Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has introduced a new award category, the Creative Brand Lion, designed to recognise organisations that deliberately invest in the internal systems, culture, and leadership frameworks required to sustain breakthrough creativity and long term brand growth. The body revealed that this is aimed at spotlighting   the business structures behind standout marketing work.

At the same time, the festival is strengthening its collaboration with the World Federation of Advertisers to launch a new global research initiative titled Clients and Creativity 2026, which will actively capture how senior marketers across multinational companies expect creativity to evolve in an increasingly technology shaped marketing environment.

Through this joint effort, both organisations are directly engaging brand leaders across WFA’s international membership network. Specifically, they are inviting executives to contribute insights through a short survey designed to identify where future creative advantage will come from and, importantly, how artificial intelligence is already reshaping capability building inside modern marketing organisations.

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The study arrives at a decisive moment. As brands rapidly integrate automation tools and intelligent platforms into their workflows, marketing leaders are simultaneously reassessing how creativity can continue to function as a growth multiplier rather than simply a communication tool.

Consequently, the findings are expected to help clarify how companies plan to balance human imagination with machine enabled efficiency in the years ahead.

Importantly, the survey results will be released in early June, just ahead of the 2026 edition of the Cannes Lions Festival, where conversations across the global marketing community are already expected to focus heavily on the expanding relationship between creativity, innovation, and AI powered transformation.

The new Creative Brand Lion will therefore operate as both a recognition platform and a strategic signal. Rather than celebrating campaigns alone, the award will highlight organisations that intentionally build repeatable creative excellence through leadership alignment, operational investment, and capability development across teams. In doing so, Cannes Lions is shifting attention toward the organisational engines that make world class creativity sustainable.

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The inaugural Jury President for the award will be Marcel Marcondes, Global Chief Marketing Officer at AB InBev and recipient of the WFA’s Global Marketer of the Year 2024 honour. His appointment reinforces the award’s emphasis on creativity as a measurable driver of commercial performance rather than a purely artistic benchmark.

Explaining the motivation behind the research partnership, Stephan Loerke, Chief Executive Officer of the World Federation of Advertisers, noted that marketers are currently navigating one of the most significant shifts in the history of brand building.

He emphasised that while debate around AI continues to accelerate, brand owners increasingly want clarity on the capabilities that will define creative success in the future and how those capabilities can translate directly into demonstrable growth outcomes.

Similarly, Simon Cook, Chief Executive Officer of Cannes Lions, explained that the introduction of the Creative Brand Lion reflects a broader industry shift toward recognising creativity as an organisational discipline rather than a campaign level achievement.

He stressed that the new award category acknowledges brands that intentionally develop cultures, processes, and talent ecosystems capable of delivering consistent creative impact at scale.

Cook also highlighted that the joint research with the WFA will provide an important pulse check on how brand side leaders currently interpret the evolving relationship between artificial intelligence and creative performance.

As a result, the initiative is expected to shape conversations across the Festival when global marketing decision makers gather in Cannes later this year.

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Earlier collaborative research conducted in 2022 by the WFA alongside Contagious and Observatory International already demonstrated the strength of industry confidence in creativity as a growth lever.

At the time, more than four out of five multinational marketers described creativity as marketing’s most powerful advantage, while a significant proportion identified it as essential to business success itself.

Now, with AI rapidly transforming production speed, insight generation, and audience targeting, both Cannes Lions and the WFA are moving decisively to ensure that creativity remains firmly positioned at the centre of brand strategy rather than at its margins.

Together, the new research initiative and the Creative Brand Lion award signal a coordinated effort to help organisations translate creative ambition into structured capability and sustained competitive advantage. 🚀

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