The Croisette is quiet again. Rosé glasses cleared, the Lions packed up, the industry heading home. But what lingers are the conversations—and the creative provocations—that pulsed through every corridor of Cannes Lions 2025. In a year where AI, brand safety, and economic pressure shaped the global agenda, five clear lessons stood out for anyone serious about building brands that last.
1. Creativity is Still Human-First
Apple’s Tor Myhren set the tone from the opening keynote: "AI is the most exciting tool of our lifetimes. But it's just that—a tool." In a calm, grounded session, he made the case that creativity must remain rooted in emotional clarity, intent, and craftsmanship.
Myhren's story of the AirPods Pro feature for hearing loss made it tangible. After years of development, Apple released a feature that allowed users to self-test for mild hearing loss. But the power came not from the product, but the personal story: his father trying the feature for the first time and smiling. That moment became the basis for "Hearstrings," a campaign that blended empathy with precision—and generated over 50 million YouTube views.
2. Creative Teams Need Space to Try
Emmanuel Orssaud of Duolingo pulled back the curtain on how the most chaotic-looking brand in the room stays consistent. The secret? A 70/30 rule: 70% of the team’s time goes to proven formats. The remaining 30% is protected for experiments.
That’s how the "Duo is dead" campaign happened—a random Slack message turned into a viral arc involving a dead mascot, airport shoots, and $85,000 in merch revenue. Orssaud made it clear: "You have to be okay with experiments failing. The important part is running strong retrospectives."
Too many brands say they want innovation but leave no room for it. What Duolingo shows is that experiments don’t need to be expensive—just empowered. Constraints become a creative asset when the team has psychological safety and autonomy.
3. Desire > Awareness
Esi Eggleston Bracey, Unilever’s Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, brought a sharp reframing: "Stop chasing awareness. Start building desire."
With 400 brands across 190 markets, Unilever developed SASSY—a framework focused on Science, Aesthetics, Sensorials, Shared-by-others, and Young-spirited branding. It’s how they turned products like Wonder Wash and Strawberry Crumble Dove into sell-out hits. "Desire is emotional, not rational. You earn it by going beyond what people need to what they crave," she said.
The Vaseline Verified campaign embodied that logic. By validating TikTok beauty hacks in a lab and letting creators carry the message, Unilever generated a 43% sales lift and millions of organic interactions. It wasn’t perfect. It was culturally alive.
4. Culture is a Growth System
Jane Wakely from PepsiCo delivered a masterclass in scaling cultural insight. The key lesson? Brands don’t follow culture—they co-create it.
Take Rico Tostitos in Mexico. What started as a street food hack—vendors slicing open chip bags and turning them into meals—became a platform. PepsiCo partnered with over 10,000 vendors and turned a snack into a meal format. Penetration rose 8 points.
At the same time, PepsiCo’s regenerative farming platform (Smart Farm) is turning sustainability into a brand trust engine. Lay’s worked with 27,000 farmers using satellite-fed diagnostics to detect plant health. Wakely’s message: creativity doesn’t stop at ads. It scales across supply chains, flavour launches, and vendor relationships.
5. Loyalty is Won Early—and Lost Fast
One chart from a WPP session stuck with everyone: openness to forming brand loyalties peaks between the ages of 18 and 35. After that, it drops significantly. People aren’t just buying a product. They’re making identity decisions.
This insight reframes youth marketing: not as trend-hopping, but as future-proofing. Capture attention while habits are still forming, and you build stickiness that compounds over decades. Ignore it, and you risk irrelevance.
For brands working to grow through Gen Z, the implication is urgent. Young people can spot inauthenticity at scale, but they also reward alignment. The brands they choose now often become the ones they defend later.
Final Word: The Blueprint Going Forward
The most powerful message across the festival wasn’t about tech, formats, or budgets. It was care.
Care in how products are designed. Care in how people are represented. Care in how campaigns are made, tested, and brought to life.
From Suleyman’s notion of AI as a creative companion to Myhren’s call for empathy in design, Cannes Lions 2025 offered a clear directive: Speed is not a strategy. Nor is scale. What lasts is work that connects—because it was made with precision, humanity, and a willingness to do it properly.
The brands that win from here won’t be the ones who shout the loudest. They’ll be the ones who listen best.