How marketers can be as bold as Lions

5 lessons from the winners at Cannes
In keeping with its name, Cannes Lions 2026 gave its highest honors to work that was anything but tame.

Here are some of our favorites from financial services, insurance, healthcare, technology and B2B, grouped into five strategies used by this year’s winners to grab attention.

1. Find the loophole
TD wanted to show that investors could buy fractional shares of top stocks. Their dilemma? Displaying logos of those companies in their ads would violate trademark laws. The solution was a loophole you could literally see through. In its guerilla-style Fractional Window Shopping campaign that won two Bronze Lions, TD placed out-of-home boards in retail areas, each with a square cutout that revealed an iconic brand’s logo in the background.

Viagra found its own legal loophole – and won a Pharma Gold Lion for it. By advertising everyday consumer products bearing the Viagra name, the company cleverly worked around a Chinese law banning direct-to-consumer pharma ads. As the saying goes: all’s fair in love…and marketing.

2. Disarm with humor
Humor can be risky when the subject is sensitive. That makes Novartis’ Pharma Grand Prix-winning Relax Your Tight End especially impressive. Launched during the Super Bowl, the campaign featured legendary NFL tight ends, relaxing, to help men understand that prostate cancer screening can be done with a blood test, not an invasive rectal exam. Guy humor, targeted at guys. Nicely done.

AI company Claude also used humor to great effect, poking fun at rival OpenAI’s plans to put advertising in ChatGPT. In Claude’s Keep Thinking campaign that won the Film Grand Prix, chatbot conversations hilariously devolve into irrelevant ads. What makes it work – in a very meta way – is an AI company spoofing AI so well.

3. Tap into the culture
Jenny, Jenny, who can I turn to…about cancer? In its Silver Lion-winning campaign, Cancer Support Community paired the unforgettable number from the pop-rock earworm “867-5309” with a specialized “272” area code – for CSC – to create a memorable lifeline for cancer support. Smart and simple.

In health and wellness, The Ordinary drew attention to its science-backed skincare by deflating beauty culture with a brainy, Grand Prix-winning campaign. Built around a science-free periodic table of cosmetics buzzwords, The Periodic Fable makes a sharp point about catchy but misleading marketing. Its intro film – a cultish classroom devoted to viral skincare trends – is equally effective. And disturbing enough to make the message stick.

4. Think big – and different
Extreme weather could make 10% of Australian homes uninsurable by 2035. While competitors focused on recovery, Suncorp Insurance shifted the conversation to resilience by creating a hyperlocal, data-led digital platform for the entire country – even homeowners insured by other providers – with personalized guidance for making their homes more resilient.

The company’s Haven platform has attracted 323,000 visitors, with 79% planning to take action. By thinking bigger than insurance claims, Suncorp won Cannes’ biggest honor: the Dan Wieden Titanium Lions Grand Prix.

SKF offered another inspiring example of shooting for the moon. Instead of taking the expected rational, spec-driven B2B approach, the industrial manufacturer won the Creative B2B Grand Prix by framing its moon-powered tidal-energy technology as a space program that never leaves Earth. The campaign drew global attention and sparked a larger conversation about sustainability.

5. Build it and they will come
Creating an ad for the Super Bowl is one thing. Building an entertainment destination around it is another. That’s just what Grand Prix winner Uber Eats did. Extending its popular campaign that argues football is a conspiracy to sell food, Uber Eats invited fans to go deeper in the app, where 1,000 bespoke films could be assembled into made-to-order ads with new celebrities, jokes and deals. App visits grew by 3.7 million.

Tra Mongkut Fertilizer in Thailand created a very different kind of destination for farmers struggling with poor soil. Through its Soil Stay campaign, the company invited farmers to trade physical soil samples for a tailored stay at one of its model research farms—think Airbnb, but for agriculture. The novel approach educated farmers, built stronger relationships and struck paydirt at Cannes with a Gold Lion in Creative B2B.

Another great year for creativity
We hope you’re as inspired as we are by all this award-winning work. To learn how we can make your creative marketing efforts a little bolder, let’s talk ›