There were reasons to be happy at this year’s Cannes Lions.
We were awarded a Titanium Lion for work we knew deserved it. It stood out from the moment I first saw it as an early idea in a meeting in São Paulo. It was the first ever Titanium win for Mars, and the first in my 28 years of building brands.
There were conversations that went delightfully off-script, like a panel with Deepak Chopra on the value of giving care outside of work to shape better leaders inside it.
And there was some brilliant work, powered by high-caliber creative talent. I returned to the Creative Effectiveness Lions jury this year—exactly 10 years after I first judged Creative Business Impact at Cannes. I was excited to see the change that a decade made in creative power grounded in truth, craft, and consequence. I met an extraordinary group of industry leaders, all willing to trade the sun and fun for a windowless room and a shared belief that great work still matters.
We’ve seen and awarded much excellent work. But we also much debated the connection between real life and the world of award submissions: Should a campaign impact be awarded when, just nine months after its Grand Prix win, the client CEO calls the brand “challenged” in their investor presentation? Should we celebrate a stunt’s creative impact when it failed to reverse the core brand’s underperformance reported in the client’s quarterly review? How long can we keep living in a parallel universe of clever stories we tell ourselves—rather than facing the outside world as it actually is?
Then, the dam broke.
Twelve Lions—one Grand Prix, three Golds, four Silvers, and four Bronzes—had to be rescinded, as the winning agency admitted to AI-doctoring its case studies. Another Grand Prix was scrutinized on the scale of local impact that its powerful case video promised. A case study for a Gold Lion was questioned for celebrating the work from four years before the submitting agency won the account. Sales results reported by another Bronze Lion win were strongly debated by local press. The swiftness of action from the Lions team was spot on, but it does little to ease the growing sense of the collective desperation.
Beneath the awards glitter, there’s a deep, real fear of irrelevance hanging over the creative industries. I see it as a client who’s been around for many, many award seasons: a fear that in the face of accelerating technological change, we have lost not just control, but purpose.
Instead of confronting that fear, we turn to the ever more sophisticated “fake magic”: exaggerated cases, inflated impact metrics, and self-congratulatory narratives so detached from reality they feel like bad fiction.
