Cannes 2025: Ranking The Eight Gold PR Lions Winners

(MENAFN- PRovoke) Every year, I take a look at the campaigns that win Gold Lions in Cannes, and select my own favorites from among the winners.

It's always an interesting exercise for me. I rarely agree wholeheartedly with the jury (even though this year it was chaired by one of the best creative minds in the business, Tom Beckmann of Weber Shandwick, pictured above) and I usually find at least a couple of winning campaigns to be curmudgeonly about.

This year, the two obvious trends were a focus on elegant solutions to real business problems (mostly) and a number of winners that were based in actions rather than words. Both of these trends are welcome.

We also saw a slight decline in the number of purpose-driven campaigns (not so welcome) and an increase in campaigns that showed the playful, fun-loving side of the brands involved, as well as the ability to tap into and even create cultural moments.

Where available, I have linked to YouTube videos of the winning campaigns, so you can pick your own personal favorites.

1. The Parental Leave Mortgage

One of the reasons I dislike using“communications” as a synonym for public relations is that the best relationship-building is grounded in an organizations actions and behaviors, not is words, and this DDB campaign for Nordic bank Nordea is a perfect example.

The campaign took the form or a new product offering, allowing parents to pause their mortgage payments, with no fees or additional costs, during parental leave. A response to the fact that Finland has a generous parental leave law (up to 160 days) but only 12% of parental leave time is taken by fathers because they often need to continue working to provide financial stability.

In addition to securing 8.5 million impressions (one and a half times the Finnish population) in the first week, the campaign resulted in a 200% increase in

2. Nutter Butter, You Good?

I am SO not the target for the Nutter Butter campaign. During the 20 years I lived in the US, I never sampled the delights of Nutter Butter, I never saw an ad for Nutter Butter (the last ad spend was in 1970) and I was aware of it only as a thing that had been somewhat popular decades earlier: an artifact of Americana from the 50s, maybe. On top of that. TikTok-where this campaign happened in its entirety is a place I visit only rarely and reluctantly.

So why did I love the“Nutterverse” created by Dentsu Creative for Mondelez so much? Mostly, because the weirdness of the whole campaign, but also the courage (born of desperation, given the moribund state of the brand) to turn control of the messaging over creators, the obvious spontaneity of the whole experience, all combined to create the most unique campaign at this year's festival.

For a spend of $0, the campaign took the brand from a place of cultural irrelevance to one of the most talked about products on social: more than 3 billion impressions, 250 million eatned views, 1.1 million new followers. If I had a quibble it would be the sales results (a 16.5% increase in Gen Z household presentation seems like it's avoiding the actual sales numbers) but if cultural relevance is the currency we all think it is, this campaign delivered in spades.

3. AXA: Three Words

Where the“Parental Leave Mortgage” above was an entirely new product, this was a simple change to the wording of an existing product, as insurance company AXA offered consumers the opportunity to revise their homeowners policy so that it provided emergency relocation expenses in the event of fire, flooring-or domestic violence.

We've seen a lot of good domestic violence-themed campaigns over the past few years (one won Best in Show at our North American SABRE Awards earlier this year), but this one stood out for a couple of reasons, combining real-world impact on a terrible real-world problem and demonstrating the purpose-driven brand-building delivers tangible benefits when done right.

On the issue front, the campaign-idea creation by Publicis Conseil, PR by Publicis Consultants-helped more than 120 people in the first month, while on the business front, it moved AXA from second to first place in brand consideration and drove a 9% increase in new consumers.

4. Lucky Yatra

When PR agency CEOs at our Cannes breakfast roundtable talked about campaigns that solved real-world problems,“Lucky Yatra” was clearly top of mind. Developed by ad agency FCB Group India for the Central Railway, the initiative addressed a significant economic issue: $820 million in lost revenue due to the fact that more than 40% of riders don't pay the approved fare.

