The actual job of a marketer at a festival like this isn’t just the meetings on your calendar. It’s getting better at the work itself. That means spending real time being inspired by the best people doing your job anywhere in the world, arguing about how you would have approached the same brief, and figuring out exactly what you’re missing that made someone else’s execution this good. Look at what great looks like, then go get better at it.
For years my Cannes routine was simple: stack the days with as many meetings as possible, sprint along the Croisette under the scorching heat, and call it productive. Cannes isn’t cheap, and neither is a week away from your actual job, so it’s a fair instinct to want visible proof you spent both well. The easiest proof available is a packed calendar. If I wasn’t double-booked, I felt like I was leaving value on the table.
This year I did something different. I left room to actually walk the Palais gallery floor, the one with all the work entered for the awards pinned up on the wall, and look at the work. Don’t worry, growth, ROI, and agentic transformation remain very much top of mind for me, for the record. That’s a joke. Mostly. It’s also true that the ideas worth being inspired by are usually the ones built for outsized leverage, not incremental gains.
I spent time one afternoon there with Dean Paradise, Chief Creative Officer at Leo Chicago, going board to board, discussing why something won and what we’d have done differently. It turned out to be one of the better uses of my time at the festival.
Four real patterns kept showing up across categories and countries:
- Ideas built to actually scale
- Brands building with a specific community
- Brands building with people rather than talking at people
- Brands capable of leveraging a story that was already happening in culture and stepping into it the right way.
I’d also argue real business impact and scalability are becoming less their own category and more a baseline expectation running underneath all the others, which is a healthy shift if the numbers are real. But we all know award entries can conveniently weave through data points to paint a certain picture, so it’s always worth taking them with a grain of salt.
We also stopped in the Craft category, which I have genuinely mixed feelings about, and I’ve put that one last on purpose.
What drove real scale
Mercado Libre’s Field Barcode mowed a 104 meter scannable barcode into a single soccer pitch, unlocking a discount for anyone who scanned it. The brilliance of it wasn’t the stadium, it was leaning on broadcast and social amplification to reach far past the people actually in their seats that day: 813 cities, 53,000 redemptions. It earned the Outdoor Grand Prix.
Heinz’s “Look Familiar?” is built on lateral thinking: the negative space around a box of fries already forms Heinz’s own keystone logo, so the campaign just points that out, no words needed. It won the Print & Publishing Grand Prix. My honest reaction was different. The first time I saw the board I thought of McDonald’s, because a fry box belongs to McDonald’s in most people’s heads regardless of what shape the negative space technically forms. I don’t think that makes it a bad campaign. I think it makes it a campaign built for a room that already speaks Heinz fluently, which is a narrower audience than the general public it also has to work for.
Amusingly, an actual McDonald’s campaign won a Gold Lion of its own this year, “Camera Rolls” by Leo UK, for the idea that McDonald’s is the honest last stop at the end of a good night out. Even McDonald’s didn’t need to borrow anyone else’s negative space to make the point land.
The redeeming entry in my mind for Heinz was the one where it took its own “fry box looks like our logo” observation and built it into an actual product: the Dipper, a fry box with the keystone shape built into the packaging itself, not just the photography, now live across roughly a dozen countries. It picked up Gold in Direct. Whatever I think about “Look Familiar?”, this is the version of the idea that’s actually built to travel.
Building with the community
This bucket has a real tone shift inside it, going from more serious to more lighthearted, showing how these campaigns can live across a wide emotional spectrum.
Tecate reopened retail stores and created jobs for Mexicans returning home after US ICE deportation, taking a position on something genuinely painful and political. I’ll admit my first reaction was nervousness, a beer brand finding a tidy business case inside someone else’s hardship can read as opportunistic. Then I saw that five stores are already back open under the new model, with more planned, and that licensing “Frijolero,” a song that’s been a protest anthem against border politics since 2003, was clearly a deliberate choice, not incidental. It picked up Gold and Silver in Brand Experience & Activation. If the jobs are real, it earns it.
Coca-Cola in Mexico took the expression “the last Coke in the desert,” normally a flex about scarcity and status, and gave the actual last Coke to people who live in the desert and actually need it. It’s a small swap in framing that does a lot of emotional work, ego to empathy in one move, and it picked up Gold.
