Cannes award-winning ads also deliver results?

Creative work wins awards, but many brands still struggle to prove it also drives revenue. 

That gap shows up in budget conversations and how campaigns are measured. 

This tension sits at the center of the creative vs. effective advertising debate. For years, marketing teams have treated creativity and performance as competing priorities. In practice, the data shows the opposite. 

The most creative campaigns are often the most effective. The problem isn’t whether creative works, it does. It’s how consistently teams can identify, measure and scale it. 

At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, this shift is underway. The Creative Effectiveness category recognizes work that delivers measurable business impact and not just originality. 

Creative effectiveness marketing is not a niche concept, but is becoming the standard for judging marketing performance. 

In this article, I’ll share examples of campaigns that have achieved both commercial success and won Cannes Lions. Let’s look at these success stories for inspiration and why they worked.

Founded in 1954, Cannes Lions was created to celebrate the craft of advertising. The Oscars celebrate the film industry. The Grammys celebrate music; why can’t commercials be just as artistic and worthy of recognition? For decades, advertising success was defined by originality and craft. It elevated creative standards while creating a perception that creativity and commercial performance were separate goals. 

The result is a fragmented approach to advertising performance vs. creativity, where the two are managed separately rather than designed together. 

Cannes has started closing that gap and judging creativity and performance together. 

Celebrating bold ideas

At its core, Cannes rewards creative courage and campaigns that challenge category norms or reframe familiar products. 

Heinz "It Has to Be Heinz" (2024 Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix) is a great example. After years of competitive pressure, Heinz didn’t launch a product campaign; they leaned into people’s existing obsession with the brand.

The campaign shared real stories of people sneaking Heinz ketchup into high-end restaurants and even putting it on sushi. 

By celebrating these quirky fan behaviors, Heinz reestablished itself as a cultural icon rather than just a condiment. It worked. 

The brand achieved 12% global ketchup sales growth each year since 2019, regained 3.2 share points from competitors, and by 2023, Heinz had achieved Kantar’s “Icon” status. Only 4% of brands have achieved this status. 

This is what award-winning ad effectiveness looks like in practice. The creative idea reflects real behavior, making the brand both memorable and commercially successful.

Cultural impact and memorability 

The campaigns that perform best over time capture attention and become part of the culture. 

Take Dove’s Real Beauty as an example. Launched in 2004 after research found that just 2% of women saw themselves as beautiful, the campaign reframed what beauty advertising could say, sparking a global conversation that’s still relevant.

Culturally relevant campaigns are memorable. And memorable campaigns relate to better brand recall when consumers shop, proving that creative impact can drive performance. 

Industry recognition and prestige

  Winning a Cannes Lion signals to clients, talent and the industry that an agency operates at the highest creative level. 

That prestige has an economic impact, too. Award-winning agencies attract top talent and often, clients open to more ambitious ideas. Yet, there’s a criticism that agencies optimize for the Cannes judges rather than commercial outcomes. 

The data shows otherwise. 

Ipsos research found that award-winning ads are 29% more effective on short-term sales lift and 11% more impactful on long-term brand building than typical advertising. 

If creativity and effectiveness are aligned, the real question becomes “why do so many campaigns still underperform?” The answer points to how marketing performance is measured and managed. 

Over the past twenty years, the metrics have changed.

In the Mad Men days, agencies celebrated creativity. Then digital marketing came along, with more granular performance data and, with it, a new level of accountability. 

This visibility improved decision-making while introducing new constraints. Teams now optimize for what can be measured, which isn’t always the same as what drives growth. 

This is where the advertising performance vs creativity tension becomes operational. Creative impact typically compounds while performance metrics prioritize short-term impact. 

The key is finding the right balance between metrics and outcomes. 

Marketing accountability

Performance dashboards enable real-time campaign evaluation, providing greater visibility but also creating bias. 

Metrics like return on ad spend (ROAS) and conversion rates focus on highly targeted, short-term activities. Those are easier to measure than long-term growth.

As a result, creative departments are often required to justify ideas using metrics that don’t fully reflect their value. In fact, the 2022 LIONS State of Creativity report found that just 12% of marketers felt confident in convincing their CFO to invest in creativity.

The problem isn’t the creativity itself; it’s the timing. 

If you wait to evaluate the creative after the campaign launches, budgets are already committed.

If you evaluate creative earlier in the process, teams can test ideas before launching. This helps marketers identify which concepts are most likely to perform, which reduces risks and improves outcomes. 

Data-driven decision making

Performance analytics has transformed marketing while introducing new risks. If the data drives all decision-making, there’s a risk of teams playing it “safe” with their ideas. 

Research from the IPA Effectiveness Conference 2025 found that many brands have improved efficiency in recent years, but they’re doing so at a small scale. 

Test highly targeted campaigns for short-term efficiency; then scale for meaningful growth. Otherwise, campaigns may look effective but underdeliver on overall business impact. 

