The Rosé is Warm, The Work is Hard, The Risk is Real
The Cannes Lions festival continues to be a raucous spectacle: part awards show, part seaside industry confessional, part sales conference for the business of creativity. And this year, amidst the panel shows, debates, and endless sun-kissed social reels, there was at least one bright headline worth celebrating: a shift from the tired call for ‘bravery’ in marketing to a sharper, more grounded discussion of risk.
This is more than semantics. Marketing isn’t supposed to be an adrenaline sport for advertisers; it’s meant to be the discipline that turns risk into managed, productive growth, that protects businesses by generating sustainable organic sales, not simply by burning cash on flamboyant stunts. As WARC’s summary of Cannes 2025 noted, talking about risk rather than bravery moves the conversation out of the shallow waters of platitude and into the hard work of building trust, brand strength, and resilience.
But even as the festival congratulated itself on that shift, it couldn’t resist packaging up old truths as though they were groundbreaking revelations. Case in point: the thunderous applause for ‘creative consistency’ as though the industry had just cracked the code of effectiveness. And yes, the data is clear consistency and consistent branding drives returns.
But let’s not pretend this is news. It is, in fact, embarrassing that we still have to teach ourselves that showing up, again and again, with the same codes, ideas, and tone, is better than constant reinvention. As a discipline, we have the memory of a goldfish and the ego of a prize-fighter. It does not matter how beautiful our art, Craft and Creativity without Commercial risks making our industry appear further adolescent.
Meanwhile, just a few yards from the Palais, Scott Galloway and Rory Sutherland were on stage debating whether the brand itself is dead. Galloway thundered, “The era of brand is over… From the end of World War II to Google, the algorithm was simple: mediocre product, great storytelling, cheap reach. That world’s gone.” He dismissed the old logic of buying fame with a wave of cash and a Cannes award. In its place? AI, social graphs, micro-segmented targeting. “I don’t need to defer to a logo,” he snapped.
Rory Sutherland, as ever, offered a richer, more human view. A brand, he argued, is like a pension. “You invest for years and think it’s rubbish. Then one day you wake up and go: bloody hell, where did all this equity come from?” His point was bigger than nostalgia: most businesses today simply don’t have the patience to build enduring value. “Marketing is fat-tailed,” he said. “Ten percent of what we do delivers eighty percent of the value. It’s treasure hunting, not open-cast mining.”
He’s right. Consistency isn’t magic dust. It is the result of the hard, unglamorous discipline of patience. It’s a refusal to let short-term measurement steer the whole ship. As marketers, we have developed an obsession with linear ROI, measured by last click, last view, last coupon code. And in the process, we have given up the idea of building structures, brands, products, and systems that deliver customer benefit in the long term. That’s the real creative work and it’s rarely awarded on the Cannes stage.
However we should be careful with the narratives we employ, it is a false binary to choose between art and science, marketing and engineering. It is bad creative thinking that can not explain why it might work and bad engineering that can not adapt to new data and approaches.
Because Cannes, for all its celebration of risk and consistency, still treats creativity as a surface skill a matter of narrative flair, clever lines, and neat execution. But creativity isn’t just messaging. It’s also the work of product innovation, system design, customer experience, the plumbing and wiring of businesses that deliver genuine customer benefit, not just emotional salience.
If marketing’s job is to bring the voice of the customer into business decisions, to translate messy human needs into sustainable growth; then we need to stop treating creative storytelling as the only place creativity lives! Yes, that storytelling is often the sharp edge of the sword. But unless it is built on robust, consistent structures beneath it. Operational, product, service, brand experience — then it is little more than confetti thrown into the wind.
Galloway warned that in the AI era, mediocre brand fluff will die fast. Marchisotto of Elf Beauty offered the counterpoint: that building brands still delivers value, if you have the guts to take the risks, to convince the boardroom, to invest in building something consistent and customer-led over the long term. “Most brands can’t do the work we do,” she said, “because they don’t have the balls to sell it to their C-suite.”
And therein lies the practical challenge. How do we teach, scale, and reward the type of creativity that is structural and customer-led, rather than purely narrative? How do we build cultures that tolerate risk, invest with patience, and recognise that marketing’s and advertising’s real work lies not in the easy-to-celebrate craft of the ad, but in the harder work of aligning teams, building systems, and creating ideas that live through execution after execution?
Some steps worth taking:
Train teams not just in creative craft, but in the customer economics that underpin growth.
Build incentive structures that reward long-term brand value creation, not just quarterly bumps in salience metrics.
Foster processes where creative thinkers work alongside product, customer service, and operations teams to weave consistency through every customer touchpoint.
Use AI where it supports human creativity, but not as a replacement for human judgement, risk-taking, or provocation.
Create a culture that sees marketing not as decoration, but as an organisational system designed to translate customer understanding into competitive advantage.
Because this isn’t just about being better, it’s about surviving. In a world of AI churn, cynical short-termism, and customer indifference, the only brands that will thrive are those that understand creativity as a systemic discipline, not a fleeting performance.
We cannot afford to keep mistaking confetti for strategy. We must build organisations where creativity is woven into every layer, where risk is managed with purpose, and where consistency is not a revelation, but a resolute commitment.
That’s the real path to growth. That’s where marketing grows up and proves it deserves a seat at the grown-up table. And yes, it will be risky. But maybe that’s exactly the risk we need.
Cannes can keep its rosé-drenched awards nights. But we should leave the festival willing to do the harder work. Not of being brave for bravery’s sake, but of managing risk. Of teaching consistency not as revelation, but as discipline. Of broadening the definition of creativity until it stretches across the bones of the business. That is the real path to growth. That is where the real marketing revolution lies. And if that sounds risky? Well, maybe that’s us growing up after all.