Celebrating the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity

Cannes’ most forward-looking conversations weren’t about pharma – but pharma should have been listening

By Claire Gillis

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is known for its topical breadth – and the smart pharma marketers who attended spent plenty of time listening to speakers who had absolutely nothing to do with their line of work.

But this is good news. The attention they paid to speakers from technology, entertainment and mass media means that lessons learned at Cannes won’t be consigned to the tactical dustbin. Indeed, Cannes 2025 gave pharma a blueprint for widening its lens. It reinforced what the forward-minded industry leaders have been saying for years: creativity that moves people to make better health decisions doesn’t always have to come with a regulatory label.

Here are three takeaways from the festival’s top non-health-related panels and the lessons that pharma can learn from them.

Chef Amaury Guichon, better known by his digital nom de plume The Chocolate Guy, advised companies that want to work with creators to “give them a little bit of freedom, because they know best how to connect with their own audience”. Food creator Keith Lee agreed, but added that corporate/creator relationships operate under a different set of rules and assumptions from traditional celebrity endorsements. Companies must “let that person be that person. Brands often want to mould them, but people can sniff it out immediately”.

Brands hoping to ally themselves with well-known creators, whether Instagram stars boasting seven-figure follower counts or influential leaders of online health communities, will need to stomach more risk than they’re used to. Pharma won’t benefit from the authenticity these creators have established in the minds of their fans if it attempts to control them. Lectures about MLR review are likely to be lost on creators used to doing things their own way.

Should pharma establish a level of comfort with creators in their marketing mix, however, the upside could be enormous. TikTok global head of business marketing and commercial partnerships Sofia Hernandez emphasised the value of creator content, especially “in a world where half of people are saying they don’t like ads”. Hernandez added: “Let’s let creativity lead.”

It’s time for pharma to take creators up on that offer, but only with expert guidance so they don’t fall foul of those regulations.

As a group, Cannes Lions attendees are as bullish about the future of advertising as anyone you’ll encounter. That’s why it was so compelling to hear A-list brand leaders opine that the era of traditional advertising is giving way to what AB InBev global CMO Marcel Marcondes called an “age of experiences”.

Marcondes tracked his organisation’s journey from advertiser to “experience provider”, pointing to Michelob Ultra’s “Shade Tracker” as an example of a programme that bonds a brand to the lifestyle of its consumers. McDonald’s VP, US marketing, brand, content and culture JJ Healan struck a similar tone, noting how the WcDonald’s anime-inspired restaurant experience connected the brand with fans in a manner as inventive as it was unexpected.

The ‘PainVisible’ team

Brands need to move beyond standard product promotion and toward the curation of memorable interactions. Of course, doing this on behalf of a life-changing drug presents a greater challenge than on behalf of a beer or burger. But consumers have come to expect the same level of creativity and engagement from health brands that they do from retail and tech ones, and pharma must follow suit.

As Marcondes put it: “This brings us a big responsibility to adjust the way we connect our brands with consumers, because we need to match their lifestyle. We need to be meaningful to them.” He wasn’t referencing health-adjacent brands when he said this, but he might as well have been.

Given its prevalence in the broader discourse at the time, it wasn’t surprising that every Cannes 2024 panel morphed into an AI panel. It was natural, then, that 2025 would be the year of the AI backlash.

That backlash, however, came less in the form of stomping the brakes on AI enthusiasm and more in the form of celebrating the human element. As Unilever chief growth and marketing officer Esi Eggleston-Lacey put it: “Humanity is not our limitation. It’s our superpower.” A similar sentiment was echoed by musician James Blake, who stressed the importance of refining personal craft and technique before layering technology on top of it. “Techniques are the fundamental building blocks of why I feel confident to come out and perform,” he said. “I had done 14 years of study before I ever went near a laptop.”

Audience applause at Cannes

While AI is already transforming drug development and clinical trial enrolment, its utility in the creative process remains a work in progress. It was human rather than artificial insight, after all, that prompted Apple to reconfigure its AirPods as clinical-grade hearing aids. AI empowers and augments creatives; it can’t replace them.

Based on two of Cannes’ most celebrated pharma campaigns, both of which tapped AI in a limited manner, the industry appears to be striking the right balance. ‘PainVisible’ employed a thermal camera to visualise pain experienced by all (including non-verbal) patients, while ‘Glowing Relief’ addressed an issue created by power outages – an inability of older patients to locate medicines – with glow-in-the-dark packaging.

As Khalid Latiff, Global ECD at VML Health, who was a pharma juror at Cannes this year, noted: “In pharma, where nuance and empathy matter, I was happy to see a resurgence of analogue creativity, tactile design and storytelling that feels unapologetically made by humans. It’s the kind of artistry AI can’t fake.”

Claire Gillis is CEO at VML Health