Cannes Lions countdown: creatives pick favourites

Marketing Report recently invited senior creatives to select their two standout pieces of work

Ahead of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Marketing Report invited senior creatives to select their two standout pieces of work from the past 11 months, including one campaign they may have personally worked on.

Dillah, Zakbah, Deputy ECD, Fold7

If I were to pick two pieces of work from the past 11 months, it would be Carlsberg Signs of Unity and Coinbase Your Way Out.

And not to sound biased because one of them is ours, but I genuinely believe Signs of Unity captured something really special. It came from a belief that football is at its best when everybody gets to feel part of it. What I loved most was that we didn’t treat accessibility like a CSR add-on. We integrated culture, fandom and participation to it. By turning the most iconic football chant into sign language-led celebrations. The campaign widened on who gets to also share in the emotional rituals of the game all while keeping the work human, optimistic and unmistakably football.

Coinbase Your Way Out is THE campaign that I was truly jealous of, from every creative decision in it. The insight, the tone and the craft. It took a relatable generational truth and elevated it with tactile practical effects, brilliant production design and a tone that felt funny, culturally sharp and timeless all at once.

Hugo Bone, Executive Creative Director from AML

When John Davidson's involuntary tics went viral after the BAFTAs in February, a lot of people from different communities were understandably affected. The world was watching. The pain was real. My son has Tourette’s and I was worried for him. At AML, we’ve been working with Tourette’s Action for a few years now, so it felt good to be able to try and heal wounds with our latest campaign, #NOCHOICE. It leaves no doubt - people with Tourette's have no choice over their tics; the rest of us have a choice over how we respond. Every poster pairs the two sides — "I don't choose to raise my voice. Please choose not to raise your eyebrows." The film, capturing people mid-tic, lands especially hard. The right campaign at the right moment.

I watched Hamnet the other day. Late to the party. I’m a super emotional guy (don’t tell anyone) and was expecting to be in floods. But it didn’t happen. For whatever reason, it just didn't move me. The same is not true of another piece of work which also calls on nature - the BBC Natural History Unit's film 'A Very Special Delivery'. Crikey. I welled up. How could anyone not be moved by that? For starters, the King’s turn was wonderful. But the story, the animals, the landscapes, the cinematography, the soundtrack, the craft - and of course the man himself. It’s one of those films that makes you proud of the organisation, and proud of the nation. Hats off. And happy birthday Sir David.

Louise McQuat, Global ECD, Akcelo

Coinbase - your way out.

I’m obsessed with this spot. I’ve watched it like 50 times and still catch new details every time. Conceptually, using an NPC character to tell a story about breaking free from systems and automated behaviour feels so insanely current. But what really blows my mind is the execution. The fact they recreated a digital world physically is such a subversion of how you’d expect this idea to come to life. In a moment where AI would’ve been the obvious shortcut, they went completely the other way and built it practically, in-camera. Building a fake digital world by hand is pure genius.

Channel 4 - Dirty Business. I genuinely think the thinking behind Fountain of Filth is genius. The entire idea hinges on this perfect act of subversion. Fountains are normally these regal, romanticised monuments to beauty, history, wealth, and human achievement. They’re designed to glorify cities and immortalise moments in time. So taking that exact visual language and corrupting it into this grotesque spectacle of sewage, vomiting figures, and corporate greed is just unbelievably smart. And I love that they didn’t explain the issue through another film or campaign. They created a real-world spectacle people could discover, react to, photograph, and argue about themselves. In a content-saturated world, that kind of physical cultural interruption feels incredibly fresh.

Michael Ruby, Chief Creative Officer, Park & Battery

My (two) predictions for winners at Cannes this year:

“Anthropic’s Claude AI campaign, ‘A Time and a Place’, must surely be a strong contender. As bold as it was unconventional, this swapped touting tech specifications with dark comedy. It was clever, too – positioning Claude as a trustworthy ad-free alternative just as its main competitor, ChatGPT, began introducing ads. Perfectly cast, the campaign – by Mother London – was also totally culturally of the moment we’re all in with AI. I didn’t just laugh, I was jealous.

“Second, our ‘Dangerous foods’ campaign for Thermo Fisher Scientific was all about making the dangers of deceptively dangerous foods more visible. We used AI-crafted predators to bring to life how risks lie in wait, ready to strike, in foods with the risk of an allergic reaction. I am extremely proud of what we created on an extremely limited budget and timeline – and also pioneering an AI-enabled production process – to achieve meaningful impact in healthcare.”

Tamryn Kerr - Co-Founder and CCO, Hijinks

In a year where most of us haven’t gone a day without hearing about AI, I’d like to call out the “Claude by Anthropic” campaign. It’s rare to find a Super Bowl campaign devoid of a single celebrity, but it didn’t need it. The casting, direction and jealously-inducing smart simplicity of it is in my opinion flawless. Just give it a Gold now and let's be done with it.

Hijinks’ own work for Women’s Aid, featuring a children’s choir outside Parliament, threw an important spotlight on the lives lost to domestic abuse. This is work that didn’t just raise awareness but actually made a lasting impact on legislation; the same day, the government changed the law to help protect vulnerable kids from known domestic abusers.