Cannes Lions has published the Creativity Report 2026, an overview of the ideas that won Lions this year and the patterns connecting them. The analysis of the winning work shows that brands increasingly captured attention by offering audiences tangible value, distinctive sounds, stories open to participation and a more transparent approach to truth.
The report groups these shifts into four creative directions: Fair Trade, Sound Reasoning, Fan Folklore and Tackling Truth. Alongside an overview of campaigns and insights from Jury members, it also presents the results of the first Creative Brand Lions, an Award recognising the systems and cultures that enable brands to achieve creative and business results over an extended period.
Fair Trade describes campaigns built on a genuine value exchange. Instead of searching for new ways to insert themselves into existing experiences, brands offer audiences a tangible benefit. In the project Copycats Welcome, mobile game Clash Royale allowed players of competing copycat games to convert their existing progress into currency in the original game. More than 2.3 million players did so within three days, 1.65 million new accounts were opened and 5.4 million former users were re-engaged.
Uber offered a different form of exchange in Brazil. The brand became a sponsor of fourth-division club Uberlândia E.C. without changing its name, using the existing similarity as the basis for the partnership. The club received financial support, while the campaign generated 1.2 billion impressions, a fourteenfold increase in brand mentions and an 84 percent rise in match attendance.
Sound Reasoning shows how sound is becoming a flexible identifying asset in a media environment fragmented across numerous formats. Energy drink Sting connected its name with the sound of a Formula 1 engine, even though its sponsorship agreement did not allow its logo to appear at the track. DJ Armin van Buuren, creators, former drivers and Formula 1 itself were involved in the campaign, which achieved a reach of 1.12 billion and generated more than one thousand media stories.
The third direction, Fan Folklore, gives brands the role of initiating a story while leaving its development to the audience. Through the campaign Expedition Impossible, Columbia Sportswear offered the entire company to anyone who could prove that the Earth was flat. The challenge then continued through discussions and direct responses on X, Reddit and YouTube, reaching 80 million people. German retail chain PENNY used the real-life arrival of more than 50 sheep inside one of its stores to develop the story Sheep Happens together with the audience, generating €30 million in earned media value.
Tackling Truth brings together work responding to the public’s increasingly pronounced scepticism towards content created with generative tools and deepfake technology. The winning brands included those that embedded transparency into the idea itself and provided proof of the people, work or reality behind their claims.
Entry data shows that AI played some role in 40 percent of the work submitted to this year’s Festival. The Jury’s conclusion, however, was not that tools are taking over the leading creative role. Taste, craft and attention to detail remained the qualities that distinguished the winning projects from the rest.
This year also brought the first presentation of the Creative Brand Lions, an Award that evaluates a company’s creative capabilities, processes and culture rather than an individual campaign. Two Lions were awarded from among 73 entries. The Grand Prix for AB InBev: Creativity at Scale went to AB InBev, whose 33 brands across 17 countries won an average of 40 Lions annually over the previous five years. Mastercard was recognised for The Priceless Partnership, a system built around the Priceless platform, which the brand has been developing since 1997 and applying across 220 markets.
In both cases, the Jury looked for proof that creativity was not an occasional result produced by an individual team, but a capability the company could replicate across different years, brands and markets. The report therefore identifies a shared internal culture and measurement system, long-term planning and partnerships in which agencies and external collaborators operate as part of the same team among its main lessons.
