Cannes Lions 2025: Key Insights from The Marketing Society Correspondents

Nick Elliott

Nick conducted 27 "Quick Conversations" with industry leaders, exploring what drives great creativity. His interviews spanned from 80s pop icon Howard Jones to Olympic champion Sir Mo Farah, demonstrating the breadth of creative thinking at Cannes. His systematic approach to capturing diverse perspectives on creativity provided valuable cross-industry insights.

"What's the Key to Great Creativity?" - This simple question unlocked conversations with some of the most experienced, interesting, and creative people in the industry.

Siew Ting Foo

Siew Ting delivered the most comprehensive analysis across the week, identifying five major industry shifts. She emphasised how marketing has "finally decided to back itself again," moving from wide-eyed fascination with every new tool to strategic implementation. Her observations on e.l.f. Beauty's success story - growing brand investment from 6% to 24% of net revenue whilst delivering 25 consecutive quarters of growth - became a recurring reference point amongst correspondents. Read her full Cannes summary here on LinkedIn.

Abigail Dixon

Abigail reported back on four key sessions over on Linkedin following her first trip to Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. She focused on the future of marketing and leadership development. Her standout takeaway came from the DEPT® Secret Garden panel on "The Marketer of the Future," where she captured crucial insights about agency evolution and cultural relevance. She particularly noted Mars's approach to mental health messaging through pet benefits, demonstrating how global brands can maintain cultural relevance locally.

"Face into the tension between agencies as we move from an old model of buying as much as possible to a new model embracing experience marketing."

Linn Frost

Linn explored the relationship between brand, innovation, and advertising, highlighting industry frustration with binary thinking. She championed the synergy between innovative products and brand storytelling, emphasising that great marketing comes from integration, not silos. Her post-Cannes takeaways celebrated craft, storytelling, and human connection.

Rich Boon

Rich focused on the attention economy, attending sessions at Campaign x Uber, Stagwell, and Sports Beach. His insights centred on what drives creative attention in an age of distraction, highlighting the continued power of long-form emotional storytelling whilst acknowledging the need for platform-specific adaptation.

Rich and his team at OH SIX took some great content form the Croisette to create some key insights for us in video format. Check it out below

Munas van Boonstra

Munas brought a powerful dual perspective to Cannes Lions 2025, witnessing both the industry's technological evolution and its cultural awakening. At Will.I.Am's session with Sir Martin Sorrell, she captured the urgency around AI adoption, with Will.I.Am positioning AI as a movement to extend human capability rather than replace it.  She also tracked the B2B Brand Summit launch, noting creativity's emergence from the shadows. But perhaps more significantly, as a woman of colour in advertising, Munas documented what she called "the undeniable RISE of female leadership, creativity, and representation." She witnessed the Lions "See It Be It" program's impact, with over 100 women and non-binary creatives from 33 countries—75% now in senior roles—returning as mentors and trailblazers. From the WIN Lounge to the "It Takes A Village" gala, she observed women of colour not just being invited into rooms, but shaping the agenda. Equally meaningful was her documentation of Asia's rising creative influence, celebrating speakers from Chinese brands like Yili Group to Singapore's Love, Bonito—marking "a long-overdue recognition of Asia's creativity and strategic leadership on the world stage. Read her takeaways over on LinkedIn.

Sabina Jasinka

Sabina covered significant ground from Female Quotient to NVIDIA's Secret Garden, focusing on AI implementation, accessibility, and B2B branding evolution while capturing the authentic energy that makes Cannes unforgettable. Her observations on how CMOs are embedding AI across teams provided practical insights into organisational transformation, with her key takeaway being that "AI should no longer be sold as novelty, but as outcome-driven." At Maison NDA, she documented Terence Kawaja's industry framework of "Survive - Revive - Thrive (Tariffs?)" showing the advertising ecosystem's journey from 2023's cost-cutting through 2024's cautious revival to 2025's uncertainty. She identified critical shifts: AI redefining platforms, LLMs transforming search, commerce media's rapid growth beyond retail, and creators becoming core to media strategy with 12 million in the US alone. Throughout her reporting, Sabina balanced strategic insights—like Brian O'Kelley's observation that "everyone's an Ad Network now" and "the next $100B ad platform won't look like the last one"—with the human moments that define Cannes: spontaneous encounters, impromptu dinners, and record-breaking crowds that had locals saying "C'est du jamais vu" (we've never seen anything like it).

You can follow her takeaways on Linkedin here.

The collective wisdom from our correspondents paints a picture of an industry that has found its footing. The days of chasing every shiny new tool are giving way to strategic implementation of technology in service of human connection. As creativity and commerce align under clear brand purposes, marketing is evolving into what Siew Ting calls "early adulthood" - confident, purposeful, and ready to make people feel again. The future belongs to brands that master the winning trifecta: Purpose + Brand Science + Cultural Relevance.