Two Perspectives, One Festival: Cannes Lions 2025 Recap

A veteran's experience meets fresh eyes in this revealing conversation about creativity's most important festival

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity isn’t just an awards show. It’s a living, breathing reflection of our industry’s soul, ambitions, and relentless evolution. Each June, the advertising world’s brightest minds descend upon the French Riviera, transforming the coastal city into a creative laboratory where the future of our industry takes shape.

This year’s festival brought together two perspectives separated by decades of experience but united by an unwavering passion for creativity. John Elder, a creative agency veteran with 30 years in the industry and more than a dozen Cannes festivals under his belt, and Zuwei Li, a recent graduate making his mark in the industry, experienced the festival’s intoxicating magic for the first time this year.

Their post-festival conversation reveals surprising insights about how Cannes Lions has transformed, and what it means for the future of creativity itself.

First Impressions vs. What Has Changed: The Evolution of Spectacle

Zuwei: Walking into the Palais felt like stepping into humanity's creative lab. It reminded me of the rice cakes my mom and I make every New Year: we start with a shapeless dough and, through patient kneading, turn it into something memorable. Cannes was the same: thousands of raw notions pushed, pulled, and polished by passionate hands until they emerged as finished ideas.What truly electrified me was watching creativity leap past language and borders. Creators from Lagos to São Paulo spoke different tongues yet celebrated the same heartbeat of humanity. I saw low-budget brilliance reset global brand perceptions, an interactive game that reimagined Navy recruiting, and a haunting activation exposing domestic abuse in the basement. Each began as a floating idea and ended up moving culture forward.

John: That's a beautiful way to put it, and it captures what has fundamentally stayed the same about Cannes even as everything else has evolved. It has been interesting to see Cannes change over time, but in truth it has been evolving since before I ever attended. From a pure play creative festival and award show, I've seen Cannes become the preeminent place for the people in creativity and tech who are pushing the industry forward.

Zuwei: In a world obsessed with efficiency and ROI, being surrounded by people who care this deeply about craft felt like discovering a secret society of dreamers. They refuse to compromise on what matters, sparking conversations no spreadsheet could ever capture, and that reminded me of what attracted me to this industry.

John: Yes, it's still a creative festival at heart, and the work was as good as ever. As Cannes has added categories over the past decade-plus, it has broadened the types of agencies and clients who enter and have given more people the opportunity to vie for recognition of their brand of creativity. All that is highly motivating, and I think it's cool that Cannes stays current with what's happening in marketing as clients’ needs change, not to mention what technological innovations allow agencies and marketers to experiment with.

Zuwei: That broader scope is exactly what made my first experience so rich. I wasn't just seeing traditional advertising, I was witnessing the entire creative ecosystem in conversation with itself.

John: Some may lament the broader focus beyond creativity exclusively, and while that could be seen as a dated perspective, to me seeing both Young Lions push the boundaries of creativity and also to see the likes of John Hegarty and Jeff Goodby still driving into new territories with the perspective of people who have shaped what advertising is today tells me creativity isn't going anywhere. Is Cannes different today? Probably. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so.

AI: The New Creative Collaborator

Zuwei: Walking into Cannes for the first time, I realized AI wasn't just another buzzword—it is genuinely the core topic on every screen, panel, and coffee chat. Twelve months ago when I first started my job in the industry, I vividly remember the vibe to be "Will AI take my job?" But now the question is, "How fast can I train my co-pilot?" That pivot from fear to fascination felt as radical as the moment humanity traded cave walls for canvas: same impulse, new surface.

John: It did feel that Cannes had progressed as compared to the past couple of years in the discussion around AI. There was much less of the polarity of hype vs. anxiety (though to be sure there was some of both) and more really interesting examples of how agencies and brands are using AI to solve marketing problems and drive their businesses.

Zuwei: Exactly! What sparks me most is remixing creativity at the next level. Tools like Sora and Runway now power spec films in competition. Designers spoke of "co-sketching" with models that spin color palettes overnight, it's fascinating. Democratization is just the first inning. Yes, anyone can render Cannes-ready visuals, but the deeper shift is taste-training models on brand DNA, culture graphs, even audience biometrics. We're expanding what counts as a creative input.

John: Agencies have a lot of cool examples of using generative creative, which was interesting—setting aside the largely as-yet unresolved image rights issues—but it was clear to me that clients are moving faster than agencies at AI adoption. Some really interesting examples coming from brands such as Ulta Beauty, Amazon and Nestlé. Personalization at scale is driving increased repeat purchase and it stands to reason that a more relevant message is resonating with potential customers. This is not something that we needed AI to tell us, but AI is helping make it possible.

Zuwei: That collision between human and machine is the fuel. But the best work I saw still bore human fingerprints: a sly joke, a lived truth, a strategic leap no dataset predicts. AI elevated craft; taste steered the symphony.

