At this year’s Cannes Lions Festival, in France P&G’s Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard offered five ‘timeless lessons’ for brand creativity:

• 𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗲. Find IN-sights that matter.

• 𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗲. As Joey Reiman says, “the fruits are in the roots.”

• 𝗙𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘆 𝗶𝗻 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗳𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗱𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴. Consumers deserve our finest craft whenever and wherever the brand is expressed.

• 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗮𝗱𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴. Memory keeps brands “top of mind.”

• 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗲𝗻𝗱𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽𝘀. It is the key to building the best creative work…because the heart and soul of brands comes from the hearts and souls of people.

Coming from one of the most influencial big brand CMOs, the back to basics lesson about consistency is an important one.

Pritchard asked, “Can we still build brands that are trusted, growing and lasting?”

He answered “Yes,” but only if marketers stick to founding principles of marketing, rather than continually pivoting to chase the ever changing volatility and short-termism of the advertising market.

Pritchard’s view, however, was challenged in a session titled How Can You Build a Big Brand from Lots of Littles. A panel discussed the question, ‘how do you create a cohesive brand from countless micro-moments?’

In creative, the rise of the algorithms means advertisers need to build many more variants of their creative work to be tested and optimised. Marketers are now having to construct plans built on ‘lots of little’ engagements.

There is a way to balance the fragmentation of digital creative with the need for brand consistency, according to Grace Kite from Analytic Partners and Tom Roach from Jellyfish, who were part of the panel. If you align the “thousands of small engagements” with advertising creative each day there is a possibility of forming a bigger brand identity, said Kite.

“Seeing lots of little ads is a perfectly good substitute for lack of attention on any one ad… It works for brand building and sales.” Based on findings from Meta research, Kite concluded: “You actually get more sales if you aggregate moments versus continuous moments… it works for sales, even if you are below that 2.5 seconds attention threshold, as long as [the ads]  were working together in an aggregated way.”

To successfully align images and messages to form a consistent brand requires content orchestration across channels, said Roach. Platforms reward volume and novelty, but can be aligned through coordination of the many messages being produced across multiple platforms.

The panel argued that many little executions of messages across social, audio, video, print and out of home media can still build a brand, just in different way from the traditional approach.

Winners of the Cannes Lions for Radio and Audio are:

Click here for all the audio winners.

The winners of Innovative Use of the Audio Medium are:

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The winners of hte Excellence in Audio category are:

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See Young Lions winners and their campaigns here.

View all the 2025 Cannes Lions winners here.