Driven by a key insight-while Indians don't like paying for train tickets, they do love lotteries-the agency turned train tickets into lottery tickets, each with a unique number. The initiaitive was promoted using audio and out-of-home and generated more than 500 million impressions and overwhelmingly positive sentiment.

In terms of results, the campaign generated a 34% increase in sales, and $685 million in revenue, according to the submission (although outside the confines of the festival, there are some questions about the duration and effectiveness of the campaign).

5. Daisy vs Scammers

Perhaps the best use of artificial intelligence on display among the Gold Lions winners in the PR category, this campaign for O2 (credited to VCCP, Girl and Bear, Faith, and Bernadette) was designed to confound scammers who target elderly Brits-often posing as telcos and other service providers-by keeping them tied up on calls, for as long as 40 minutes.

To do that, the company engineered Daisy, a synthetic granny trained on data provided by a“scambaiter” and chainging multiple AI technologies that drew on a custom-designed LLM, speech recognition, and a voice model to hold lengthy conversations about hobbies, her family, and her cat Fliffy.

According to the entry, Daisy saved British consumers £3 million in“annual loss prevention equivalent” (I don't know how that's calculated) and generated £36 million in“earned media value” (a metric that remains inescapable at Cannes, despite its speciousness). I do question whether the 1.7 billion media impressions were helpful, however, since they presumably alerted scammers to Daisy's existence?

6. Progresso Soup Drops

It had a real impact on the cultural conversation, its drove a ton of eanred media coverage, and it has a measurable impact on Progresso's sales results and market share, but I still find it had to get excited about the Progresso Soup Drops campaign-the only Gold winner in this year's PR Lions that came from an idea created by a PR agency (Edelman).

But unlike the Nordea“Parental Leave Mortgage” campaign, which created a new product that delivered real and tangible benefits to consumers, the creation of“soup drops” felt a little gimmicky to me, and also struck me as another a years-long trend of food-related products (“everything bagel” ice-cream, Velveeta martinis, Edelman's own mayonnaise scented perfume for Hellmann's).

All of that notwithstanding, the concept clearly struck a chord with others: 12.8 billion impressions (even people who would normally eschew vanity metrics feel obliged to provide them in Cannes); the product itself sold out in record time; and most important, Progresso sales were up by 14 points.

7. Haaland Payback Time

Maybe 30 years ago, I was playing a game called“Ultima Online,” one of the first of the multiplayer online role-playing games, and I fought with another player (and killed him) who turned out to be New York Mets backup catcher Todd Pratt. I mention this to let you know that I understand the basic appeal of meeting and interacting with a sporting celebrity in a gaming context.

At the same time, though, one of the lenses through which I look at award-worthy campaigns is degree of difficulty, and I can't help thinking that (1) generating excitement around a video game is a little easier than generating excitement around a mortgage or even a soup and (2) being able to leverage a celebrity with the profile of Erling Haaland-one of the most prolific goalscorers in the world-more or less guarantees publicity.

Once the folks at ad agency David and the Clash of Clans discovered Haaland was a fan, I'm not sure using him to gain attention for the game required any great insight, and while The Romans delivered effective PR support and the results were great (a 150% surge in new players) this almost felt like a can't miss proposition.

8. Sun Reserve

Every year, it seems, there's at least one Gold Lions selection that mystifies me, and this year Sun Reserve, produced by Grey Sao Paulo for Corona beer (with PR support from 3pm Weber Shandwick and Inpress Porter Novelli) is that campaign.

Corona, celebrating 100 years of“encouraging people to enjoy the sun,” decided to take over a lot on one of Brazil's most beaches, keeping real estate developers at bay and protecting the sun. There are now two of these“sun reserves” (the second is in South Africa) and negotiations are under way for more.

But in terms of impact, I have my doubts. It's not clear from the entry how big these“reserve” actually are, whether there was any measurable environmental impact, or what the benefits to the brand were beyond several stories in top-tier media.“We did a nice thing,” should not be enough to win a Gold Lion.

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