Timeless Creativity at Cannes Lions 2025: How P&G Is Building Brands That Last

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is a global gathering of creative minds shaping the future of marketing and advertising. It celebrates the power of creativity to solve problems, connect people and propel business forward. Continuing our 20+ year tradition, P&G joined with our partners again this year to reaffirm that timeless creativity — rooted in insight, craft and consistency — is essential to driving growth, building trust and creating brands that endure in a rapidly changing world.

Throughout the festival, P&G executives joined valued partners for conversations that explored how brands can remain relevant and impactful by staying true to creative principles while adapting to change. The theme was clear: creativity, executed with consistency and purpose, remains the ultimate tool for navigating the complexities of today’s marketplace.

Setting the Stage

Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard pulled back the curtain, sharing learnings throughout his career at P&G and insights that have helped ensure some of our most iconic brands remain just as relevant today. In his keynote, Pritchard emphasized that while the world may change, the fundamentals of creativity remain constant. These timeless lessons, grounded in insight, craft and consistency, continue to be the foundation of P&G’s success:

• Know your consumer better than anyone. Find insights that matter. True insight goes beyond observation — it uncovers the human truths inside a behavior that leads to interesting brand ideas. Ariel’s “Certainty of Clean” campaign extracts insights from the lengths people go through to get clothes clean, transforming those insights into fresh ideas which led to double-digit growth in Europe.
  
  
• Know your brand better than anyone. As author and adjunct professor Joey Reiman says, the fruits are in the roots. The key to identifying what your brand stands for in the hearts and minds of consumers is found in the DNA from the very beginning... and it’s a great source of insights and ideas. The historical “Don’t Squeeze the Charmin” campaign with spokesperson Mr. Whipple brought to life the brand’s irresistibly squeezable softness and later inspired creation of the Charmin Bears who communicate the same benefits in a fresh, clever way.
  
  
• Fall in love with the craft of advertising. Advertising describes the creative outcome of what we do. Its creativity is designed to connect, persuade and build trust, which helps people turn toward our brands. SK-II launched its most exclusive and luxurious skin care series — LXP — with 8 times the concentration of its miracle ingredient PITERATM, with beautiful advertising inspired by the time-honored art of ceramic restoration known as Kintsugi, whose philosophy embraces imperfections and sees beauty in the flawed or imperfect.
  
  
• Build memory with advertising. Consistently expressing the brand idea wherever it is experienced in words and visuals that last is essential to keeping brands top of mind. Head & Shoulders’ “I Don’t” campaign builds memory of the idea that people who use the brand don’t have dandruff because they prevent it, and executions tailored for local sensibilities in each European country ensure it’s unforgettable.
  
  
• Build enduring creative relationships: The best work comes from trusted partnerships because the heart and soul of brands comes from the hearts and souls of people. Long-term collaborations have driven some of our most successful campaigns, including “It’s a Tide Ad” and the fun stories that bring to life the distinctive benefits of Old Spice.

Inspiring Conversations

P&G leaders helped extend Pritchard’s message while also exploring how innovation, creativity and inclusive marketing help us better meet your needs and deliver business growth.

• Accessibility Drives Creativity. Taide Guajardo, P&G’s head marketer for Europe, took the stage alongside experts in inclusive design to discuss how embracing accessibility in creative work drives better engagement, improves outcomes and opens new opportunities for growth. As a prime example, Guajardo shared insights into how P&G is redefining audio description in advertising with PG One, transforming traditional audio narration into vivid, immersive experiences for individuals with visual impairments and leveraging technology to cut the times by 50%.

• Multicultural Marketing. Lela Coffey, Vice President of Multicultural Business Acceleration, reinforced the importance of integrating inclusive marketing throughout the business and shared how doing so helps us strengthen our insights with all consumers and each consumer group to create superior brand experiences and drive market growth.

• Media Convergence. Eric Austin, Vice President of Global Marketing & Media Innovation, discussed how the blurring of lines between traditional and digital media gives us an opportunity to adapt our approach. By focusing on understanding your habits and needs and using programmatic media, we're serving up better, more relevant content to reach you on the right platforms where and when you are seeking information.

• The Creative Revolution in Health. Rohini Miglani, Vice President of Brand-Building Integrated Communications, explored the creative awakening in health and wellness. As health-focused brands increasingly merge wellness messaging with emotional narratives, they’re creating more meaningful experiences for people like you.

Timeless Creativity Wins Gold

While our campaigns are fundamentally crafted to address your needs and improve daily life, it's incredibly rewarding when they also earn industry recognition. At Cannes Lions, where only 10% of submissions make the shortlist and 3% of the nearly 27,000 entries ultimately win, securing a Lion is a significant achievement.

This year, a standout was Tide, Saatchi & Saatchi and MSL’s "Collateral Stain Stories" campaign, which received a:

• Gold Lion for Brand Partnerships
• Silver Lion for Social Insights and Engagement
• Bronze Lions for 360 Integrated Brand Experience and Social Content Marketing.

“Collateral Stain Stories” took the world of Marvel and turned it on its head, focusing on the everyday people who clean up the messes left behind after the superheroes' epic battles. The campaign tapped into social-first platforms, where it resonated with a broad audience beyond just Marvel fans. By turning Marvel's background characters into influencers, Tide Oxi Boost showcased its power to handle even the most chaotic laundry situations, helping the brand achieve extraordinary results.

The campaign exceeded all expectations, generating over 417 million engagements and 1.6 billion earned media impressions, making it the most successful digital launch in Tide’s history.

We know the best work and biggest wins come through collaboration with our global network of Creative MVPs. Thank you to all the teams and agencies who partner with us to develop innovative, creative, award-winning campaigns and also to those whose work was recognized at Cannes.

The insights, discussions and recognition from this year’s festival will continue to inspire the future work of not just our brands but the industry at large. Despite the complexities and disruptions of today’s world, our commitment to timeless creativity — rooted in human insights, craft, consistency and collaboration — will continue to guide how we build brands that last.