Heineken’s Irish pub work leans on an idea a lot of us have probably joked about with friends at some point: what if we just bought the place ourselves. Twenty-six people with zero bar experience actually did, buying their dying local pub to save it, and Heineken backed them with training, funding, and a resource hub other towns could use to do the same thing. It’s already inspired one more town to buy its pub, with two more in progress. It took the Creative Strategy Grand Prix, and unlike a lot of “purpose” work, this one kept going after the press cycle ended.
Pedigree in Brazil gave the country’s most common mixed breed dog its own official pedigree certificate, which sounds like a punchline and somehow also moved adoption rates and market share at the same time. It’s a genuinely good idea. I’ll also note it already won Titanium at Cannes last year and came back with fresh numbers this year, which tells you the work has real scale, and that the team behind it is good at extending a platform rather than letting a good year end. That’s scale in both senses.
Cathay Pacific revived a beloved old flight path for a one day stadium event in Hong Kong, picking up Silver in Outdoor for letting a shared civic memory do the brand building instead of a brief. It doesn’t scale, but it’s clearly meaningful to that community and region, and that’s allowed to be enough.
Club Deportivo Municipal, a small Peruvian football club, replaced big sponsors with a thousand small businesses each sponsoring one square of the jersey, raising roughly $254,000 and keeping a community institution alive. It made the Design Lions shortlist for the rebrand alone, and it’s a genuinely good way to solve a business problem through the community rather than around it.
Huggies leaned into a fear every parent already lives with. The brand streamed an hour of real babies tested live against genuinely expensive furniture and fabric, no edits, no second takes, betting the product would hold up to the exact scenario every parent has nightmares about. It picked up Silver in Social & Creator. Nobody needed the problem explained to them first.
Vaseline’s Nigeria work carries a bit of real controversy. Dean told me Vaseline is one of the most counterfeited products in Nigeria, and the brand responded by paying a real Nigerian prince to front an AI authentication tool on WhatsApp that catches counterfeit product, leaning straight into the “Nigerian prince” scam trope that practically every millennial grew up laughing about in their spam folder. It won Gold and Bronze in Social & Creator, and it’s a genuine milestone, the first Cannes Gold credited to a West African agency, through Publicis West Africa’s involvement alongside lead agency Leo Singapore. But Nigerian trade press itself has pointed out that the campaign turns a stereotype about Nigeria into an award for an agency based in Singapore, and knowing who’s actually telling the joke really does change how it lands.
Hyundai replaced the factory unlock sound on its rental cars in Puerto Rico with the call of the coquí frog, a sound tourists kept complaining about online and locals consider a point of pride. It took the Audio & Radio Grand Prix, a reminder that “community” doesn’t have to mean charity. Sometimes it just means correctly reading which side of a local argument the brand should stand on.
Building with the people
This is different from the community bucket. These aren’t brands serving a group, they’re brands handing real creative or commercial control to specific individuals.
ASICS put more than 2,000 actual teenage girls inside the design process for a new PE kit, after research showed close to 70% of them would stay in sport if the kit felt better. No borrowed trope, no clever twist, just a real product built with the people it was for, and a brand on the hook publicly if it hadn’t worked. Silver, Health & Wellness.
Vaseline Originals bought the rights to viral skincare hacks people were already sharing for free and started sharing revenue with the people who invented them. It’s one of the cleaner creator economy ideas I’ve seen precisely because nobody’s pretending it’s charity, the creators get paid because the model only works if they keep inventing. Gold, Social & Creator.
IKEA skipped traditional reviews and just recorded what overnight mattress testers mumbled in their sleep, then ran the unfiltered nonsense as the testimonial. Nobody curated a quote, and that’s the power of it.
Leveraging the cultural pulse
The sharpest ideas in this group didn’t invent a story. They noticed one already happening and had the nerve to step into it.
The Ordinary borrowed the actual periodic table to call out the made up science behind skincare buzzwords like “clean” and “dermatologist recommended.” It won this year’s Health & Wellness Grand Prix for exactly that reason: it’s true, and it’s useful, a rarer combination in beauty marketing than it should be.
