Celebrating Creativity with Cannes Lions 2022

Every year, creatives from around the world – filmmakers, advertisers, marketers, creatives, communicators, media, tech partners and more – gather in Cannes, France, to immerse in best-in-class creativity. The International Festival of Creativity has been championing creative excellence since 1954 with the goal of providing a global destination and the definitive benchmark for creativity that drives progress.

Almost seven decades later, Cannes Lions recognizes creativity as a driving force for business, for change and for good. Reflecting on the legacy and against the broader backdrop of continued disruption in both our industry and in the world around us, we saw Cannes 2022 as an important moment to double down on P&G’s focus of creating value by harnessing the superpower of our industry… creativity.

Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard delivered this central message of Creativity for Growth during his keynote, explaining how creativity makes markets bigger, inspires innovation to attract new people to markets and advances economic inclusion where more people benefit through higher incomes, increased wealth, and more purchasing power.

This message of accelerating growth through creativity was brought to life throughout Marc’s keynote via a series of ad spots, from some of our most loved brands, that demonstrate why creativity must feel personal, communicate performance and build trusted partnerships. This included:

• Pampers Poonami, which creatively shows how its latest diaper innovation is designed to address the number one worry for parents when out and about – the dreaded poonami!
• Men Have Skin Too from Old Spice, which marked an intentional creative shift for the brand and drove more accurate representation of Black men as sophisticated and smooth. The spot tapped into the unique tension that men want skin care benefits like – moisturization and fragrances – and yet aren’t great at sharing their stuff.
• The Venus Pubesong, which exemplifies the power of driving inclusion behind the camera to identify the limitations in an existing cultural taboo, in order to normalize the conversation among consumers – because it’s okay to #SayPubic!

Through a weeklong program of partner-led events, industry panels, talent development platforms and leadership conversations, we had the opportunity to further showcase how our creative responsibility extends to doing good. P&G is taking systemic action to advance creativity for both growth and good with Widen the Screen – a content creation, talent development and partnership platform that enables equal representation and inclusion of diverse creators across the advertising, film and media ecosystem. We started this platform with Black creators and are broadening to all underrepresented creators, with a call to action to “widen the screen, so we can widen our view.” When we focus on our core job of creating value as a force for growth, that in turn gives us the means to be an even broader force for good – in ways that help society and the planet.

Celebrating and Recognizing P&G’s Creativity at Cannes Lions
As part of the convening of creative minds, creative brilliance is celebrated through the Cannes Lions Awards – a set of highly competitive, world-class awards. Of all the work that is entered for consideration, only 4% receive recognition. Just getting onto an awards shortlist is an accomplishment! Despite the high bar, P&G people – corporate and brand teams, alongside agency partners and collaborators – were shortlisted for 30 awards this year. By weekend, P&G took home more than 10 awards, including the coveted Grand Prix for Sustainable Development Goals for Good Health and Wellbeing for our work with Whisper in India to educate school-age children about periods – something not taught in schools and commonly not discussed at home. In India, where 23 million girls drop out of school every year at the onset of puberty, “The Missing Chapter” campaign influenced a century-old system to add the vital chapter of period education in Indian textbooks to #KeepGirlsinSchool. You can watch the powerful work that our Whisper team in India, and our partners at Leo Burnett, drove to achieve this impact below.

With barely more than 0.75% of entries awarded recognition, the bar to win gold is pretty high. Our Tide team and partners at Saatchi & Saatchi were up to the challenge and won recognition in the Sustainable Development Goals for Responsible Consumption and Production category for their work to encourage consumers to #TurnToCold.

The Silver Lions, where only 1.13% of submissions take home an award, saw recognition for P&G’s Whisper team again for their work with Leo Burnett to bring The Missing Chapter in period education back into India’s schools and communities, as well as to our corporate LGBTQ+ team for the film CODED: The Hidden Love of J.C. Leyendecker, which explores how some of P&G’s earliest product advertisements secretly spoke to the LGBTQ+ community.

P&G and its agency partners also took home six Bronze Lions, including:

• An additional Lion for Tide’s #TurnToCold campaign.
• Two Lions recognizing the “Marvel Teaser or Tide Ad?” campaign. Watch here.
• One Lion for Ariel’s work to #ShareTheLoad.
• One Lion recognizing our work to #WidenTheScreen and Widen our View of Black life. Watch here.
• One Lion for our work with Saturday Morning and Tribeca Studios to realize 8:46 Films (and to take back the time that it took for George Floyd’s life to change the world). Watch here.

It is this inspiring work – as well as other fantastic examples of creativity that we demonstrate within our business every day – that proves how creativity, as a force or growth, matters. Congratulations to all the corporate and brand teams and partners whose vision, insight and passion are brought to life in our brand communication and whose efforts to make a personal connection with our consumers, communicate the superior performance of P&G’s brands, and build trusted, transformative partnerships are earning awards for the impact they continue to have on our business and in the world.