Nine out of ten marketers don’t know why their ads worked (or failed).
This is a striking reality in an industry where creatives remain one of the most significant drivers of advertising campaign success.
Marketers today have access to more performance data than ever before. They can measure impressions, engagement, conversions, and sales with remarkable precision. However, when it comes to the creative itself, most decisions still rely on intuition, experience, and post-campaign hindsight.
The challenge was never a lack of creative ideas. It was and is always about understanding why certain ideas resonate more deeply, persuade more effectively, and remain memorable long after audiences encounter them.
This is what makes Cannes Lions so valuable.
Every year, Cannes celebrates the industry’s most creative and impactful work. While the awards recognize excellence, they also provide a unique opportunity to study the characteristics that appear in winning campaigns.
This year, instead of focusing on predicting winners alone, we leveraged C5i Incivus, our GenAI-powered AdTech product to analyze 35 shortlisted campaigns across the Titanium, Innovation, and Glass: The Lion for Change categories. Our goal was to uncover the signals behind creative effectiveness. We evaluated these campaigns across multiple dimensions, including creative impact, audience processing, persuasion, emotional response, strategic alignment, and brand impact.
The objective was not to determine who will take home a Lion. It was to answer a more valuable question: What do the world’s most celebrated campaigns have in common, and what can marketers learn from them?
Why Cannes Matters Beyond the Awards
Winning work shapes how marketers evaluate creative excellence for years.
The Cannes Lions shortlist is not only a collection of campaigns competing for recognition. It is a reflection of the ideas, strategies, and creative approaches that are capturing the industry’s attention. In many ways, it serves as a snapshot of where advertising is heading.
Yet identifying excellence is easier than consistently reproducing it.
Creative evaluation remains highly subjective. What resonates with one audience may not resonate with another. What appears innovative to one judge may feel familiar to someone else.
As a result, creative excellence often feels difficult to define and even harder to replicate.
C5i Incivus approaches the problem differently. Rather than evaluating creatives through opinions alone, it evaluates campaigns across measurable creative, cognitive, emotional, persuasion, and brand-impact dimensions. The result is data-backed and structured, which makes it easier to understand which campaigns stand out, and the signals that contribute to their effectiveness.
Instead of asking who will win Cannes, we asked: What signals consistently appear across the strongest shortlisted work?
The C5i Incivus Cannes Analysis Framework
To answer that question, C5i Incivus assessed 35 shortlisted campaigns across the three categories and evaluated them using 17 creative intelligence measures. The highest Creative Effectiveness Score reached 94.01, while the Top 10 campaigns averaged 91.25. Among the strongest campaigns, message clarity reached a perfect score of 10 out of 10.
Individual scores were grouped into six dimensions that together provide a holistic view of creative effectiveness.
Creative Impact: Evaluate how effectively a campaign communicates its message and captures attention. It includes Creative Effectiveness, Recall, Messaging Intent, and Ad Copy Effectiveness.
Audience Processing: Measure how easily consumers can absorb and interpret a creative. It includes Cognitive Load, Design Complexity, and Ad Copy Complexity.
Persuasion: Assess the campaign’s ability to influence behavior through relevance, calls-to-action, and persuasive triggers.
Brand Impact: Evaluate how effectively a campaign strengthens brand recognition and contributes to brand outcomes.
Strategic Alignment: Measure the relationship between creative execution and intended business objectives, including Purchase Intent, Messaging Clarity, and Funnel Compatibility.
Emotional Response: Examine the campaign’s ability to create meaningful emotional connection and resonance.
Taken together, these dimensions provide a structured way to understand not just what a campaign says, but how effectively it communicates, persuades, resonates, and drives intended outcomes.
The Signals Behind Cannes-Worthy Creative
When the highest-performing campaigns were analyzed collectively, five patterns consistently emerged.
Signal #1: Emotion Works Best When It Is Clear and Relevant
Emotion remains one of the most powerful drivers of effectiveness, only when it serves a purpose.
Across the Top 10 campaigns, Emotional Resonance averaged 9.7 out of 10, while Relevance averaged 9.3 and Purchase Intent averaged 91.0.
The highest-ranked campaigns by Emotional Resonance were:
- Recipe for Change (Puck) – 10.0
- No Frame Missed (Apple) – 9.9
- Tocayos (Heineken) – 9.8
These campaigns demonstrate an important principle.
Emotion is most effective when it is connected to relevance, messaging, and audience outcomes. Emotional storytelling alone is not enough. The leading creatives pair emotional impact with strategic purpose.
For example, Recipe for Change uses something familiar (recipes) to address a complex issue (food insecurity). By giving consumers a clear and meaningful role in the solution, the campaign creates emotional engagement that feels relevant and actionable.
Signal #2: Persuasion Is Built Into Every Layer
The best creative persuades long before the final call-to-action appears.
Among the Top 10 campaigns, Ad Copy Effectiveness averaged 99.3, Persuasive Triggers averaged 9.7 out of 10, and Visual or Verbal CTA strength averaged 7.1 out of 10.
The leading campaigns by Persuasiveness were:
- Tocayos (Heineken) – 9.47
- Hero Gum (Gift of Life) – 9.43
- No Frame Missed (Apple) – 9.15
For example, Tocayos is built around a simple cultural insight: people who share the same name often feel an immediate connection. Heineken turns that insight into a social experience, creating opportunities for strangers to interact, engage, and share a beer together. Rather than relying on a traditional sales message, the campaign uses participation, relevance, and human connection to make the brand part of the experience.
Also, one of the most notable findings is that Ad Copy Effectiveness shows one of the largest gaps between top and bottom performers. The best-performing work consistently scores highly on persuasive triggers, calls-to-action, and purchase intent.
