Dynamic as few and consumer-centered as perhaps even fewer, the advertising industry left the 71st edition of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in June 2024 with two main takeaways. One was the still growing
, with online creators-revolving campaigns winning, for instance, the Titanium Grand Prix and the Creative B2B Grand Prix. Another sign of the times was the strengthening of
, as several competitors bet on whimsy to excite the juries. However, the event struggles to recover the grandiosity of its past iterations, particularly pre-pandemic ones. In 2024, the
stood fell behind 26.8 thousand. That was over 17 percent below the registrations recorded in 2018.
The evolution of the Lion: history and money
The first International Advertising Film Festival took place in Venice in 1954. Fourteen countries and 187 entries competed for the lion-shaped trophy, inspired by the iconic feline statue in St Mark's Square. After being held in Italy and Monaco, the festival landed in Cannes, France, in 1984. Twenty years later, in 2004, the British firm that would later become the business-to-business (B2B) media company Ascential plc acquired the festival for more than 50 million U.S. dollars. Since then, the aura of extravagance and exclusivity continued, at least in part thanks to
entry fees that can exceed 2.6 thousand euros as of 2024. The year prior,
Cannes Lions' event revenue surpassed 100 million British pounds, up over 40 percent from the 2019 result.
The Lion kings: top creative winners and award-getters
Whereas part of the festival's income comes from the thousands of campaign entries competing for prizes in various categories, only a few parent companies receive several awards. In 2023, the top three
countries with the highest number of lions were the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil, all with a long history of good performance at the event. The same year, Omnicom and WPP topped the
ranking of ad holdings impressing the Cannes juries the most with their work. Both groups accepted hundreds of awards. They also stood amidst the
media groups with the highest revenues in 2023, surpassing 14.5 billion dollars each and indicating that larger corporations can afford creative ads more systematically.
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