Effectiveness means finding a balance between efficiency and scale. 

Effectiveness awards and categories

Industry awards evolved to reflect this shift. 

Cannes Lions, the IPA Effective Awards and the Effies now recognize campaigns that demonstrate measurable impact.

The idea that creativity and performance compete for priority is outdated.

Research from Kantar and WARC found the most creative and effective ads generate more than four times as much profit as ads with weaker commercial results. Paul Dyson of Accelero found creative acts as a 12x multiplier on ROI. In The State of Creative Effectiveness report, Zappi found ads with strong creative effectiveness deliver ~30% greater ROI. This is why marketing ROI creative campaigns isn’t a contradiction. It’s the expected outcome when the data and creative support one another. 

Creativity drives attention and memorability

Ipsos research found that award-winning ads deliver 30% higher brand attention on average compared to typical advertising. 

Campaigns that capture attention are more likely to be remembered because that memory drives future purchase decisions. 

Specsavers’ “Misheard Version” is a recent example. The campaign is built around a choir mishearing song lyrics, but they tied it to the brand’s purpose of clear vision.

The brand won Gold at the 2025 Creative Effectiveness Lions and the 2024 PR Grand Prix at Cannes. The key principle is alignment when the idea and product reinforce each other. 

Insight-driven creative improves persuasion

Strong creative work is rooted in a real human insight. 

Kantar’s analysis of award-winning campaigns found that when brands connect to human truths, they drive stronger engagement and effectiveness simultaneously. While not a Cannes Lions winner (yet) Ollie’s latest campaign is a great example of identifying a real consumer insight and tying it back to their brand: 

Persuasive campaigns reflect real behavior. 

Emotional storytelling strengthens brand impact

Research from Kantar and WARC shows ads that drive a strong emotional response are four times more likely to drive long-term brand equity. That equity translates into pricing power, loyalty and resilience in competitive markets.

The 2025 Cannes Creative Effectiveness Lions show winning campaigns don’t choose between creativity and results. They integrate both from the beginning, ensuring creative ideas can drive measurable results. 

Strong strategic insight

Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” is a standout example. Apple could have told everyone the camera is great, listing a bunch of specs. Instead, the brand used UGC to show the product in action. The campaign turned the iPhone into the best-selling smartphone on the market. 

This is an example of scaling the message while reinforcing the core value proposition. The campaign won the 2025 Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix. 

Clear brand linkage

Strong campaigns make the product the campaign which creates product differentiation and brand equity. Take Vaseline’s “Verified” campaign for example:

System1 research presented at Cannes 2025 found the most consistent brands generated 27% more awareness which compounds over time. 

Measurable business outcomes

Cadbury’s “Shah Rukh Khan-My-Ad” campaign featured Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan and re-imagined celebrity advertising. 

Instead of running one national campaign in India, Cadbury Dairy Milk used AI to create thousands of localized ads where the popular actor appeared to endorse small businesses by name. 

The campaign won the Creative Data Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, recognizing its innovative use of data and technology to scale a single idea.

By enabling small businesses to participate directly, Cadbury turned a traditional brand campaign into a platform — extending reach while maintaining relevance at a local level.

This demonstrates a key shift in creative effectiveness marketing in that ideas can be systems that scale. 

Ideas are plentiful, the challenge comes with turning them into measurable outcomes and doing it on repeat.

Aligning creative briefs with business goals

Effective campaigns start with clear objectives. 

Is the goal short-term sales lift, long-term brand equity, market share or cultural visibility? Each goal requires a different creative strategy.

WARC’s framework from the 2025 Creative Effectiveness Lions distills this into three steps: connect your results to your objectives, keep it simple and make it interesting. 

This alignment ensures creative work is evaluated against the right outcomes from the start. 

Testing creative concepts early

The biggest opportunity lies in timing. When teams test creative early, they identify which ideas are more likely to succeed. 

This reduces reliance on instinct and boosts confidence. It also improves performance across the brand portfolio. 

Measuring impact beyond impressions

Impressions and reach tell you how many people saw your campaign, but they don’t tell you if it changed how those people think or feel about the brand. They also don’t tell you whether the campaign influenced sales. 

To understand impact, marketers need to measure brand lift, emotional response and behavioral outcomes.

This is where connected consumer insights platforms like Zappi come into play. By enabling early-stage testing and insights, teams can evaluate creative before it goes to market and invest with greater confidence.

The Cannes Lions creativity debate is no longer about whether creativity works. It does. 

The State of Creative Effectiveness report shared Paul Dyson’s finding that creative quality is one of the most powerful levers available to marketers, accounting for the majority of advertising ROI across multiple studies. 

The most effective campaigns define success upfront, build creative around real insight and test and refine before scaling. This is how brands move from isolated wins to repeatable performance.