Cannes Lions: What the Festival Gets Right and Consistently Gets Wrong

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the advertising industry’s largest annual gathering, drawing thousands of agency leaders, brand marketers, and media owners to the south of France each June. It rewards creative excellence, generates significant industry conversation, and has been doing both for over sixty years. It also has a persistent habit of confusing applause with effectiveness, which is a different problem entirely.

If you want to understand what the festival actually means for working marketers, you need to hold two things in your head at once: Cannes produces genuinely important creative benchmarks, and it has a structural incentive to celebrate work that photographs well on a stage rather than work that moves a business forward.

What Cannes Lions Actually Is

Cannes Lions started in 1954 as a film advertising festival. It has since expanded into a sprawling multi-day event covering everything from social media and digital craft to health communications, entertainment, and sustainability. There are now over thirty award categories, each with its own jury, entry criteria, and Lion tiers from Bronze through to Grand Prix.

The scale is significant. Tens of thousands of entries are submitted each year. Hundreds of jurors from across the industry review them. The winners are announced across a week of ceremonies that generate substantial press coverage, and the Grand Prix winners in particular become reference points that creative directors and strategists cite for years afterward.

For agency leaders, winning at Cannes carries commercial weight. It signals creative credentials to prospective clients, helps attract senior talent, and provides a shorthand for quality that travels across markets. I have seen this dynamic operate from both sides. When I was growing an agency, the question of whether we were producing award-calibre work was never purely about ego. It was about what kind of clients and briefs we could attract. Creative reputation is a business development tool, and Cannes is one of the most visible ways to build it.

That commercial reality is worth acknowledging before you start critiquing the festival. It is not just a vanity exercise. It has real business consequences for the agencies and brands involved.

The Effectiveness Problem at the Heart of the Festival

Here is the tension that has followed Cannes for decades. The festival judges creative work. It does not, in most categories, judge whether that creative work drove business results. The two things are related, but they are not the same thing, and conflating them is one of the more persistent habits in the marketing industry.

When I spent time judging the Effie Awards, which explicitly measures marketing effectiveness rather than creative craft, the contrast was instructive. Effie entries require you to demonstrate what the work actually achieved commercially. You have to show the problem, the strategy, the execution, and the measurable outcome. Some of the work that wins Effies is beautiful. Some of it is not particularly remarkable to look at. What it all has in common is that it worked.

Cannes has made genuine efforts to address this. The Creative Effectiveness Lions category, introduced in 2011, specifically requires entrants to demonstrate business impact alongside creative ambition. It is one of the harder categories to win precisely because you cannot rely on craft alone. But it remains a single category within a much larger festival structure that still predominantly rewards how work looks and feels rather than what it delivers.

The practical consequence for brand marketers is that Cannes winners should be treated as a creative reference library, not a performance benchmark. If you are trying to understand what bold brand-building looks like, what unexpected creative territories are being explored, or how brands are handling cultural moments, the winners shortlist is genuinely useful. If you are trying to understand what drives revenue growth or customer acquisition, you need to look elsewhere. The Forrester intelligent growth model offers a more commercially grounded framework for thinking about where marketing investment should actually go.

What the Festival Gets Genuinely Right

It would be easy to write Cannes off as an industry self-congratulation exercise, and some critics do exactly that. I think that misses something important.

The festival creates a concentrated moment of creative ambition that the industry needs. When you spend most of your working year managing budgets, client relationships, and performance dashboards, it is easy to lose sight of what genuinely excellent creative thinking looks like. Cannes forces a recalibration. It says: this is what is possible when craft, strategy, and bravery align. That is worth something.

The case study culture that Cannes has built is also underrated. The process of preparing a Cannes entry requires agencies and brands to articulate what they were trying to do, why they made the creative choices they made, and what happened as a result. Even when the results section is thin, the strategic and creative thinking documented in those case studies is often excellent. Some of the best creative strategy writing in the industry comes out of Cannes entry preparation.

