Cannes Lions was, as always, interesting, inspiring and intense. A good 70 years after the very first festival (when it was just about advertising films), it’s now a gigantic event where practically every aspect of brand building and communication gets covered across a huge number of seminars during the week — not just in the festival palace, but also on a range of other stages at the big hotels around town. That’s unlikely to stop it growing even a bit more next year.
I was there together with my client, Brand Marketing Sweden (formerly Sveriges Annonsörer), just as I have been for the past two years. On their behalf, I’ve summarised and analysed the festival in four articles on their website. Two of these are also available to non-members of the organisation.
One of the advantages of the festival’s ever-growing scale is, in my view, its broadened focus on creativity. It’s become clear that creativity isn’t just about commercials and ads, but about brand-building as a whole. That came through in seminars, panel discussions, exhibitions of award entries in advertising and communication, and award ceremonies.
But the size is also a drawback in itself. It’s humanly impossible to take in everything. Even though delegates, in recent years, have been able to watch recordings of the official programme’s seminars for a couple of weeks after the festival — a way of catching up on what they missed at the time.
CREATIVITY – THE MAIN THEME
It’s obviously a given that what’s now called The International Festival of Creativity is about creativity. Often with a broader focus these days, one that includes more P’s than just Promotion. But it’s remained clear just how important — often decisive — communication is for business results. At its best, brand-building has increasingly become a responsibility for the whole organisation, not just the marketing department.
A recurring fixture every morning during festival week was a conversation with three marketing chiefs from different companies with strong brands. They often talked about how the organisation had rallied around the brand, and how marketing works closely with both finance and company leadership.
These discussions aren’t new this year, even if more people are talking about it now. But it was undeniably something of a revolution in 2024, when McDonald’s Vice Chairman and CFO, Ian Borden, and their Global CMO, Morgan Flately, spoke with Jill McDonald, President, Internationally Owned Markets at McDonald’s UK, on the theme “Convince Your C-Suite: The Real Impact of Creativity”. He was probably the first CFO ever to speak on stage at Cannes Lions.
“Today we know that highly creative communication delivers the best results,” was how Ian Borden summed up that conversation (I wrote about it here earlier).
Examples of these discussions, as well as of creativity in a broader sense, can be found in one of the open articles on Brand Marketing Sweden’s website:
In that article, John Hegarty also talks about the problems with today’s advertising which, he argues, has become better at hounding people than inspiring them. He urged everyone to stop “making ads” and instead entertain. Because that’s what it takes to engage — you have to be enjoyable, he pointed out, reminding the audience that 900 million people today use ad blockers. A good few million more pay for subscriptions purely to avoid advertising.
“Let’s be brutally honest: this isn’t a media problem. It’s a product problem,” he stressed later, in the newsletter where he followed up on the seminar.
There, he spelled out the problem even more clearly:
“In the short term, stalking can look really smart. It satisfies the accountants. You can show an offer to a precisely defined segment twelve times a day and track the click-through rate in real time. But stalking doesn’t build the one asset that counts in the end: the brand’s permanent place in someone’s mind.”
RETHINK THE BRIEF
John Hegarty argued that all advertising has to clear one simple hurdle: the Entertainment Test. Simply put, that means removing the logo from the ad and then asking yourself whether it’s still worth paying attention to.
“If the answer’s no, you’re not in the entertainment business. You’re in the interruption business,” he said.
Instead, you should start by asking yourself: “How is this idea going to brighten someone’s day, even if just for fifteen seconds?”
According to John Hegarty, the experiences people welcome all share three simple truths:
- They were made for people, not algorithms
- They convey a clear perspective that could only come from your brand
- They respect the audience’s time by rewarding it with emotion: laughter, wonder, or a truth that makes them nod along
He advises every brand owner to rethink how they brief their agencies. If you only measure success by short-term response from a micro-audience, the natural result is that you come across as intrusive. So you need to start by changing the objective — by asking the question: “Would anyone choose to spend their time on this?”
That question should open every brief, written in big, black letters.
“Then strip out the jargon, and beyond the business goals, you need to start from a human truth — something your audience would agree with, even if they never bought your product. Define what feeling you want to leave behind. Do you want to amuse them? Move them? Challenge them?” John Hegarty advised, adding that if you’re asking the agency to inspire the audience, you have to measure more than clicks.
You shouldn’t ignore data, but you need a broader view to also capture signs of genuine human value: do people watch to the end, even when they could skip? Do they share the ad, even when there’s no prize draw forcing them to? Do the comments reflect real emotion, or are they just bots? Those answers show whether the ad is being received as entertainment rather than as an irritation.
