Philip Thomas chairs Cannes Lions, and the conversation is best read with that in mind. He argues that commitment to creativity rises and falls with individual leaders rather than with strategy, and that the business damage arrives late enough to be misread as safety. The organizations that come back to him say their sales are suffering.
The practical half of the conversation is about the client and agency relationship. His festival’s entry data shows the chance of winning a Lion dipping for three or four years before climbing to more than double where it started, and the dip is when most clients leave. His starting advice is two percent of a budget handed over with no conditions.
Key findings
- Thomas says he can name five global marketing organizations that let creativity lapse under a new leader and later returned, and that the reason they give when they return is commercial rather than cultural.
- He treats the delay between cutting creative investment and seeing the damage as the trap, because performance holds up long enough to make the cut look safe.
- The evidence Thomas offers for the creativity and growth link is largely his own organization’s, and he says so. Cannes Lions holds data comparing Lion wins with stock price. The one hard number he quotes is a client’s internal measurement rather than an independent study.
- On agency tenure he describes a curve with an early rise, a multi year dip, and a long climb to more than double the starting rate. He is candid that he cannot explain the dip itself.
- A study he commissioned found agencies and marketers both rate creativity highly, but agencies badly underestimate how much their clients care. Thomas reads the gap as a language problem rather than a values problem.
- His prescription for getting started is deliberately small: ring fence a minor budget, hand it over without constraints, and stay below the finance function’s line of sight.
The five names he will not say out loud
Thomas describes a pattern he has watched repeat. An organization works with Cannes Lions on creativity, sees the upside, and then loses the one person who believed in it to a successor who does not. Lion wins fall, creativity falls, and because the effect lags the business keeps performing well enough to make the cut look safe.
He says he can name five global marketers who let creativity lapse and later came back, and the reason they give is not culture but sales. Thomas treats the link between creativity and business success as well established, though he chairs the festival whose own data underwrites that claim. The difficulty, he says, is execution.
Naming the ones that came back
Asked for examples, Thomas will not say a brand lost its way, only that it decided on a different course. His first case is McDonald’s, which he says came to Cannes Lions with its own analysis showing that work winning Lions was 52 percent more effective than work that did not. A change of personnel and focus followed, and it has only recently returned.
Heineken follows the same arc: Cannes Lions marketer of the year around 2012, then a period when creativity took a back seat, and now a return. AB InBev came to the festival five years ago asking how to get good, put money and time behind the answer, and has had what Thomas calls incredible success since. All three are festival clients he is describing.
It works, therefore they fund it
Thomas recounts asking Fernando Machado how Burger King’s cost cutting owners tolerated so much expensive creative work, assuming the answer was personal persuasion. Machado told him he had it the wrong way around: they would never give him the money if it did not work. He had proved it worked repeatedly, so they kept investing.
The interviewer ties this to the same week’s IRG 100 session with Chris Burggraeve, who has written two books on marketing and finance and argues that marketers must speak that language to win the business case. He also recalls Miguel Patricio saying on an earlier Humanizing Growth session that he had briefed his teams to go and win Cannes Lions.
Three conversations that use different words
Thomas endorses a point from Mastercard’s Raja Rajamannar: marketing leaders have to be aligned with the KPIs of the chief executive. His crude illustration is a CMO excited about an NPS score while the CEO asks where the sales and the profitability are. The fix is to agree in advance what both sides will be measured on and what leads to what.
The second failure he names is agencies and clients fighting each other. Agencies complain that their marketer will not let them do the creative work they want, and Thomas tells them they are on the same team. His instruction is to stop arguing internally and gather the data and proof points needed to persuade the board and the finance people.
The dip, and what happens after it
Thomas measures agency creativity by Lion wins, calling it as good a benchmark as any, which makes his own festival’s currency the proxy for quality. On that measure, drawn from tens of thousands of pieces of work, the chance of winning a Lion rises through the first two or three years of a relationship. He likens it to the early stage of a marriage.
