PR firms, which are busy helping clients see around corners, providing senior counsel, crisis communications, internal comms and so on and so forth. (Not that any of these activities cannot be synonymous with Cannes-winning work also, by the way).
In Weber global chief creative officer Tom Beckman, the PR Lions had a super-intelligent, thoughtful, passionate and, yes, creative, jury lead, whose line about honoring work that “lived in the jungle, not the zoo” resonated with the greater focus on business effectiveness and results.
It was also reflected by the quality and scale of the brands represented in the winning PR Lions work, which was a long distance away from some of the obscure and frankly irrelevant work that used to win in not so distant prior years.
The PRWeek Awards have always had creativity in the mix but celebrated effectiveness as the primary driver of success in the Awards. However, this year especially, Cannes definitely seems to be heading that way as well.
Take the Grand Prix winner in the PR Lions, Lucky Yatra, for Indian Railways by FCB India Mumbai. It addressed the reluctance for riders to pay to get on their train by adding a lottery element to each ticket bought, something of an obsession in India.
It backed up the idea with smart outdoor and other media buying and produced a massive return on investment. It was strategically really clever, based on a great insight and it was super-effective. Was it creative? Not particularly. But who cares at the end of the day if it more than did the job it set out to do?
Each year, Cannes awards the title of creative company of the year and in 2025 it went to WPP. The holding company’s Mindshare agency also won joint highest points in Media Network of the Year. And WPP won a total of 168 idea creation Lions.
Sounds like a great year for the Mark Read-led entity, yes? Well, not quite. WPP’s market capitalization was down 2% over the past five days and is less than a quarter of main rival Publicis Groupe, which has been beating it up in large media reviews including Mars, Coca-Cola and Paramount. Read is leaving at the end of the year. And WPP is desperately searching for someone to turn around the holdco’s ailing fortunes.
It makes you wonder what this much-vaunted creativity means in the modern marketing environment when awards season is over and the rubber really hits the road in terms of producing return on investment for clients.
As Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun told Campaign UK editor-in-chief Gideon Spanier in his only media interview of the week: “It’s very cold outside and a very tough time for clients.” He said Q1 2025 was the worst since COVID-19 and that he’d rarely known such a level of uncertainty.
He called on the whole marcomms industry to think about how it can be useful to clients, starting the Monday immediately after Cannes. To be fair, he still says that it’s “creativity that truly differentiates us,” but he sure talked a lot about media, data, AI, technology, intelligent content, measurement, personalization and influencers used at scale for a fraction of the price of traditional large-scale creative treatments.
Gratifyingly, Sadoun leaned into the phrase PESO (paid, earned, shared and owned media), which PR pros have been practicing expertly for the best part of decade already.
He was magnanimous toward Read, whom he clearly respects and likes, and remembered a time not long ago when WPP was beating up Publicis in those same big pitches where the French holding company now has the upper hand. He expects WPP to bounce back eventually and for a combined Omnicom and Interpublic Group to be a formidable competitor.
In his words, it’s important for all ships to rise in the marcomms market and for it to grow the overall pie — and strong competition is required if that is to be achieved.
There is so much content at Cannes it’s impossible to summarize all of it, so much. And creativity was a hot topic in many of the discussions. But it’s getting to the stage where the festival could just as easily be branded as effectiveness, AI, technology or all of the above, such is the fast-moving nature of this industry.
Sir John Hegarty noted on LinkedIn that he’d just listened to former WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell on the BBC’s Media Show, which aired before Cannes. Sorrell didn’t mention creativity once, rather he doubled down on AI, algorithms, tracking, data and precision.
Now Sorrell isn’t in a strong position to preach at the moment, given the parlous nature of his own share valuation at S4Capital, but even Hegarty admitted that “creativity without impact isn’t just indulgent. It’s irrelevant.”
On the stage at Cannes, Hegarty said “creativity has always been the antidote. It’s the only competitive advantage that scales, if you let it.”
He added that creativity is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s the whole game. And the role of leadership is to rediscover your founding philosophy, build a culture that celebrates originality over efficiency, make boldness your business model and stop worshipping size.
Certainly words to ponder on, especially coming from such a legend in the industry.
One thing I am sure of is that the primary aim of any of these descriptions of effective marcomms is to earn the attention of audiences and provide value for clients. That’s where the PR industry excels when it’s at its best, whatever the Cannes Lions Festival calls itself – and that’s the space where it needs to lead and continue to run toward.
