Creativity Is for Life, Not Just for Cannes

Looking at this year’s Cannes film Lions winners, I had two big thoughts. The first is - wow. This is a remarkable collection of top-tier creativity, finding new things to do with our century-old medium every year. It’s a privilege to be part of an industry capable of work as bold, entertaining and human as these Apple, Uber and Nike ads. The evidence for the impact creativity has on the performance of a brand just keeps building up and we live in a golden age of advertising effectiveness.

But my second thought was - are we rewarding the wrong things? At Cannes this year the System1 team launched The Creative Dividend, new work in partnership with the Effies exploring the “Creative Stack” - five ways in which creativity multiplies profit for advertisers. For most of them, Cannes Lions do a good job at finding and awarding the best work. Entertainment, emotional payback, creative and distinctive use of brand codes and avoiding the “extraordinary cost of dull” - all things you can find amongst the Lions winners.

Right at the top of the creative stack, though, there’s “creative consistency”, one of the most powerful ways to create lasting brand effects via creativity, on top of the immediate business impact a great ad drives. Campaigns with consistent elements, from repeating scenarios to familiar characters, pay off in the long run, building brand differentiation and distinction and contributing to profit. And that’s without mentioning the benefits of lasting brand-agency relationships, which also contribute to this ‘compound creativity’.

We handed all this data over to Marketing Week columnist and founder of The Mini MBA Mark Ritson who had the job of delivering this message to a packed out audience in Cannes and summed it up very nicely saying “you’re all taking your cakes out of the oven too quickly”

Thanks to my podcast Uncensored CMO I spend most of my week at Cannes interviewing CMO’s or hanging out with them so I had a lot of opportunities to hear what they thought of Cannes. Many were quick to mention how many Lions they had picked up this year vs previous years. Perhaps they too are asking the wrong question? What if success is measured not by how many Lions you win but by how long you use the work? In our pursuit of the new let’s not forget that creativity is for life, not just for Cannes.

So back to the winners this year.

At System1 we believe ads live and die by how the audience responds to them, not what the experts or juries say. Fortunately, we found plenty of examples of Lions Winners that audiences favoured on our Test Your Ad platform. But there are also clashes between elements which appeal to juries and the ads audiences love. Could creative consistency be one of those things which the Lions undervalue?

Lions, unlike leopards, can change their spots. Humour in ads used to be the thing which ordinary viewers liked and juries turned up their noses at. Last year I noticed that funny ads were getting the recognition they deserved at long last, and in 2025 that’s continued.

This year, four ads stood out for me in our testing. Gold Lions winners from Uber One and Apple in the US, a US Bronze Lion winner for Uber Eats, and a UK commercial for Temptations cat food that carried home a Bronze Lion. All four of them delivered the one-two punch of award-winning advertising that also connected on a wider, popular level.

And just as in 2024, the connecting thread between three of the four ads is humour. This year, a funny ad even walked off with a Gold Lion. Uber’s commercial for its Uber One discount service for students made the most of an entertaining premise - Succession’s Brian Cox enrolling as a college freshman purely to get access to deals on food and rides. Cox’s irascible performance and the hilarious narrative of his intimidated roommate made for a darkly funny ad, and one that never took its eyes off the product and message. Viewers agreed, giving Uber One a strong 3.5-Star Rating on our Test Your Ad scale.

Uber Eats’ Super Bowl ad, with Matthew McConaughey as an intense conspiracy theorist convinced football is all a master plan to sell us food, was another funny winner. It scored 3.7-Stars and took home a Bronze Lion. What Uber’s two commercials also share is a knack for using celebrities brilliantly, taking their on-screen personas and playing on them to entertain viewers, putting them in ridiculous situations and having fun with the concept.

Both the Uber ads make the most of an extended runtime. Bronze Lion winner Temptations, though, makes wonderful use of just 15 seconds of screentime. A hipster DJ cat is too cool to hang with its owner, preferring to crank up the techno. Temptations Lickable Spoons soon change the moggy’s mind. Scoring 4.1-Stars on Test Your Ad, it does what any short ad should aspire to - giving viewers a funny, memorable image with a clear product link and call to action. It’s a great sign that awards juries are recognising work this simple and effective.

The fourth ad I loved, Apple’s story of a Star Wars cosplayer using his phone to find fellow Boba Fetts, doesn’t overtly aim for humour but it’s a charming, entertaining slice of life. And what these ads tell me is that there’s less of a gap between juries and public than you might think. While they have different ways of getting there, they’re both really after the same thing in advertising - what Orlando Wood, author of Look Out, calls showmanship. Giving the audience a show in exchange for their time - entertaining them or giving them something they’ve never seen before - is one of the most effective things advertising can do.

But while Cannes is great at rewarding showmanship, what about consistency? Uber is building a strong brand identity for itself with its witty celebrity-driven ads, and while there’s no continuity of assets between Apple ads, the overall vibe of them rarely changes. But mostly the Lions Winners are about change, not consistency. The Grand Prix winner this year, Channel 4’s ad for the Paris Paralympics, is a daring, surprising ad, but it’s also an explicit departure from previous highly awarded work.

I’m not asking Cannes to shift direction overnight. Advertising is built on human creativity - and isn’t it interesting how little AI figured into the winners this year? It’s only human to be thrilled and shocked by new ideas. But creative consistency is the foundation on which effectiveness is built. Like the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, which inducts artists who’ve been around for 25 years, maybe Cannes needs a Consistency Lion, celebrating the greatest campaigns which have hit a five or 10 year landmark. Sometimes it’s not the loudest, but the longest roar which matters.

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