It’s June in Cannes, and the rosé isn’t the only thing flowing freely. Along La Croisette, creative directors and data analysts alike are clinking glasses – but perhaps not for the same reasons. One group toasts to campaigns that made people feel something genuine. The other group? They’re raising a glass to click-through rates and impression countsthat would make a Wall Street analyst weep with joy.
Welcome to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2025, where the age-old battle between creative storytelling and performance marketing has reached a fever pitch. The question on everyone’s sun-kissed lips (besides “où est la plage?”) is this: Should Cannes Lions drop its digital-media awards in protest of data-driven vanity metrics?
Light-hearted as that query might sound, it’s stirring up irreverent debate among the creative glitterati. After all, this year’s festival has given us plenty to chew on. We’ve seen Grand Prix campaigns that tugged at our heartstrings and others that busied themselves tugging at the algorithm.
We cheered when a certain pharma brand reimagined itself with a cinematic tale of intimacy, making a Viagra campaign feel “deeply human”. In the next breath, we scratched our heads (and maybe rolled our eyes) at an audio campaign bragging about its 68 million TikTok impressions. Cannes 2025 has truly been a tale of two cities – one measured in tears and goosebumps, the other in clicks and engagement graphs.
So, dear creative comrades, grab your popcorn (or your data dashboard, as you prefer). Let’s dive into this debate with tongue firmly in cheek and insight firmly in hand. Are we really handing out Gold Lions for sheer reach, and if so, is it time to toss those awards onto a proverbial bonfire of vanity metrics? Or can the industry find a happy marriage between Mad Men and Math Men in this sunny French ménage?
Clicks vs. Heartstrings: A Tale of Two Campaigns
Let’s start with a little compare-and-contrast, shall we? On one side, we have campaigns built to move hearts. On the other, those built to move the needle – the digital needle of likes, shares, and “thumb-stops.” Consider a prime example from this year: Viatris’ “Make Love Last” for Viagra. This Pharma Lions Grand Prix winner wasn’t about performance figures at all – it was about intimacy, emotion, and storytelling.
The campaign took a pharmaceutical brand famous for cheeky jokes and transformed it with an “emotional, cinematic narrative” celebrating long-term relationships. Judges praised its craft and cultural sensitivity, noting how it quietly and artfully told a human story without needing to shout. In other words, Viagra made your nan cry (in a good way) – and earned a Lion for resonance over reach.
Now, contrast that with another 2025 champion: Budweiser’s “One Second Ads.” A brilliant idea? Absolutely – the Audio & Radio Grand Prix went to this zippy campaign of micro-ads one-second long, each featuring the first notes of iconic songs. It was fun, fresh, and undeniably effective at grabbing attention. But the victory lap in the case study was all about the numbers: Bud got 68 million impressions on TikTok for those bite-sized ads. The team practically wallpapered their entry video with graphs of engagement.
It’s the kind of stat that sounds impressive – 68 million anything usually does – but let’s pause a second (literally one second) to ponder: is that a creative triumph or a numeric one? Did it win because it was emotionally or intellectually groundbreaking, or because it mastered the dark art of the algorithmic “thumb-stop” on social media? The campaign did resonate with the target (music fans) and it cleverly merged medium with message – but the big headline was reach.
We could throw more examples on the pile. Penny’s “Price Packs” redesign – a Print & Publishing Grand Prix – earned plaudits for a savvy idea (printing fixed prices on packaging to prove a commitment to affordability amid inflation) andfor generating a juicy $190 million in earned media and a sales lift. There’s creativity and commercial outcome neatly bundled, which is arguably the ideal.
Meanwhile, KitKat’s “Phone Break” Outdoor campaign served up zero metrics in its winning narrative – it simply swapped out smartphones for chocolate bars in public scenes, silently chiding our screen addiction. No like-count, no follower growth, just a beautifully crafted image and a universal insight that made jurors swoon. Which approach should Cannes really be celebrating? The one that subtly reminds us of our humanity, or the one that shouts “look how many people clicked!”?
