Interview: Cannes PR Lions 2025 Jury President Tom Beckman

(MENAFN- PRovoke) Tom Beckman is the global chief creative officer at Weber Shandwick. Since he joined the agency a decade ago, it has been ranked top of the PRovoke Global Creative index more times than any other network.

Previously, Beckman ran the creative department at Swedish agency Prime, which was bought by Weber Shandwick in 2014 and returned to independent ownership last year . Under his creative leadership, Prime topped the Cannes Lions ranking on multiple occasions. He has won awards including the Cannes Lions Grand Prix, Eurobest, LIA and CLIO and served as jury president in many major shows. Before coming into the PR industry, Tom pursued less successful careers as book publisher, jewellery designer and journalist.

This month, Cannes Lions named Beckman as this year's president of the Cannes PR Lions jury. Beckman sat down with PRovoke Media to talk about his approach to awards, and what he'll be looking for in a Lions winner.

Tom, congratulations on your appointment! How are you feeling about leading the PR Lions jury this year?

I'm very happy, I have a lot of jury experience, including at Dubai Lynx, Eurobest and The One Show, and obviously being president of a Cannes Lions jury is the ultimate accolade from the industry. There are not many of those opportunities for people from a small nation like Sweden, so I am very humbled.

You're following in big shoes on the PR Lions jury, after Jo-ann Robertson in 2023 and Kat Thomas last year, both of whom were very clear about their approach. Have you given any thought to what your focus will be on and how you'll be guiding your jury?

I haven't had the opportunity to connect with the jury yet as they haven't been announced, but for not only the awarding jury in Cannes but also the bigger pre-Cannes jury, I'll be making sure everyone is on the same page as to what the assignment is. It's like being a curator, making sure we curate best elements that reflect the state of the industry, and making sure the pieces of work we award can serve as a benchmark for the industry for the year to come.

It's a really important job: it's easy to hate on awards shows and if you do Cannes the wrong way it's a vanity spectacle and very expensive, but if you treat Cannes – or indeed the PRovoke SABREs –the right way, it's a rare opportunity to understand where the bar is. I take it seriously. Some people are perhaps provoked by that, with all the misconceptions about what awards shows are for.

There will always be Cannes haters, but I've always thought there's nothing like it for immersing yourself in extraordinary creative work from around the world. Do you think being at the festival has real value for the PR industry?

It certainly has. Early in my career I had a mentor, the founder of a Swedish ad agency behind some amazing pieces of work, and he brought me to Cannes for the first time and taught me how to do it: watch all the showreels, watch all the seminars, take notes, go to all the awards shows, get a sense of what's winning and why, and take everything back to your colleagues and clients, so that's what I've been doing for 15 years. Every year I compile an insight deck that we go on tour with internally and to clients, one of the most important relationship and new business instruments for us. If you treat it the right way, it's a valuable business trip.

We've had years of purpose-driven work winning at Cannes, and now humour seems to be coming back. What sort of work do you think we'll see this year?

I would argue that maybe the biggest tone of voice we'll see is memeification. Marketing, PR and advertising and PR have always been defined by the channel through which they are pushed, but 18 months ago there was a tipping point in the media environment. The typical way businesses and consumers are now consuming entertainment and news is through their social media feeds, Instagram reels and TikTok, and marketing is starting to adapt to that environment. Rather than high-end production, we're seeing indie production, dark humour and weirdness.

There's a major shift, from seeing people with a following on social media as a channel, now they are more of a partner and co-creator. That's definitely shaping the work. Probably the most extreme example of this is peanut butter brand Nutter Butter - their TikTok feed is just insane weirdness, so I'm expecting to see more of that for sure.

Does this tie in with how the definition of earned media creative is changing?

What I've been telling juries for the past few years is that you need a good definition of what the word earned means. When Cannes introduced the PR category in 2009, I asked what“earned” meant: instead of media relations or PR, we called it earned. You can argue that this fight over the definition of evergreen buzzwords like earned and integration is ongoing, and for agencies to compete they need the most up-to-date version of what it means. In 2009, earned meant you were PR-ing the advertising, so in the first few years we saw successful advertising and not a lot of press. I would argue that's not an earned idea, that's a great ad idea. Earned is a more deliberate way of creating something, so I'm looking for ideas that are strong enough to survive in the jungle – in the real world.

Most CMOs now would agree that the definition of earned has done a 180 – it's now about advertising the PR. When you come up with a true earned idea that is designed to survive in the jungle, you take those articles and push through paid and social media. We've come a long way in the last 15 years, and it's always the job of the PR Lions jury to help the industry update its definition.

Are we likely to see more work using AI this year, or is it still too early for AI to have an impact on award-winning creative campaigns?

I would argue that our industry in general has been focusing too much on what AI means for how agencies operate and too little about what it means for consumers. My point of view on AI and this generation of engagement is that the internet revolution gave people access to information, the social media revolution gave us access to expression, and the AI revolution gives people access to production - that's why we call them online creators. Agencies and brands are still playing catch up. It's a very interesting, dynamic environment, and I expect to see a lot of work from brands working with online communities and sharing their brand playbook with external partners.

From an earned perspective, I don't expect to see very much interesting AI production this year, but bringing on online creators and editors and fan culture will make a mark on Cannes this year. But it's moving very fast and within a year, the production side of AI will be so advanced that it will start to replace most of our conventional production services.

After Golin being the first PR agency to win the PR Lions Grand Prix for creative ideation, do you think we'll see more PR agencies winning?

I certainly hope so for our industry, but what's important to me is that the Grand Prix shows best practice for PR agencies and beyond. Regardless of who's behind the work.


Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity takes places from 16-20 June .

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