The festival has also become a meaningful venue for conversations that go beyond individual campaigns. The talks programme, the Lions Health and Lions Entertainment tracks, and the growing presence of technology and media companies have turned Cannes into something closer to a full industry forum. The conversations happening on the Croisette in June increasingly reflect where the industry is heading, not just where it has been.

For brands thinking about go-to-market and growth strategy, the Cannes ecosystem offers a useful lens on how creative ambition and market positioning interact. The brands that show up consistently in the winners lists tend to be brands with clear points of view, not just big budgets.

The Agency Incentive Problem

There is a structural issue worth naming directly. Agencies enter Cannes to win. Winning helps them attract clients and talent. This creates an incentive to produce work that wins awards, which is not always the same as producing work that solves client problems.

I have seen this play out in agency environments. The brief that gets the most internal creative energy is often the one with award potential, not necessarily the one with the most commercial complexity or the client with the most urgent business need. That is a misalignment that clients should be aware of, and that good agency leaders should actively manage.

There is also the question of what gets entered. Cannes entries are self-selected. Agencies choose which campaigns to submit. They choose how to frame the work. They write the case studies. The winners list is not a representative sample of all marketing activity. It is a curated selection of work that agencies believed was competitive and worth the entry fee. That selection bias matters when you are trying to draw conclusions about what “good” looks like across the industry.

Early in my career, I was handed a whiteboard pen in a creative brainstorm for a major drinks brand when the agency founder had to leave unexpectedly. The pressure in that room was not primarily about what would work in market. It was about what would impress. Those are different questions, and the best creative leaders I have worked with are the ones who hold both simultaneously rather than defaulting to one.

How Brand Marketers Should Actually Use Cannes

The mistake most brand-side marketers make with Cannes is treating it as either entirely relevant or entirely irrelevant. Both positions miss the point.

The more useful approach is to treat Cannes as a creative intelligence source with known limitations. Here is what that looks like in practice.

Use the winners as a creative benchmark, not a performance template. When you look at a Grand Prix winner, the question to ask is not “how do we replicate this?” It is “what does this tell us about where creative ambition is right now, and how does that relate to our brand’s situation?” The answer will often be “not much,” and that is fine. The exercise is about calibration, not imitation.

Pay attention to the Creative Effectiveness category specifically. This is where the festival gets closest to asking the right question. The work that wins here has to demonstrate both creative quality and commercial impact. It is a smaller body of work, but it is more directly useful for marketers who need to justify creative investment in commercial terms.

Watch the talks, not just the awards. The presentations and panels at Cannes often contain more actionable strategic thinking than the awards themselves. Brand leaders talking about how they made decisions, what they were trying to solve, and what they learned is more transferable than a finished campaign film.

Be sceptical of case study arithmetic. Cannes case studies are written to win awards. The results sections are real, but they are also selected and framed to support the narrative. When a case study claims that a campaign generated a specific uplift in brand preference or sales, ask what the counterfactual was, what else was happening in the market, and how the measurement was constructed. The mechanics of market penetration rarely reduce to a single campaign variable, regardless of how the case study is written.

The Cannes Debate That Keeps Recurring

Every year, the same conversation happens around Cannes. Is it too focused on purpose-driven work? Are the big network agencies still dominating unfairly? Is independent creative work getting the recognition it deserves? Is the festival too expensive for smaller agencies to participate in meaningfully?

These are all legitimate questions, but they tend to circle around the same underlying tension: Cannes is simultaneously an industry institution and a commercial enterprise. It has to balance creative credibility with commercial sustainability. The entry fees, the attendance costs, and the sponsorship structure all shape what the festival looks like and who participates in it.