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a campaign achieving massive reach – that’s often the point of advertising, to be seen and heard. But when awards night comes around, we have to ask: are we giving too much weight to those metrics? In the jury room, does “tangible impact” sometimes overshadow intangible ingenuity?
The festival’s own CEO, Simon Cook, likes to emphasize work that both “pushes creative boundaries” and demonstrates tangible impact on business and society. The holy grail, of course, is doing both. Yet the uneasy feeling among many creatives is that, increasingly, a clever hack with record engagement might outshine a profound idea with modest numbers. And that’s the crux of our conundrum.
How Digital Ate the Lion: A Brief History of Going Data-Driven
It wasn’t always like this. Roll the clock back a couple of decades and Cannes was all about TV spots that made you laugh or cry, print ads that stunned with artful wit, maybe a radio jingle that wormed into your ear. The metrics then? Perhaps a pencil in the ad trades noting a campaign’s effect on sales next quarter, if at all. The only numbers folks cared about on the Côte d’Azur were the price of champagne and the number of steps to the Gutter Bar.
Then came the internet, social media, smartphones – enter the Cyber Lions. Cannes first dipped its toes in digital back in 1998 with the introduction of the Cyber Lions (yes, even before Wi-Fi was ubiquitous). By 2003, as online advertising gained prominence, Cyber Lions became a hot ticket, celebrating creativity in new interactive media. Fast-forward and you see how the festival evolved: new categories sprouted like wildflowers after a rain.
Mobile Lions (for those tiny screens we’re all glued to). Creative Data Lions in 2015, explicitly introduced to “acknowledge and celebrate data’s critical role” in modern storytelling.
And indeed, the criteria for these data-driven awards make no bones about it – entries are expected to show “measurable outcomes – like increased customer engagement or sales – ... tangible business results” alongside creativity. In short, bring your big idea, but don’t forget your bar charts.
By 2018, the festival underwent a major shakeup – retiring some legacy categories and acknowledging that “digital” isn’t a niche, it’s the air we breathe. The venerable Cyber Lions category was laid to rest in favor of more specialized celebrations. Rising in its place: the Social & Influencer Lions, launched in 2018 to reward campaigns built on social media and influencer marketing. (If you listened carefully that year, you could almost hear the whoops of social strategists high-fiving across the Croisette.)
Even that has kept evolving – come 2025, the category was rebranded as Social & Creator Lions to reflect the ascendant creator economy. So now, TikTok dances, YouTube collaborations, and Instagram hoaxes have their own kingdom of Cannes glory.
And oh, have those campaigns delivered on the engagement front. Just last year we saw a Grand Prix in Social & Influencer go to a wonderfully absurd conspiracy-caper for skincare brand CeraVe, which pretended that actor Michael Cera secretly founded the company – a bonkers stunt that blurred lines between ad and internet culture, stringing along millions of amused followers for weeks. Lovably absurd? Absolutely.
Driven by a thirst for shares and comments? You bet. The success of “Michael CeraVe” was measured in trending hashtags and curious clicks. It epitomized the modern social campaign: half creative storytelling, half engagement-engine. Would it have won in a world without digital Lions? Hard to say – perhaps it would never even exist in a world not obsessed with going viral.
All this evolution begs an uncomfortable question: has Cannes Lions, by multiplying its digital categories, inadvertently tilted the scales toward rewarding metrics-rich work? The entry statistics hint at a shifting mindset. In 2025, submissions in strategy and effectiveness categories (where proof of results is key) swelled yet again. The industry, it seems, is chasing proof as much as poetry.
Creative Data Lions entries are now full of lines like “using live data to do X” and “achieved Y% engagement uplift,” as if reading from a marketing effectiveness report. It’s not inherently bad – accountability and creativity can coexist – but it does mark a change from the days when gut-led creativity reigned supreme and nobody asked for the CPA on Honda’s “Cog” commercial or the ROI of Old Spice’s Isaiah Mustafa’s pecs.
