A Cannes Lions 2025 guide for ROI-hungry APAC marketers

Each June, the global creative industry gathers at Cannes Lions, a festival that serves as both a celebration of marketing creativity and a signpost for where the industry is heading.

 

For marketers across APAC tuning in from afar, Cannes Lions can feel distant. Budget constraints, time zone challenges, and limited in-person representation mean many regional marketers observe the festival through headlines, highlight reels, and post-event reports.

 

Relevance also makes Cannes Lions hard to justify as an investment for APAC-focused marketers. The tension between creativity and commercial effectiveness is particularly pronounced in the region. Long-term brand building is often secondary to short-term sales-driven campaigns.

 

'Too far. Too flashy' is a common explanation for why regional marketers don’t make it to the Croisette or into the Palais. This begs the question: what can APAC marketers take away from a festival that celebrates bold, high-budget creative ideas?

 

The value is making it matter—at home

 

The value of Cannes Lions for APAC marketers lies in learning how creative effectiveness, proof of impact, and real-world results can drive marketing. It is about being inspired to try new things. APAC marketers don’t need to copy the ideas presented at Cannes—they need to be provoked to transcend the status quo. Being able to identify original and impactful ideas from work that is all style with little substance is a skill honed through practice. Like any craft, it is a skill shaped by 10,000 hours of devotion. Big ideas born on the Croisette can drive impact at home when they are reimagined with local insight and ambition.

 

This requires marketers to:

Three things to watch for this year

 

1. The intersection between culture-first creative & media: While APAC marketers may have extensive experience in influencer marketing, ensuring a brand’s marketing ecosystem is optimised for this approach is a key topic at Cannes this year. It marks a shift from 'doing' to a way of operating.

 

2. Retail media will be on the charm offensive: A developing area in APAC marketing, but one with significant impact for both retailers and brands. A new awards category aims to recognise innovative uses of retail media as a strategic channel to engage consumers and enhance brand relevance—regional marketers would be advised to take note.

 

3. Augmenting tech for hyper-personalisation: Rather than replacing marketing talent with AI or merely using it to automate tasks, the most forward-thinking teams are augmenting human creativity with AI’s speed, data analysis, and pattern recognition. Together, they can build campaigns that feel handcrafted for each customer but are scalable across thousands or millions of users, an approach well-suited to a diverse region such as ours.

 

APAC marketers don’t need to be in Cannes to learn from it. Programming highlights, award-winning case studies, and expert breakdowns are increasingly available online. Tuning in offers a lens into global standards and a toolkit for elevating local marketing work to meet them. Cannes Lions isn’t just a celebration of global creativity, it’s a chance for APAC marketers to reframe what bold, effective work can look like in their own markets. The real win lies not in bringing trophies home, but in bringing home ideas sharp enough to cut through locally.

 

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