The lights dimmed at Cannes Lions 2025, but the revelations from this year's festival continue to illuminate a fundamental shift in how great marketing actually works. After analyzing the Grand Prix winners, jury insights, and standout campaigns like Vaseline Verified, which earned Singapore its first-ever Titanium Lion, a clear picture emerges of an industry that's finally cracked the code on balancing creativity with business impact.
The Death of the One-Hit Wonder Campaign
David Tiltman from LIONS Intelligence delivered perhaps the most sobering truth of the festival: nearly half of all creator-led advertising spend is completely wasted when branding fails to land within the first few seconds. This revelation points to a deeper problem plaguing modern marketing, the obsession with viral moments over sustainable brand building.
The campaigns that dominated this year's awards didn't chase fleeting trends. Instead, they built what industry leaders are calling "creative platforms" living, breathing systems that evolve while keeping a brand's core essence intact. Think of it as the difference between a one-night stand and a long-term relationship. The latter requires more patience, but the payoff compounds over time.
Consistency emerged as the secret weapon against marketing chaos. While brands scramble to keep up with AI, creator content, and platform fragmentation, the winners at Cannes proved that structured brand systems can sustain clarity and cut through the noise. Emotional consistency, the jury noted, matters just as much as visual identity—every execution should evoke the same feeling, because fragmented emotions confuse consumers and weaken recall.
How Vaseline Flipped the Script and Won the World
The most instructive case study came from an unlikely source: a petroleum jelly brand. Aanchal Sethi and Marco Versolato from WPP@Unilever walked the audience through how Vaseline Verified transformed from a small social brief into the brand's most awarded campaign ever by doing something radical, having the brand verify user hacks instead of promoting its own agenda.
The campaign's genius lay in its reversal of traditional brand-consumer dynamics. Instead of preaching to their audience, Vaseline started listening. Users were already creating content about unconventional Vaseline uses, but misinformation ran rampant. The brand stepped in not as a lecturer, but as a helpful validator, earning credibility while addressing genuine safety concerns.
Platform-first creativity became the defining characteristic of award-winning work. As Theresa Ong from Meta's Creative Shop explained, the strongest campaigns weren't adapted for platforms, they were built for them. Tailored executions, not generic adaptations, cut through the digital clutter. This approach helped Vaseline Verified spread across markets organically, proving that authentic content travels faster than polished advertising.
The New Marketing Leader Speaks Multiple Languages
Sir Martin Sorrell, Sophie Devonshire, and other industry veterans painted a picture of the modern CMO that would be unrecognizable to marketers from even five years ago. Today's marketing leaders must be fluent in strategy, AI, performance metrics, and margin improvement. Marketing has evolved from a communications function to a core business capability.
Mira Bharin from Trust Bank and Stuart La Brooy from Sephora demonstrated this new breed of marketing leadership during their panel discussion. They showed how creativity must connect to both hearts and numbers, it's only valuable when it drives customer engagement, brand trust, and measurable business growth.
The most successful campaigns now start with business strategy, not creative briefs. Marketing teams that win are deeply embedded across the entire customer journey, using creativity to scale personalization while driving results. This integration across all touchpoints multiplied campaign impact by up to half, according to research presented at the festival.
Asia's Untapped Creative Superpower
Rica Facundo from WARC highlighted one of the festival's most important underreported stories: Asia's creative voice remains distinct and underleveraged on the global stage. The region's diversity, speed, and cultural complexity offer unique advantages that, when fused with global brand standards, become powerful growth engines.
Small budgets proved to be opportunities, not barriers, when paired with cultural precision. Campaigns like Reddit's Navy Hunt and GoDaddy's AI launch demonstrated that tight budgets combined with sharp cultural insights can still drive scale and success. The key is clarity of purpose, not depth of wallet.
The festival's jury members consistently noted that Asia-based campaigns brought a freshness and authenticity that stood out from more polished Western entries. This regional advantage stems from necessity, Asian markets demand agility, cultural sensitivity, and rapid response times that have trained marketers to be more nimble and authentic.
Beyond the Campaign: Building Marketing That Lives
Perhaps the most forward-looking insight came from the realization that great campaigns are beginnings, not endings. The best ideas grow beyond the work itself, spurring innovation, driving product pipelines, and sparking movements that shift how brands operate and communicate.
Community engagement must be genuine to build lasting impact. The winning campaigns encouraged real interaction and gave back to their audiences. Buying likes and manufacturing engagement no longer works, participation and authenticity win. Brands that shared the stage with communities and creators built stronger trust, engagement, and momentum.
This shift represents more than a tactical change; it's a philosophical one. Marketing leaders who succeed in this new environment view their role as facilitating conversations rather than controlling them. They build systems that can respond quickly with localized, relevant, and scalable creative work, but they do it through preparation and partnership, not improvisation.
The festival's standout campaigns balanced bold creativity with measurable business impact. They connected human insights to business goals, recognizing that even B2B decisions are ultimately emotional. Most importantly, they treated authenticity as more powerful than perfection, allowing unpolished but culturally resonant storytelling to outperform overly scripted content.
As the dust settles on another Cannes Lions, one truth emerges clearly: we're entering what Sophie Devonshire called "a new kind of golden age for marketers." Those who embrace this evolution, combining creativity with business acumen, authenticity with strategy, and global thinking with local insight, are better positioned than ever to lead growth and shape the future of business.
Three Key Takeaways
Platform-native creativity outperforms adapted content
Build campaigns specifically for each platform rather than creating one-size-fits-all content that gets adapted across channels.
Consistency beats viral moments
Long-running, emotionally anchored campaigns with strategic consistency across time and markets deliver better results than trend-chasing viral content.
Authentic community engagement drives real business growth
Brands that listen to their audiences and facilitate genuine interactions build stronger trust and measurable impact than those that try to control every message.
Two Action Items
- Audit your current campaigns for platform specificity: Identify where you're using generic adaptations versus platform-native creative, then prioritize rebuilding your weakest platform executions from the ground up.
- Shift from campaign thinking to platform thinking: Develop one core creative platform that can evolve over time, then create consistent emotional experiences across all touchpoints rather than launching disconnected campaigns.
"Great campaigns don't just launch, they live, evolve, and connect across time, touchpoints, and culture."
A quote representing the collective insight from the Cannes Lions Unpacked session about creative marketing effectiveness from David Tiltman, SVP Content - LIONS Intelligence, Rica Facundo, Managing Editor Asia - WARC and Ashik Ashokan, Head of Advisory APAC - LIONS Advisory
MORE GREAT CONTENT FROM THE EVENT
Marketing hasn't changed, but marketers must.
As Lex Bradshaw-Zanger captured perfectly: "Marketing hasn't changed, but marketers must." The pace and scale have transformed dramatically, but the core remains rooted in consistent storytelling and strong creative platforms
See the pictures
Check out the event via our album from the day.
Thanks to IAA Singapore: For the incredible partnership with thanks to Meta Singapore for hosting us in your inspiring space.