Performance Marketing vs. Creative Storytelling: The Struggle is Real (and It’s Personal)
Behind every award entry, there’s an agency war room where this struggle plays out in miniature. On one side: the performance marketing folks – the data scientists, media optimizers, and programmatic wizards. They come armed with spreadsheets and KPIs: click-through rates, conversion funnels, cost per acquisition, you name it.
Their mission is clear and not ignoble: deliver results that make the client’s CFO smile. On the other side: the creative storytellers – the copywriters, art directors, brand strategists, and filmmakers. They speak of brand purpose, emotional connection, and cultural impact. Their dream is to produce the next film or experience that people remember and love, perhaps even without needing to click anything at all.
In a healthy campaign, these forces balance each other. But as any creative who’s had a brilliant idea watered down by focus-group data can tell you, it doesn’t always end harmoniously. Likewise, any performance marketer who’s watched an artsy idea flop in A/B testing will groan about “creative indulgence.”
The tension is old as advertising itself, but the digital age turned it up to eleven. Why? Because now we can measure everything. And when you can measure, you can tie credit (or blame) to every micro-decision. Suddenly, the big, risky idea that might build brand love over the long term looks a bit less shiny next to a tightly targeted campaign that promises a 0.5% uptick in immediate engagement.
Vanity metrics – things like sheer reach, impressions, likes – are often derided as empty numbers. “Impressions are the potential audience, not the actual impact,” the analytics sages remind us. We all know a viral post that everyone saw but no one remembers. And yet, in the context of awards, even cynics can fall prey to numbers. It’s seductive to say “our campaign reached 100 million people” – that sounds like success, even if half those people were scrolling by in a distracted haze.
We hear judges swayed by a case study that boasts “#1 trending topic” or “5 million YouTube views in 48 hours,” when deep down we agree with the Strategy Officer who wrote that vanity metrics can be meaningless out of context. The context that matters is what the audience felt and did as a result – not just that they glanced at your content between cat videos.
The creative community frets that an overemphasis on these metrics incentivizes the wrong behavior. If agencies know that Cannes gold might be won by coupling a decent creative idea with staggering engagement figures, you can bet they’ll pour resources into gaming the system – hefty promo budgets to juice the views, perhaps, or employing influencer armies to get those “social lift” stats soaring. It’s not a hypothetical fear; it’s reality. We’ve all seen case study videos where the first 30 seconds are basically an Excel chart set to upbeat music. (At which point, the creative purists in the room reach for another glass of wine.)
And consider the psychic impact on the creatives themselves. Advertising has always attracted a mix of artists and scientists, but what kind of talent will we nurture if awards tilt toward the science? If the path to glory is seen as optimizing the heck out of TikTok rather than composing a powerful narrative, we risk losing the very magic that made advertising an inspiring field in the first place. The “math men” (and women) undeniably have a place – modern marketing needs them – but should they be the ones taking home the Lion’s share of Lions? Pardon the pun.
Burn the Clicks, Save the Creativity? (What Would Dropping Digital Awards Achieve)
Now we come to the provocative proposition itself: Cannes Lions dropping its digital-media awards as a protestagainst vanity metrics. It sounds drastic – like the nuclear option of festival reform. What would that even look like? Cannes has nearly a dozen categories that could be considered “digital” or at least digitally infused. Would they can the entire Social & Creator Lions, Creative Data Lions, maybe even Media Lions (since nowadays media strategy is largely digital) in one fell swoop? Would they tell the industry, “sorry folks, no Gold Lions for your viral stunts or programmatic genius this year – we’re on strike against superficial clicks”?
In practical terms, it’s hard to imagine. These categories exist because digital media is where so much creative innovation happens today. Plus, let’s not kid ourselves, the festival is a business – cutting categories means cutting entry fees, and nobody’s volunteering to take a 38% revenue hit (which, coincidentally, is about how far entry numbers have fallen from their 2016 peak, but I digress). Digital is the dominant form of modern advertising, so excluding it entirely would be like the Oscars saying “we won’t consider films that had too many special effects this year.” It’s a non-starter.
