Agencies & Consulting

Too many dicks, woke wins and exploding Kiwi freezer beers - here's what got the attention of four Australia and New Zealand judges at the Cannes Lions this year as they waded through hundreds of entries and discovered a flurry of cultural curveballs, consistent creative plays, contentious narratives, category convention challenges and creator and community connections. Speaking on a Cannes Download panel this week, Suncorp EGM brand and CX Mim Haysom (Creative Data jury), Publicis Groupe CCO, Dave Bowman (Social & Creative jury), WPP Media CEO, Aimee Buchanan (Media jury) and Dentsu Aotearoa CCO, Mike Flix (Film jury) unpacked the campaigns and creative work that stood out from the 29,600 entries across 32 categories in 2025 – and the trends they’re spotting in the mix.

Les Binet being “mobbed” at Cannes suggests building a brand for marketing effectiveness is paying dividends. A new generation of marketers are starting to question what they are being told and join the dots between band and demand, per Warc chief content officer, David Tiltman. After cornering the market for effectiveness by corralling a pantheon of practitioners, academia and a massive trove of data to keep banging the drum for brand-led growth and best practice in the face of massive flux, Warc’s now aiming to crack the US market, which Mark Ritson says is “way behind” the UK and Europe. But there are fractures emerging within long-held marketing effectiveness rules and playbooks – and disputes among its leading lights. Tiltman says it’s a “paradox” Warc, the Effies and the Lions have yet to resolve. But fusing those siloed effectiveness databases under one roof will help – and that’s exactly what Warc, now under Informa ownership, aims to do next.

P&G CMO Marc Pritchard, virtual professor Mark Ritson, System1, Analytic Partners and some of the world's top creatives are all saying the same thing: Consistency and craft in applying distinctive brand assets and codes pays off – big time. KitKat's Grand Prix-winning out of home ad provides a master template for Australian brands to follow, says QMS chief marketer, Tennille Burt. Here's how to lift it.

L’Oreal has spent five years overhauling how and where its A$23.85bn ad budget is allocated – and last year posted the best operating margin in its history. The firm is fully aligned with Oxford University Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz and Wavemaker on moving beyond blunt reach – and blanket paid media approaches full stop. It’s the latest in a series of evidence and market moves that strongly indicates industry is shifting rapidly away from long-held growth rules and play-books. L’Oreal Groupe chief digital and marketing officer Asmita Dubey, Oxford University Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz and Wavemaker global chief strategy and product officer Stuart Bowden on what next looks like for paid, earned, shared and owned (Peso) media, the category nuances that torpedo reach-based planning – and the structural challenges it presents.

Three top marketers at McDonald’s, Kimberly-Clark and Philips suggest “creative business transformation” is the key to keeping industry alive – and that applies to agencies and consulting firms. Which means some operational and strategic tweaks. Plus the trio offered some tips on what they are looking for from their own teams – and why if marketers are ducking bold choices because they are scared of losing their jobs, they will probably lose it anyway.

Publicis Groupe is building an alternative media and audience reach network to legacy media channels, leveraging the $650m in influencer and creator platform acquisitions it has made in the past year to tap under-utilised and cheaper audience channels for identity-linked advertising campaigns. Gaming is next. It heaps more pressure on legacy media channels under sustained revenue assault from Meta, Google, Amazon, TikTok and retail media networks, which between them are taking upwards of 75 per cent of the circa $800bn global digital ad market. According to WPP Media, the digital ad market commands 81 per cent of total global ad spend, which will surpass $1trillion for the first time in 2025.

The open web’s only challenger to Google – and increasingly Amazon – in automated advertising trading exchanges has warned Amazon’s powering global ad business is lifting Google’s strategy by luring advertisers to consolidate their digital ad buying using its demand side platform. Amazon’s $60bn advertising business is growing faster than its online commerce juggernaut – the allure for brands is the promise of an advertising and data tie-up to Amazon’s vast online shopping customer base via Amazon's commerce focused search. But the problem is anticompetitive self-preferencing of Amazon’s own advertising assets across its global shopper juggernaut and Prime video streaming service, now with ads, according to Jed Dederick, chief revenue officer at US$33bn listed rival, The Trade Desk. “We’ve seen this movie before,” he told Mi3 at the Cannes Lions Festival last week. “This is Google’s playbook that came out in the antitrust trials”. Dederick should know – he was called by the US Department of Justice as an expert witness in its successful case last year against Google’s market manipulating adtech stack – the DoJ is seeking to break up Google’s ads and data products from its YouTube and search units, which it hopes will create a more level playing field for publishers across the open web. 

"Avoid the pornography of change" was virtual Professor Mark Ritson's take on research by System1's Andrew Tindall that he thinks deserves a place in the marketing effectiveness pantheon of greats – because it spells out to marketers how to make great ads that drive a 12x profit multiplier over "shit" ads. Based on overlaying the Effies database with System1's ad testing data, it's a simple formula: Go back to basics with tight positioning, charge ads with emotion, pack them with brand codes – seven is the "magic number" – and run them for years. "You're taking your cakes out of the oven too early. Leave them in. Let the emotion work, let the codes work. Save money on creative, put it into working capital, make more money from your advertising." Here's the data to prove it, what good looks like – and what's so bad it deserves a "brown Lion" as Ritson underlines a back-to-basics theme running deep through a Cannes festival stalked by AI's impacts.

The Cannes Lions festivities are officially done and dusted. Check out the full list of brands and agencies from Australia and New Zealand that have won on the world stage at this year's Festival of Creativity - plus every Grand Prix in every category. Telstra and New Zealand Herpes Foundation end the week at the top of the tally, thanks to Grand Prix wins, while local work for Volkswagen, 1001 Optometry, Samsung, Netflix, Bristol Myers Squibb, Made By Dyslexia, Vogel's, Coca-Cola, Export Ultra, Legacy Australia, 2Degrees, 36 Months, Suncorp, 7-Eleven, Toyota and Meat & Livestock Australia was likewise recognised as world class.