John: AI appears to be following along the Gartner hype cycle, as I witnessed during the dot com boom & bust, the impact of mobile–usage and marketing–and the evolution of social media. There tends to be excitement, consternation and confusion around new technologies until someone like Jeff Benjamin comes up with something like Subservient Chicken to make people realize what's possible. I'm not sure we've had that moment yet on AI, but I can't wait for it to happen.

Zuwei: Trying to describe what's next is like explaining color to someone who's never seen it. That uncertainty is exhilarating. I'm excited that we get to paint the first strokes together.

Standout Moments at Cannes

Zuwei: Twelve years ago, I was a kid in rural China who'd never roamed beyond a mile and couldn't string together a sentence in English. This week I stood in the Palais, passport thick with stamps, watching hometown truths ignite a global stage. The 2025 Lions hammered home one lesson: start hyper-local, stay honest, and the world leans in. That's when I felt it…wow, life is full of possibilities. My standout moments were the wins that proved small streets can echo worldwide. I've always asked myself: Could something born on my block really matter out here? What if my story sounds too small? But during my experience here, Cannes answered.

John: For me, kicking off the week with a long stroll through the work in the basement of the Palais is an annual reminder of what attracted me to advertising: The power of surprising creativity in service of business outcomes. That was at Cannes this year in spades, and talking to some of the Young Lions Academy people gave me confidence that this won't change any time soon.

Zuwei: For example, memorable wins like "Lucky Yatra" turned an ordinary Indian train ticket into a nationwide lottery, demonstrating proof that a niche cultural quirk can become a national celebration and grab global headlines. And "Caption with Intention" infused closed captions with color and emotion, transforming an accessibility tweak into art so powerful the Academy is rewriting subtitle rules. For a first-gen kid who once believed "global creativity" meant copying someone else's accent, these wins feel personal. They prove the story that starts in your own neighborhood, told with craft and courage, can ring all the way to the Croisette.

John: The standout moments for me were probably similar to what people have been experiencing since Cannes' inception. It's the unplanned meetups, the candid conversations between scheduled meetings and events, the too-late discussions over too many negronis about advertising and life that I really remember. It's so great to reconnect with former colleagues who are absolutely crushing it (looking at you, Teri Miller) and meet new ones that feel like you have known them forever.

Zuwei: Those human connections amplify everything else, don't they? The work becomes more meaningful when you understand the person behind it, the late nights, the rejected concepts, the breakthrough moment in a coffee shop in Mumbai or São Paulo.

John: Exactly. That's what keeps me coming back after all these years.

The Future Canvas

Zuwei: The way I see it, AI is about to move from "helpful gadget" to "creative amplifier." When it can communicate ideas in new forms.Another work that stuck with me this year was the updated "Sweetie"-style project: a hyper-real VR child avatar built with AI that lures online child predators so investigators can trace and prosecute them. It's chilling, brilliant, and proof that emotional storytelling can hitch a ride on cutting-edge tech to tackle problems humans alone can't scale.

Growing up as a digital, social-media, tech native, I am excited about what's coming. VR headsets, spatial audio, haptic gloves—soon we won't just show ideas; we'll drop people inside them. I see the future of Cannes to be more experimental and experiential, and I'm curious to see how creatives around the world incorporate technology to bring their ideas to life.

John: The one thing I'm definitely right about regarding the future is that no one has any idea what it holds. Five years ago, not many in the business would have thought a new technology, like AI, would be at the forefront of the future. To be fair, five years ago we were dealing with a pandemic and Cannes didn't happen, but the point remains.

One advantage to having been around for a long time is that it does offer perspective. While I've seen industry transformations pretty much throughout my 30+ year career, I believe AI will have the most impact by an order of magnitude. While I wouldn't venture a guess how, I do think it's going to enhance what we love to do in advertising.

Zuwei: That optimism is infectious. Sometimes I worry that all this technological change might make creativity feel less... human. But listening to you talk about enhancement rather than replacement gives me hope.

John: I was struck by the conversation Colleen DeCourcy led with Mustafa Suleyman where both were quite optimistic about AI being a catalyst for a new wave of creativity. That's the kind of inspiration that I'm taking away from this year's Cannes Lions. And I'm already looking forward to next year.

The Bridge Between Worlds

What started as a generational divide revealed itself as complementary perspectives on the same truth: Cannes Lions endures because it evolves.

For John, human connections and breakthrough work remain the constants anchoring an industry in perpetual motion. For Zuwei, Cannes proved that authenticity resonates across cultures and technology amplifies human insight.

Underneath all the technological disruption lies something unchanging: the essential role of humanity in creativity. Whether crafting rice cakes or co-creating with AI, great creativity springs from genuine human insight.

The festival's greatest strength isn't predicting advertising's future: it's reminding us why we fell in love with creativity in the first place. Cannes evolves, but its core mission remains stubbornly human: to celebrate the art of making people care.