Heineken answered the real backlash against the Friend AI companion’s subway ads, which New Yorkers were already vandalizing, with a working bottle opener necklace that looked like the AI pendant and one line: the best way to make a friend is over a beer. There’s real skill in reading a cultural moment correctly and activating on it that fast. Well done, Heineken.
When news broke that a KitKat truck got robbed, it became news worldwide, and the brand responded in real time with an armored security escort for the rest of its fleet. You can’t plan for your own truck getting hijacked, but there’s real marketing prowess in turning the reaction into an actual marketing moment instead of a crisis memo. It won the PR Grand Prix.
As flat earthers kept making noise online, Columbia Sportswear’s CEO offered to give away the entire company to anyone who could prove the earth is flat. He announced it on television with a straight face and won the Brand Experience & Activation Grand Prix for it. It’s a headline and a safe bet at the same time, and that’s exactly why I think it’s brilliant.
Fujifilm, working with the IUCN, retro-hacked actual fax machines sitting in actual French town halls, pushing through messages about protected nature reserves on the Green List. The insight is almost embarrassingly simple: every other channel can be muted, blocked, or scrolled past, but French law requires town halls to keep their fax machine switched on. There’s no unsubscribe button for a legal obligation. It picked up Gold for Innovative and Adapted Use of Print & Publishing, and it’s the cleverest kind of attention hijack I saw all week, not because everyone was already looking, but because nobody else had thought to use the one channel mayors weren’t allowed to ignore.
I’ll close this section with the exception, because it’s a different flavor of the same instinct. Sting Energy became Formula 1’s official energy drink through an entirely ordinary multi-year sponsorship deal. What made it interesting is that the brand didn’t lead with the deal. It led with a “discovery”: a producer noticing mid-session that an F1 engine already sounds like the word “Sting,” fans “finding” the sound seeded across reels and unexpected corners of the internet before anything was formally confirmed. Every other case in this section is a brand reading a moment that was genuinely already happening without them. Sting is the one case here where the brand paid for the relationship first, then built the feeling of an organic coincidence around it. Worth knowing the difference, even when the execution is this clever.
Craft: a category I’m genuinely torn on
I’m putting this last on purpose. Cannes hands out real recognition for pure craft, Industry Craft, Design, Digital Craft, Film Craft, categories judged substantially on execution quality rather than business outcome. I have mixed feelings about that, not because the work isn’t good, both pieces below are gorgeous, but because I fundamentally believe advertising exists to serve the business, not to win the kind of recognition an art installation wins. A beautifully made ad that nobody can point to a business result for is still, to me, closer to art than to advertising.
De’Longhi built achingly precise miniature replicas of real coffee shops to dramatize that its machines can deliver café quality results at home. The craftsmanship is real, it won the Industry Craft Grand Prix outright, and I have no idea what it did for sales, because that’s not what this category measures.
Apple’s TV rebrand is the same conversation in a different category, the Design Lions Grand Prix rather than Industry Craft, but the same underlying question. One typeface, one animation language, deployed with extraordinary consistency, and built with physical glass and studio lighting rather than CGI. It’s the kind of brand system work that expresses the company’s obsession with design and still delivers a message. I still don’t know what it’s worth to Apple’s business, and I suspect Apple doesn’t fully know either. For a company this valuable that’s built its identity on design, maybe that’s allowed not to matter.
What I’m actually taking from this
What actually stuck with me isn’t any single board. It’s that four of these five buckets are about a brand giving up some control, to a community, to specific people, to a moment it didn’t write the script for, and that the work in those buckets needed almost no defending from me.
What’s easy to miss, especially if you’re skeptical of these awards shows, is that letting go on purpose, in a way that actually moves the business and not just the conversation, takes brands that know exactly what they stand for, where they play, and what they mean to their customers.
Luck plays a part, and you may not agree every one of these deserved a trophy. But producing standout work like this takes real organizational discipline and consistency, and there’s no shortcut around that part.
The fifth bucket, the one about craft for its own sake, is the one where the festival and I want different things from the same wall. I don’t think I’m wrong to want that. I’m just aware plenty of people might disagree, and that’s exactly the kind of disagreement worth having again next year.