But as a protest, as a symbolic stance? Oh, it would send a message alright. It would be Cannes Lions effectively saying: “We refuse to let our awards become a slave to the algorithm. Bring us your ideas, not your dashboards.” It’s the kind of grand statement that, frankly, many weary creatives would cheer on. A bonfire of digital categories might clear the air and remind everyone that a great idea is a great idea, regardless of medium.
Freed from chasing the next platform trend, perhaps agencies would refocus on timeless human truths and bold creativity for its own sake. Maybe we’d get fewer entries boasting about “X% engagement lift” and more that simply show an insight or a beautiful execution and let it speak for itself.
There are broader implications here for the creative community. Such a move would reinforce that awards (and by extension, the industry) value long-term brand building over short-term hype. It would validate the copywriter who wants to craft a moving story more than the growth hacker who wants to tweak open rates. But it could also alienate a whole swath of professionals for whom digital is creativity. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bain-marie – some of the most original ideas today happen to live on TikTok or in code or as data-driven experiences.
Remember the Mastercard campaign “Room for Everyone” that used data to fight xenophobia by helping Ukrainian refugees find welcoming locations in Poland? That won a Creative Data Lion because the creative idea was inseparable from the data strategy – a beautiful marriage of tech and heart. We wouldn’t want to banish work like that from the awards just because it comes with a side of spreadsheets.
Perhaps the answer lies not in dropping digital awards entirely, but in re-focusing how they’re judged. What if juries were instructed, in the sternest possible terms, to treat metrics as supporting evidence rather than the main show? To interrogate why those numbers mattered.
Did the 68 million impressions mean that people loved the idea, or just that the media spend was hefty? Did the trending hashtag genuinely change perception, or just momentarily entertain? If a digital campaign wins, it should be because the creativity shone through the data, not because the data itself dazzled.
A Creative Renaissance on the Riviera?
One can hope that this ongoing debate – and yes, even cheeky editorials like this one – might spark a mini-renaissance. There’s a generation of creatives and clients alike who are growing skeptical of the “faux-engagement” treadmill. Even the brass at big agencies admit privately that a lot of reported metrics are smoke and mirrors – bots inflate views, social algorithms give and then take away. Meanwhile, what truly builds brands (and wins genuine admiration) are campaigns that connect on a human level.
Think of the campaigns from Cannes’ past that we still talk about: Dove’s Real Beauty, Chanel’s Epic Film with Nicole Kidman, Volvo’s Epic Split, even Apple’s more recent heartwarming short films – these weren’t built to farm clicks; they were built to last in memory and culture.
The creative community seems hungry for recognition that doesn’t require an asterisk. We want to say “this moved people” and not have to add “...and hey, here’s the heat map of their eyeballs on the screen to prove it.” Awards set the tone for what is valued in the industry. If Cannes can find a way to explicitly honour resonance over reach, it could trickle down to briefs and client conversations everywhere.
Imagine a world where a client says, “I don’t care if it only got 50,000 views, if those 50,000 people felt something powerful, it’s a success.” Unlikely? Perhaps. But the winds do change – just look at how purpose-driven advertising became de rigueur in the last decade; that started with awards too, championing work that “did good” not just did well.
As we wind down our sun-drenched rant – I mean, erudite analysis – let’s remember that Cannes Lions itself is not blind to these tensions. They’ve shown a willingness to adapt categories and criteria. If enough of us in the creative peanut gallery push for a recalibration, who knows? Maybe by Cannes 2026 we’ll see a new rule that any entry overtly bragging about raw impressions has to also report a customer satisfaction score or an emotional impact metric of some sort. (I won’t hold my breath on that, but a guy can dream.)
And if all else fails, there’s always the power of a good bonfire metaphor to get the point across. On that note, I’ll hand the mic to someone who put it far more colourfully than I ever could.
“They should burn them in a bonfire of clicks and faux-engagement. We don’t need more gold lions for reach; we need recognition for resonance. Let’s celebrate the idea that made your nan cry, not the one that squeezed 0.2 seconds of thumb-stopping time. Give us awards for creativity, not clicks.” – Simon Manchipp, Founding Partner @ SomeOne