“When leadership sees that inspiring communication doesn’t just feel better but actually delivers better results on the balance sheet, the arguments stop. ‘Stop stalking, start inspiring’ is no longer just a creative slogan then. It becomes a profitable business strategy for building a brand that people actively choose to let into their lives,” John Hegarty summed up.
SURPRISING OPPORTUNITIES
Several speakers raised the problem of a lack of creativity and dull, clingy advertising. The main effect of that kind of advertising is really just a wasted ad budget. That came through very clearly at a Cannes Lions seminar back in 2024, where Jon Evans (founder of the research company System1) and Adam Morgan (founder and CEO of the strategy consultancy Eatbigfish) described studies of 160,000 TV ads in the UK and US, based on a research model developed by Orlando Wood at System1. They showed that dull campaigns need to invest 7.3 percentage points more than advertising that stirred emotion. In the UK, that represented an extra investment of just under £10 million. Per campaign.
This year, the same two spoke about how to make advertising more entertaining and more effective, under the title “The Startling Power of Surprise.”
“Based on the model Orlando Wood created, we found that surprise is surprisingly effective,” said Jon Evans, explaining that previously people had mostly looked at reactions like joy — the idea being: the happier people are, the more they buy.
But it turns out surprise beats joy when it comes to capturing and holding an audience.
“Human brains want to be able to predict what’s going to happen. Our job is to surprise them, because that’s a really effective way to create memory. But it’s also strategically valuable, especially if you can’t afford to be boring,” explained Adam Morgan, pointing to studies showing that surprise takes just 1/125th of a second to trigger a reaction, and amplifies emotion by 400 per cent.
Boring advertising has, on average, a 7 per cent chance of creating a “Fame Effect” — with a big enough media budget. But emotional advertising always performs better. Even advertising that stirs negative emotions. Ads that provoke the most negative emotion have a 22 per cent chance of achieving fame. The ads that generated the most joy raised that chance to 34 per cent. And with surprise, the odds are 38 per cent.
One problem today, though, is that as personalisation and targeting increase, the opportunities for surprise shrink.
“The algorithms are taking the surprises away from us,” as Adam Morgan put it.
SURPRISE AS A LONG-TERM STRATEGY
Peter Field has identified a number of ways to create surprise — from breaking taboos to unusual media choices. Adam Morgan and Jon Evans went on to talk about two types of reactions to surprise: a short “Oh!” And a long “Aaah!”
A short “Oh!” can be achieved, for example, by saying the unexpected, or portraying something in an unexpected way.
Another form of “Oh!” is behaving in an unexpected way — like the gin brand whose packaging looks like a bottle of motor oil. Or the Spanish luxury brand Loewe, which had used a string of famous, young influencers in its advertising. But in 2021, then-87-year-old actress Maggie Smith turned up in a Loewe ad instead. That left a clear mark on earned media, with reach up 55 per cent and engagement 68 per cent higher.
A long “Aaah!” tends to follow when a brand acts in an unexpected way.
“Aaah! I didn’t expect you to do that for me” is how Jon Evans described it, recounting the frustration he’d previously felt toward his bank. Constant checks, strict rules and fairly patchy service eventually made him switch banks. The new one offered service features he’d never expected — like being able to access his salary the day before payday. (Employers pay in salaries well ahead of time anyway, so the bank didn’t need to risk any credit losses, and could comfortably over-deliver and strengthen its brand.)
Another long “Aaah!” can be described as “I hadn’t thought about it that way.” Like when Specsavers, with very sensual advertising, launched hearing aids — built on the insight that hearing loss can be a real issue in close, intimate relationships.
Or when discount chain Aldi turned out to have the best Champagne in British grocery retail in 2025, along with a number of other products that beat the far more prestigious (and pricier) Waitrose in blind taste tests.
Jon Evans and Adam Morgan had interviewed Aldi’s former CMO, Kyrsten Halley, ahead of the seminar, and she argued that the key to being able to surprise is disciplined, rigorous thinking.
“We work hard on this every single day, and the whole team’s commitment to pushing boundaries is huge — both at the company and at the agencies,” she said.
So surprise, too, is something you should work on for the long term. As part of the strategy.
Jon Evans and Adam Morgan explained that the best approach is to strike the right balance between joy and surprise, with joy accounting for roughly 70–80 per cent and surprise the rest.
And surprises shouldn’t be about:
Empty flourishes
Creative arbitrariness
One-off stunts
Eureka moments
Instead, it should be about:
Attention, memory, fame
Strategic power
The short Oh! And the long Aaah!
Rigour and discipline
