A Cannes juror on what it takes to win a Lion and why Brazil landed Creative Country of the Year

Close to 100 hours: That’s how long it took each Cannes Lions juror to parse through the 2,049 media award entries, estimates Jasmine Presson, chief strategy officer, North America, at Mediaplus Group.

So what makes a judge award a Lion? The Current caught up with Presson — a Cannes Lions media juror this year — during last week’s International Festival of Creativity to talk about the biggest award trends, creative and business advice for marketers and why Brazil swept the awards.

“The most important thing was seeing creativity in the media itself, the media planning and execution that went with the campaign,” Presson says.

“We saw a lot of cases where you were having to see, is there creativity in the media plan, or was it just a really creative ad in a cookie-cutter media plan?”

Innovative trends behind winning campaigns emerged, but each Lion winner demonstrated creativity and business impact.

“There weren’t any cases where [a campaign, for instance] brought the cost of reaching [its] target audience down by 10%,” Presson says. Rather, winning came down to “showing real business results,” as opposed to the focus on the media metrics themselves.

Ultimately, “it was really about media as a means to an end for the business,” Presson adds.

‘Being participatory, rather than passive’ with AI

On the creative front, “platform hacking” emerged as a recurring theme, Presson says.

Presson sat on the judging committee that selected Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, reimagined for the AI era, as the Media Grand Prix winner. The new campaign aimed to hack Pinterest’s feed algorithm and impact future search results by letting users choose which images of women they deemed beautiful — instead of relying on AI models’ unrealistic biases.

“There was a willingness to explore this idea of being participatory, rather than passive, in everyday interactions with AI,” Presson says. “It was a great pointer towards the direction of creativity we’re going to need as an industry … to continue to connect with consumers.”

She points to another juror favorite and Gold winner: Colombia’s Seguros del Estado, an insurance company, and its “Fictional Insurance” campaign.

The campaign, in partnership with one of the country’s top TV soap operas, saw users take out fictional policies to protect characters from scripted misfortunes, injecting interactivity into a normally passive format: TV shows.

How effective was it? The results, including a 434% increase in leads and $121 million in insurance sales, speak for themselves.

“There were lots of cases where people were finding loopholes and ways to do more on the platform, rather than just kind of accept business as usual,” Presson says.

Cleaning brand Cif’s Silver-winning “Dirty Mouth Sponsorship” campaign was yet another example of platform hacking. The brand replaced the “bleeps” that normally mask podcast hosts’ swearing with its own “cif” sound.

Not only did daily online sales increase 43% thanks to QR codes embedded in video podcasts, but the brand helped podcasters keep their content monetized, in the face of algorithmic censorship.

Boldness pays off: How Brazil swept Cannes Lions

Bold is something that Brazilian marketers seem to know a lot of about, judging by the proportion of Lion-winning campaigns from the South American country this year.

How did Brazil nab Cannes’ inaugural Creative Country of the Year award? Presson points to three factors:

1. By law, Brazilian ad agencies that produce the ad must also buy the media. It effectively means there is no creative-media ad agency separation: “That integrated approach might influence the creativity in the media,” Presson says.
2. Necessity is the mother of invention. The Brazilian market is big, but the ad budgets often don’t compare to those in the U.S. That means “you need to get craftier with how you reach people,” Presson says.
3. At the awards ceremony on Wednesday, Presson noted that Brazilian teams accepting the accolades often sent delegations of 20 to 30 people onstage — likely everyone that worked on the campaign.

“It’s an indicator to me that they may also have a culture of inclusion,” Presson says of the acceptance teams. “Everyone gets credit. It wasn’t like five execs who were really senior but probably didn’t even work on the campaign.”

Achieving real incrementality

What ties many of the Lion-winning campaigns together is that they “don’t have to be big, just bold,” Presson says.

That may be obvious, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy, especially in today’s economic uncertainty.

“The past couple of years, especially coming out of COVID, at least for U.S.-based clients, they’ve been clinging to click-based ROAS,” she says.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” she adds. “I don’t think a lot of the things that provide high click-based ROAS actually provide incrementality. They claim a lot of credit for purchases that were likely to happen anyway.”

“On the other hand, it helped defend a lot of media budgets that probably would have been cut more substantially over the last couple of years.”

Her advice? When armed with a bold idea, marketers could consider “sacrificing two or three reach points to carve out even $100,000 to do something that might get the internet talking about you.”