WARC, the global authority on marketing effectiveness, has released ‘Creative Impact Unpacked’, a report highlighting the key themes from Creative Impact, one of five content streams at Cannes Lions 2025.
Creative Impact, now in its third year, is the home of effectiveness at Cannes Lions, co-curated with WARC. Featuring 29 sessions presented by 65 speakers over the course of the five-day Festival, it is the ultimate guide to proving the value of creativity in building resilient brands and delivering commercial results.
With some of the world’s leading marketers, researchers and effectiveness experts taking to the stage to share their latest thinking, this year’s Creative Impact track explored how the very best brands balance consistency with agility amid a fragmented media world.
David Tiltman, chief content officer, WARC and SVP Content, LIONS Intelligence, said: “If there was one word that brought together the Creative Impact programme at Cannes Lions this year, it would be ‘Consistency’. The ongoing power of a creative idea repeated and refreshed over time. And the multiplier effect of brand and performance techniques working together.
“But in 2025, in a fragmented media landscape, in siloed organisations, and at a time when creators offer alternatives to traditional communications channels, consistency and integration are hard. The good news is that it can be done – and with this report we share some of the ways to do it.”
Key trends and themes outlined in Creative Impact Unpacked are:
Closing the C-suite gap
New evidence equips marketers to champion creative brand-building to the C-suite.
- Brand as a risk mitigator: Marketers are reframing creative investment decisions to gain C-suite support. Karen Crum, Partner, Strategy and Transactions at EY Parthenon, suggested positioning brand strength as a risk mitigator, highlighting how strong brands recover faster from a crisis or how underinvesting in brand can risk commercial performance.
- The cost of dull vs creative upside: New research from Amplified Intelligence’s Dr. Karen Nelson-Field and eatbigfish’s Adam Morgan put the cost of weak creative in low-quality media environments at an average of 43 cents on every dollar – or $198bn industry-wide. A study of the most awarded companies at Cannes Lions by Interbrand found they overperformed the average EBIT performance by 2.7% a year and market capitalisation by 4.7%.
- Use ‘portfolios’ to beat the ROAS trap: Laura Jones, CMO of US grocery delivery firm Instacart, explained how shifting the board from an obsession with channel level returns on ad spend to portfolio ROAS helps move up the purchase funnel.
Consistency versus ‘lots of little’
Media fragmentation challenges brand consistency in today’s ‘lots of little’ landscape.
- The consistency challenge: Dr Grace Kite of Analytic Partners and Tom Roach of Jellyfish showed how a fracturing media market and the algorithmic models of the big tech platforms are creating a consistency challenge. Citing research from DAIVID, Tom Roach said running work with different types of emotional impact in different channels can reduce impact. Grace Kite argued that having messages in multiple media can drive synergy effects and that multiple short exposures can still drive brand effects.
- Beyond matching luggage: to balance consistency with creative flexibility, JJ Healan of McDonald’s and Natasha Maharaj of Desperados revealed their shift from rigid “matching luggage” marketing to flexible “brand universes” that maintain core distinctive codes while allowing contextual adaptation—with Desperados specifically empowering content creators with “freedom within a framework” to enhance cultural relevance.
- Progress > process: The need to reconfigure processes to allow experimentation was a common theme. Emmanuel Orssaud, CMO of Duolingo, credits the brand’s success to allocating 30% of budget on experiments and 70% on what they know works, while maintaining brand consistency through its owl mascot. Strategy experts Paula Bloodworth and Rob Campbell contrasted the process-driven approach of many marketing teams with working with artists like Idris Elba and Metallica who work quickly based on a defined point of view.
Unshittification
Marketers must combat “enshittification” – the deterioration of a service or product due to erosion in the quality of service – by aligning marketing promises with customer experience. The goal here can be thought of as “unshittification”.
- Unshittification means ditching siloes: Gap CEO Richard Dickson transformed the retailer’s “cluttered” experience by merging siloed teams into a unified services group, ensuring brand consistency across all touchpoints—from digital notifications to in-store environments. “Retail is detail,” Dickson notes, ensuring brand storytelling is everywhere.
- Design for emotion, not just efficiency: advocating for memorable brand experiences, R/GA’s Yael Cesarkis and Sephora’s VP of Marketing Brent Mitchell champion prioritizing emotional resonance over mere efficiency in customer experiences, with Mitchell highlighting how Sephora’s product sampling creates a memorable touchpoint.
- Logistics are a brand equity builder: Latin American e-commerce giant Mercado Libre, working with GUT, identified delivery uncertainty as a critical trust barrier and transformed this insight into opportunity by elevating the emotional significance of package arrival — resulting in their new tagline “Lo mejor está llegando” (“The best is coming”), according to CMO Sean Summers.
Other themes outlined in the report are: The case for consistency, The creator takeover, Multiplier effect in action, Same same but different, Reframing brand as buyability in B2B, The race to the full funnel, Brand building for startups, and Lessons from Creative Effectiveness Lions.