Then comes a dip of three or four years, and it coincides with the point at which most clients leave. Clients who stay see the success rate climb to more than double where it began. Thomas turns that into an instruction: a new marketing leader, a mistake, or a procurement demand to cut costs are all bad reasons to change agency.
Pressed on why the dip exists, Thomas explains the ends but not the middle. The first flush comes from an agency investing heavily in a new relationship, and the long term quality comes from trust, understanding and belief in each other. In between there is neither, and he says plainly that he has no answer for the dip.
The most terrifying thing a client can say
What agencies ask for, in Thomas’s account, is not more budget but permission. They are paid to push their marketers and make them uncomfortable, and they want to be trusted to do it. David Droga told him over lunch that the most terrifying thing a CMO can say is that they trust him.
The reason, Droga said, is that trust removes the alibi. There is no falling back on being made to do this or that, and no hiding place once the client has simply asked for the work. On his account, that is what elevates everybody’s thinking.
A ladder for saying why
The friction Thomas describes is a vocabulary problem. In review meetings a marketer says they like a piece of work or they do not, and nobody in the room can say why. Leo Burnett’s answer was a ladder scoring work from zero to nine or ten, with each level described, so that a verdict arrives with its reason attached.
Thomas’s own research put the gap in numbers: agencies rated creativity 9.5 out of 10, marketers eight and a half to nine. Asked how much they thought their clients cared, though, the agencies scored it very low. He reads that as two groups meaning different things by the word creativity, not as a disagreement about its value.
The partnerships he points to as proof have lasted: Wieden and Kennedy with Nike, Snickers with BBDO. Their success, he says, rests on knowing what they mean when they talk about creativity. It boils down to common language, trust and longevity.
Do not bet the farm
Thomas says building creativity inside a company starts with the marketing leader genuinely believing in it, and that all of his organization’s data comes back to leadership. The second condition is removing the fear of failure, which he frames as containing risk rather than accepting it. The successful moves he has seen are organizations choosing to experiment and see what happens.
Coca-Cola won Lions without risking its US television budget, choosing one market or one brand instead. In Singapore it designed a can that splits in two to share, a tiny idea that won Lions and was later rolled out in China as a product. Unilever asks Lynx and Dove to take the risks while the rest of the portfolio follows.
His third condition is aligning incentives. He describes giving a speech about a global advertiser’s commitment to creativity and being told afterwards by someone in Austria that none of the local KPIs mention it. Central staff may earn a bonus for winning Lions while the country manager gets nothing, so the summary he offers is leadership, experiment, and aligned benefits.
Purpose, and where it was pushed too far
Thomas holds that expectations of brands have genuinely shifted, and attributes part of that to a vacuum of political leadership rather than to marketing. It is no longer just a panel discussion at Cannes Lions. He notes a UK dispute in which a large shareholder told one consumer goods company that purpose does not matter and asked it to get on with selling products.
A well known advertiser told him it got two things wrong after the financial crisis. It pulled the price lever too fast, asking too much of consumers, and it doubled down too much on purpose. Thomas was taken aback, given the company’s reputation on purpose. The explanation was that purpose fit some brands perfectly and had been shoehorned onto others, where it backfired.
His test for purpose that holds is a single simple truth from which many different ideas can come. Dove has stood for real beauty in women for years, and the sketch comparison he cites set a woman’s description of herself against a friend’s description of her. Procter and Gamble’s Like a Girl worked the same way.
The recent work he singles out is Mastercard’s Grand Prix winner on card names. Banks would not let transgender and non binary customers use the name they wanted, and Mastercard gave them that freedom. He values it as a huge change to a small number of people. Asked whether executives mean it, he gives the bottom line impact first and genuine care second.
Amazon comes to Cannes
Amazon is Thomas’s lead example in the performance versus brand argument. It could sell itself purely as a performance marketing platform. Instead it is coming to Cannes Lions this year in a significant way, which he reads as recognition that the sea change has already happened. That is a claim about his own event’s pull as much as about the industry.
He does not defend a particular split, accepting that both are necessary and that the percentages vary. His definition of creativity is functional: work of interest and entertainment that is attractive to audiences. In an attention economy where the current scroll on TikTok runs 12 seconds, he argues that engaging stories are the only counter.
