Cannes Lions 2025 Signals an Era of Essence and Co-Creation

Each June, Cannes becomes more than a festival. It turns into a mirror, reflecting not only the state of our industry but also the questions that will shape its future.

This year, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity drew 26,900 entries from 96 countries and regions, alongside CMOs, CEOs, and leaders from across business and culture. For one week, the Riviera became a global stage where trends, challenges, and breakthrough ideas were shared and debated.

And amid it all, one theme cut through the noise: in an AI-saturated world, creativity must prove its essence. Not spectacle for spectacle’s sake, but work that grows, involves, and changes the world.

A Silver Lion That Meant More Than a Trophy

For TBWA\HAKUHODO, Cannes began with recognition. McDonald’s Japan’s recruitment campaign “No Smiles” earned Silver in Creative Effectiveness — one of the festival’s most unforgiving categories. Unlike others, it doesn’t just reward bold ideas. It demands proof: measurable impact in society and business.

To stand among this category’s winners means something deeper than originality. It signals that creativity can drive real outcomes, and that our work can be judged not just by how it looks, but by what it achieves.

Three other projects from our teams — Pride Code, The Symphony Plotter, and Smart Eye Camera — reached the shortlist, placing them in the top 10% worldwide. Across the TBWA collective, Grand Prix wins for Telstra, Apple, and Paris 2024 added up to 25 Lions. Proof again that disruptive creativity resonates on the global stage.

Lessons from the Festival Floor

Four of our colleagues walked the halls, theaters, and backrooms of Cannes this year. What they brought home wasn’t only inspiration but hard questions for the future of agencies.

The Ambition to Scale

Kenshiro Suzuki, Creative Director

Inside a cramped, cold theater — far from the beaches of the Mediterranean — I found myself gripped by the Titanium and Innovation Lions. These categories don’t simply reward campaigns. They honor bold social experiments: ideas with the potential to transform the world through creativity.

The format is unforgiving. Only two presenters take the stage. Ten minutes to tell their story. Then, a barrage of jury questions — every answer expected to be flawless. To even reach this stage, projects must first clear the brutal shortlist process. The work that did was formidable: globally recognized architecture, technologies already embedded in daily life, innovations making headlines around the world.

Yet what united the Grand Prix and Gold winners was not their scale of execution or polish of craft. It was ambition.
How strongly were these ideas designed to expand? To endure beyond a single brand, a single year, a single market? The jurors pressed this question again and again: Do you have the ambition to scale?

Projects that existed only once, in one place, for one client, could not survive. And in that distinction, I saw the blueprint for the agency of the future.

The ideas we create must grow larger each time they are executed. They must invite people in, building momentum as others willingly join. They must be resilient enough that the next generation would want to inherit them.

Perhaps the clearest signal of this ambition was in the presentations themselves. Many of the winning cases weren’t presented by agencies alone, but by agency–client duos, standing side by side with the same conviction. That shared energy was more than symbolic — it showed that scaling an idea requires a true partnership, united in both purpose and passion.

From Audience to Co-Creator

Takao Mizumoto, Art Director

At Cannes this year, the strongest signal was clear: fans and everyday creators are no longer the audience. They are the protagonists.

Brands and agencies are no longer in the business of delivering messages one-way. The shift is underway toward a world where creativity is built together.

Take Vaseline Verified. Online, countless “urban legend” uses of Vaseline had been circulating. Instead of dismissing them, the brand partnered with creators to scientifically test and verify them, sharing results back to the community. This effort to grow knowledge and make trust visible earned recognition across categories, including Titanium.

Or Sounds Right, a project that credited the Earth itself as an artist. Sounds of wind, waves, and forests were sampled by musicians and released on Spotify, where every play directly supports conservation. The result: a co-created musical experience between the planet, artists, and listeners.

Entertainment echoed the same pattern. Dungeons & Dragons: The Lost Episode revived an unfinished anime through fan theories, while Abracadabra: From Fan to Featured placed fans inside a Lady Gaga music video. In both cases, brands helped turn community dreams into reality.

