Credit: Above banner image is cropped from The KitKat Heist – KitKat ad.
Cannes Lions is the global advertising and communications industry’s annual celebration of creative excellence, held each June in Cannes, France. The 2026 festival ran from 22–26 June and brought together work from 92 countries, with more than 20,000 award submissions judged across the week.
While Cannes is a long way from Sydney, we wanted to celebrate our recent Australian Marketing Institute Agency of the Year win. So this year we brought a little of the festival home. We packed the QT Hotel screening room with more than 60 clients and Sparks for an evening celebrating creativity, and some of the work that stood out at the 2026 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. It gave us the chance to watch some of the winning work together, talk about why it worked and consider what we can learn from it.
Our Head of Creative + Production, Margot Alais, curated a reel of 15 campaigns spanning everything from toilet anxiety and missing people to beer, insurance, chocolate, erectile dysfunction and cows that look a lot like Oreos.
Each example was very different. What connected them all was the strength of the ideas and the willingness of the brands behind them to do something interesting with them.
Creative that gets talked about
After the screening, our Strategy Director Paul Everson hosted a panel with Jordana Busenshutt from Boehringer Ingelheim, and Kate Miranda and Karen Gair from Asthma Australia.
They brought the conversation closer to home through two campaigns we know particularly well: Cat No. 9 for NexGard SPECTRA and She Needs to Breathe for Asthma Australia.
Both campaigns began with a strong insight. Neither would exist without a client willing to back it and see it through. That includes the less glamorous parts of creativity: regulatory and legal review, stakeholder management, government relations, budgets and the inevitable practical constraints.
A few themes kept coming up during the evening. Start with an insight rather than an execution. Constraints can sharpen an idea. The right ambassador needs to be part of the story rather than a name attached to it. And creative work ultimately has to move somebody, whether that means changing behaviour, building a brand, prompting a conversation or influencing policy.
Perhaps surprisingly for 2026, AI barely entered the conversation. Even with AI-generated work among the Cannes winners we screened, people kept coming back to the quality of the idea, the insight behind it and how it made them feel.
What we watched
Our reel deliberately mixed different sectors, markets and types of creativity. Here’s what we screened, along with how the work performed at Cannes:
- First School Poo – Andrex: Silver and Bronze Lions in Film, for Social Behaviour and Single-Market Campaign respectively.
- Based on a True Story – Missing People: Gold Lion in Film for Use of Humour, plus an Entertainment shortlist.
- A Time and a Place – Claude: Gold and Silver Lions in Film. The wider Claude campaign also took two Film Grands Prix.
- Expedition Impossible – Columbia Sportswear: Brand Experience & Activation Grand Prix, a Titanium Lion and further Gold and Silver Lions.
- Coquí Alarmed – Hyundai Puerto Rico: Grand Prix in Audio & Radio.
- Viagra Blue Brands – Viatris: Gold in Pharma and Bronze in PR.
- The Pub That Refused to Die – Heineken: Creative Strategy Grand Prix, alongside Bronze Lions across PR, Direct, Creative B2B and Entertainment.
- I Think of You Dying – Life360: Gold and Silver in Film and Bronze in Film Craft.
- I’m Not Remarkable – Apple: Gold in Film Craft, Gold in Entertainment Lions for Music and Silver in Film.
- The KitKat Heist – KitKat: PR Grand Prix plus multiple Gold and Silver Lions.
- L’Ultimo Uomo Reale – The RealReal: Silver in Film and Bronze in Film Craft’s AI Craft category.
- Oreo Cows – Oreo: a Titanium Lion, two Gold, two Silver and two Bronze Lions.
- Haven – Suncorp Insurance: the Dan Wieden Titanium Grand Prix, two Silver Lions and a Bronze.
- The Wedding Rice – Wikifarmer: Grand Prix in Creative Business Transformation, and Greece’s first Cannes Lions Grand Prix.
- The Māori Roll Call – Whānau Ora: two Gold Lions, in Glass: The Lion for Change and Sustainable Development Goals.
And the audience chose…
We also asked everyone in the room to vote for their favourite work of the night. Viagra Blue Brands took the top spot, followed by A Time and a Place and The KitKat Heist. Three very different pieces of work, but each built around an idea you can explain quickly and remember afterwards.
For anyone who couldn’t join us, or wants another look at the work, you can watch the full Cannes reel here.
A big thank you to everyone who joined us, and particularly to Jordana, Kate and Karen for sharing what it takes from the client side to turn a creative idea into work that actually makes it out into the world.
We’re already looking forward to seeing what Cannes gives us to talk about next year.