The purpose-washing debate is worth taking seriously. There was a period when a significant proportion of the most celebrated work at Cannes was campaigns built around social causes, environmental commitments, or cultural advocacy. Some of that work was genuinely excellent. Some of it was brands attaching themselves to causes for award potential rather than authentic commitment. The industry has become more sceptical of this pattern, and the judging criteria have evolved to reflect that scepticism, but the underlying incentive to produce emotionally resonant cause-adjacent work for awards purposes has not disappeared.

I have managed significant advertising budgets across multiple industries, and the honest reality is that most of the campaigns that drove the best commercial outcomes were not the ones that would have won at Cannes. A well-structured paid search campaign for a travel brand that generated six figures of revenue in a single day from a relatively simple execution is not Cannes material. It is, however, exactly what a commercially grounded marketing function should be producing. The festival does not celebrate that kind of work, and it probably should not. But marketers should be careful not to let the festival’s definition of excellence crowd out their own.

What Cannes Tells Us About the Industry’s Self-Image

The most revealing thing about Cannes is not the work that wins. It is the work that gets entered, the conversations that happen around it, and the way the industry talks about itself in that context.

Marketing has a persistent tendency to celebrate itself in ways that are disconnected from the businesses it serves. The festival amplifies this tendency. When the industry gathers in Cannes, the conversation is predominantly about creativity, culture, and craft. It is less frequently about revenue growth, customer acquisition, or commercial strategy. That is partly appropriate, given what the festival is for. But it also reflects something true about how the industry thinks about its own value.

The brands that get the most from Cannes are the ones that have already resolved this tension internally. They know what they are trying to achieve commercially. They have a clear growth strategy. They use Cannes to stress-test their creative ambition against an external standard, not to define what success looks like. Understanding how creative investment fits into a broader growth strategy is the context that makes festival participation genuinely useful rather than just expensive.

The BCG research on scaling agile organisations makes a relevant point about the relationship between creative ambition and commercial discipline: they are not opposites. The organisations that do both well tend to have clear strategic priorities that creative work is in service of, rather than treating creativity as an end in itself.

The Festival’s Evolving Role in a Fragmented Media Landscape

Cannes has had to adapt to a media environment that looks very different from the one it was built around. The festival that started with film advertising now has to make sense of short-form video, creator-led content, programmatic media, and AI-generated creative. Some of these adaptations have been more successful than others.

The Social and Influencer Lions category reflects the reality that a significant proportion of brand communication now happens through creator partnerships and platform-native content rather than traditional advertising formats. The integration of creator strategies into go-to-market planning has become a mainstream consideration for brand teams, and Cannes has had to reflect that shift.

The growing presence of technology companies at Cannes, both as sponsors and as subjects of discussion, reflects the degree to which media technology has become inseparable from creative strategy. The conversation about AI and creativity that is happening at Cannes right now is one of the more substantive industry debates in years. Whether AI-assisted creative work should be eligible for the same recognition as human-originated work is a question that does not have a clean answer, and the festival is working through it in real time.

For marketers thinking about how emerging tools fit into their creative and media strategy, the Vidyard research on pipeline and revenue potential for GTM teams offers a useful data point on where technology investment in marketing is generating measurable returns, which is a different question from where it is generating award-winning creative work.

A More Honest Relationship with the Festival

The marketing industry would benefit from a more honest relationship with Cannes. Not cynical dismissal, and not uncritical celebration, but a clear-eyed understanding of what the festival is optimised for and what it is not.

It is optimised for creative ambition, craft, and cultural relevance. It is not optimised for commercial effectiveness, strategic rigour, or the kind of unglamorous performance marketing that drives the majority of measurable business outcomes. Both things matter. They are not in competition. But they are different, and treating one as a proxy for the other creates confusion.

The marketers I have most respected over the years have been the ones who could hold creative ambition and commercial discipline in the same conversation without sacrificing either. They go to Cannes, they engage seriously with the work, they come back with ideas and references, and then they put those ideas in service of a business problem rather than in service of the next awards entry.

That is what good looks like. Not a rejection of creative excellence, and not a blind pursuit of it. A grown-up relationship with both.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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