The finding reinforces a broader pattern: the strongest campaigns don’t rely on a single CTA at the end of the experience. Instead, they create a persuasive journey throughout the creative itself, using messaging, relevance, visual cues, and behavioral triggers to influence audiences long before the final call-to-action appears.
Signal #3: The Brand Is Part of the Story
One of the most persistent myths in advertising is that branding and creativity are competing priorities.
The data suggests otherwise.
Among the strongest campaigns, Brand Compliance averaged 93.0 while Purchase Intent remained high at 91.0.
The leading campaigns by Brand Funnel Impact were:
- Haven (Suncorp Insurance) – 40.9
The highest-performing work does not treat the brand as an afterthought. For example, Welcome Back, Paisano celebrates the deep cultural ties between Mexican and Italian communities through a story of shared heritage, identity, and belonging. Rather than placing the brand alongside the narrative, Tecate makes the brand central to it. The campaign’s message about connection and cultural pride is inseparable from the role the brand plays in bringing people together.
The brand is integral to the story, the message, and ultimately the reason the campaign matters.
Signal #4: Simplicity Creates Advantage
The strongest campaigns communicate complex ideas without creating complexity for the audience.
Across the Top 10 campaigns, Message Clarity averaged 9.65 out of 10, while Cognitive Load and Design Complexity remained moderate at 50.1 and 30.1 respectively. Average Recall reached 82.1. This suggests that creative effectiveness is not driven by complexity alone.
The finding is clear: the highest-ranked creatives are easier to process. Top-performing campaigns combine moderate cognitive load and controlled design complexity with stronger message clarity and recall. Rather than making consumers work harder, they package ideas in a way that is immediately understandable and memorable.
In a crowded media environment, simplicity is not a creative compromise. It is often what makes creative more effective.
Signal #5: Strategic Intent Outperforms Creative Novelty
Originality matters. But originality without purpose rarely drives outcomes.
The highest-performing campaigns demonstrated exceptional strategic alignment, averaging 93.2 in Messaging Intent, 90.5 in Funnel Compatibility, and 91.0 in Purchase Intent.
What separates these campaigns is not simply that they are distinctive. They create a clear connection between the creative idea and the intended audience outcome. The strongest performers consistently score highly on Messaging Intent, Funnel Compatibility, and Purchase Intent, suggesting that effectiveness comes from aligning creative execution with a specific audience action and stage of the customer journey.
C5i Incivus Cannes Contenders 2026
Based on overall C5i Incivus rankings, the Top 10 campaigns are:
Collectively, these campaigns form a remarkably consistent group. The Top 10 average 91.2 in Creative Effectiveness and perform particularly strongly in message clarity, emotional resonance, strategic intent, and ad copy effectiveness.
The category leaders also demonstrate that there is no single path to excellence.
No Frame Missed emerged as a leader in Creative Effectiveness and Message Clarity. Recipe for Change led Emotional Resonance. Tocayos achieved the highest Persuasiveness score.
Category Leaders Reveal Different Paths to Excellence
The Creative Effectiveness and Message Clarity leaders highlight another important characteristic of high-performing work: the ability to communicate ideas clearly without sacrificing impact.
The campaigns leading these dimensions consistently combine memorability, strategic intent, and ease of comprehension. This demonstrates that creative effectiveness is often driven as much by clarity as by creativity itself.
Creative Effectiveness Leaders
| Rank | Campaign | Brand | Score (out of 100) |
| 1 | No Frame Missed | Apple | 93.9 |
| 2 | Duobell | Škoda | 94.0 |
| 3 | Oreo Cows | Oreo | 93.2 |
Message Clarity Leaders
| Rank | Campaign | Brand | Score (out of 10) |
| 1 | Oreo Cows | Oreo | 10.0 |
| 2 | Supernova Adaptive | Adidas | 10.0 |
| 3 | No Frame Missed | Apple | 9.9 |
The C5i Incivus Creativity Rankings
Looking across the Top 10 campaigns, several dimensions appeared with remarkable consistency.
The strongest-performing signals were:
- Messaging Intent – 93.2
- Purchase Intent – 91.0
- Funnel Compatibility – 90.5
- Brand Compliance – 93.0
- Message Clarity – 9.6
- Emotional Resonance – 9.7
- Persuasive Triggers – 9.7
- Ad Copy Effectiveness – 99.3
Perhaps the most important takeaway is that the strongest signals are not purely emotional, visual, or creative.
The highest-performing campaigns consistently excel at making their ideas understandable, persuasive, strategically aligned, and strongly connected to the brand.
Before the Lions Are Announced
Whether these campaigns ultimately take home Lions remains to be seen.
But one thing is already clear. The strongest shortlisted campaigns consistently demonstrate a combination of clear messaging, strategic intent, emotional resonance, persuasive execution, and meaningful brand impact.
What’s particularly striking is that these signals are not exclusive to Cannes contenders. They are the same characteristics that help creative break through crowded markets, influence audience behavior, strengthen brand perception, and drive business outcomes. For marketers, that may be the most important takeaway from this analysis.
For marketing leaders, the value of Cannes doesn’t only lie in identifying the winners. It is in understanding the signals that make certain creatives rise above thousands of entries in the first place.
While trophies recognize creative excellence, they don’t explain it. The signals do. Whether the jury ultimately agrees with every ranking or not, those signals offer something far more actionable than a prediction list. They provide a framework for understanding what effective creative looks like before the results are in.
The winners will be announced soon. The lessons behind them are already visible.
To get a more detailed analysis across 35 ads analyzed, please free to reach out to us at scalewithgenAI@c5i.ai