The attendance evidence is his own organization’s. Thomas says 93 of the world’s top 100 spenders are coming, and that opt in tracking through the festival’s 2019 app showed marketers spending eight, nine or ten hours a day in the Palais. He adds, calling it anecdote, that agencies tell him marketers now get bonuses for winning Lions.
A new Lion, ten years in the making
The interviewer raises Antonio Lucio’s point that most marketers now work in the new and B2B economies rather than in traditional CPG, while perhaps 80 percent of the industry conversation is CPG led. Thomas agrees, and answers with his own launch. Cannes Lions has run for nearly 68 years as a B2C award, and this year adds a B2B Lion.
He concedes the delay openly, saying the internal discussion started in 2012 and that they may be a little late to the party. The precedent he cites is the health and pharma Lions, launched to unleash creativity in a category that is hard to be creative in. B2B carries no such regulatory restrictions, he says, but often has the same mental straitjacket.
The ambition he sets out is not treating business buyers as humans but unlocking creativity that drives B2B decision making, and the award is being run with LinkedIn. Thomas predicts the first year’s work will be only okay and that in five years it will stand up against the B2C entries. That is a forecast about a product he is selling.
The polymath job
Asked how marketing leadership has changed, Thomas recalls the chief creative officer of Ogilvy saying in about 2010 that marketers had an enormous amount on their plate. Set against 2022, he says, they had hardly anything. He is filled with respect for anyone doing the job now, because he thinks it is incredibly difficult.
Understanding, inspiring and choosing the right agencies, then managing the board and the CEO, is what he calls table stakes. After that come the balance between data and brand, purpose and authenticity, and representing the company on stages around the world. Thomas adds that the CFOs of this world would do well to remember how phenomenal the pressure is.
Endorsing the humanized growth framing, Thomas says the marketers who made the most impact tend to be great humans: Jonathan Mildenhall, Marc Pritchard, Antonio Lucio. The job now needs a polymath who can play any part of the field. The interviewer recalls tears at the Hall of Fame induction of Pritchard and Lucio, a contrast with the ego driven CMOs of twenty years ago.
He also pays tribute to Jody Harris, who had recently died. She was in the first IRG 100 cohort and was Cannes Lions’ main point of contact for the four or five year program it ran with AB InBev. Thomas credits her with driving that creative agenda and almost single handedly changing the organization.
Two percent, and no conditions
The closing recommendation is a first move rather than a strategy. Thomas says to start small and as risk free as possible, which keeps the attempt below the finance function’s radar and lets the client genuinely trust the agency. That is what builds what he calls creative confidence.
He rejects the idea that celebrated work is expensive work, saying Burger King’s was not a 10 million dollar media spend. His instruction is to ring fence a small, constrained budget, hand it to the agency with no constraints from the client, and accept in advance that a disaster is a lesson. Two percent of any marketing budget, he says, is enough.
Scope and limitations
This is one executive’s account, recorded in 2022 in the weeks before that year’s festival, and the executive chairs the organization under discussion. Where Thomas describes the value of creativity, the return on long agency relationships or the launch of a new award category, he is explaining and defending decisions and assets of his own business. The supporting figures are almost all Cannes Lions data or client claims relayed to him rather than independent results. That includes the Lion wins and stock price comparison, the agency tenure curve, the delegate app tracking, the 93 of the top 100 spenders, and the importance scores from his own research. The McDonald’s effectiveness number is one he attributes to the advertiser’s own analysis, and the brands he names as recovery cases are clients of the festival he chairs. He hedges in places, saying he has no explanation for the dip in the tenure curve and offering the bonus point as anecdote. The conversation also touches on a shareholder dispute over one company’s purpose positioning and on political leadership in general terms, which this write up summarizes rather than quotes.
Source
This page summarises HGS #47: Philip Thomas (Chairman, Cannes Lions) on how creativity makes meaningful impact, by Marc de Swaan Arons, 2022-05-24.