Together, these cases point to a new truth: creation is not reserved for professionals or companies. In this world, anyone can become a co-creator.

For agencies, the challenge is clear. Can we design the spark that turns audiences into collaborators? True passion is born not from being told, but from creating together.　That is where the real value of agencies will be tested.

The Comment Section Doesn’t Lie

Shohei Oishi, Creative Director

One of Cannes’ defining trends this year was authenticity. The question was never just, “Is this a great idea?” but rather, “Did it truly work?” Creativity earns its place by how directly and sharply it delivers impact.

As a member of the Social & Creator Lions jury, I heard the jury president put it plainly: “We even check the comment sections.”

Metrics can be polished, results spun. But comments cannot be fabricated. They reveal the raw truth of whether a community was genuinely moved. In the highest-scoring cases, the further you scrolled, the more compelling and diverse the reactions became. People engaged in their own ways, finding new meanings and spreading them further.

That is the power of campaigns in social: to spark community-driven discovery that eventually draws in the mainstream.

The sheer volume of entries in this category confirmed another reality: today, there is no campaign untouched by social media. Exaggeration no longer works. The field is brutally fair. But in that fairness lies opportunity — every piece of work has a chance, if it can earn authentic engagement.

“Then Let’s Change the Contract.”

Takuya Miyazaki, Art Director

One campaign left a lasting impression: AXA’s Three Words.

By simply adding the phrase “and domestic violence” to a housing insurance contract, AXA gave survivors the legal right to seek refuge in emergencies. No lavish budget. No grand production. Just a quiet intervention into a system — one that saved lives.

Advertising has long been associated with making something. That’s why we often equate value with scale, spectacle, or production spend. But this case showed something profound: sometimes, you don’t need to make. You need to change.

The lesson is clear. Agencies must look not just for dazzling outputs, but for the “shortest, sharpest move” that cuts to the essence of the problem. Sometimes the breakthrough lies hidden in existing rules or systems, waiting to be unlocked.

The future of agencies will not be defined by how loudly we can create, but by how smartly we can intervene. The real test is asking: What can we change to make society better? And then, having the imagination — and the will — to implement it.

From Making to Changing

Across the four reports, two axes emerge.
First: the power of expansion and co-creation.
Second: the pursuit of essential impact and real change.

Suzuki and Mizumoto spoke to expansion and co-creation. Suzuki emphasized that ideas must not be one-off fireworks, but living forces that grow, scale, and endure. Mizumoto underlined the importance of building “entry points for co-creation,” where brands and fans shape stories together. Both perspectives highlight a shared truth: ideas must be designed to involve people and continue spreading long after launch.

Oishi and Miyazaki, on the other hand, focused on essential impact. Oishi pointed to authenticity as Cannes’ defining undercurrent: campaigns win not through surface spectacle, but by earning real trust and genuine response. Miyazaki echoed this with his call for systemic interventions — solving problems not through bigger productions, but by changing existing structures. Both remind us that true value lies not in appearances, but in tangible, lasting change.

Together, their voices converge on a single message: the future of creativity lies not in what we make, but in what we change — and who we bring along to expand it.

The Hard Question in the AI Era

This year also carried a sharp reminder. In an unprecedented move, Cannes revoked several Grand Prix awards after discovering fabricated results, created with AI-generated and manipulated footage.

Technology now makes it easier than ever to “look impressive.” But surface-level spectacle is not enough. What matters — and what Cannes ultimately demanded — is whether work creates value that truly moves people and society.

That essential question remains:
Are we creating value that matters?

The Hard Question in the AI Era

The insights from Cannes 2025 sharpen both our pride and our responsibility. Creativity’s role is not simply to produce, but to expand, to co-create, to intervene — and to change.

With the lessons and challenges of this year’s festival in hand, TBWA\HAKUHODO will continue to push forward — striving to build work that does more than win awards, work that drives real and lasting impact.