Sprinkles on the Cake: What Cannes Lions Doesn't Tell You About Your Numbers

I have sat in the room where a Cannes shortlist gets announced. I have also sat in the room where a client asks why their cost per acquisition went up 30% over the same quarter the agency was polishing its festival entry. Those two rooms are rarely the same room. That gap is the whole story this week.

Australian agencies are having a strong run at Cannes Lions. VML Sydney led the first wave with eight shortlists, and Australia picked up 25 more in a second wave led by TBWA Melbourne, out of more than 20,000 entries from 92 countries. Genuinely good craft. The work is sharp.

Here's the thing. A Lion measures the work. It doesn't measure whether the work moved a single number on the board. The agencies celebrating hardest this week are often the ones furthest from their clients' commercial reality.

That's my position, and it's one you can disagree with. For most Australian businesses, chasing creative awards is a misallocation of capital and attention. The trophy is the sprinkles. Your business is the cake.

A Lion is a marketer judging another marketer's work and deciding it's beautiful. That's a craft assessment. It tells you the idea was well made and well presented to a panel of peers in the south of France.

It does not tell you the campaign sold anything.

This matters because the industry treats the award as a proxy for effectiveness. It used to be a decent proxy. It isn't anymore. When you let the people doing the work also grade the work, you get a closed loop where craft validates craft and the customer never enters the room.

This isn't a hunch. The IPA, the UK industry body, ran the numbers across around 600 case studies from 1996 to 2018 in a report Peter Field titled "The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness." Read that title again. The industry's own people called it a crisis.

In the 12-year period ending 2008, creatively awarded campaigns were around 12 times as efficient as non-awarded ones. Award-winning work used to be a genuine commercial edge.

That multiplier has now fallen to about 4 times. Here's the line that should stop you cold: awarded campaigns are now no more effective than non-awarded ones. Field blames short-termism and creativity built for activation, not for actual business effect.

So the signal everyone is chasing in Cannes this week has been bleeding out for over a decade. The work that wins Lions and the work that moves numbers have diverged. That's not opinion. It's a matter of fact, a matter of change, a matter of measured outcome over more than 600 cases.

While the industry grades its own homework, look at what's happening to the cake.

Australian brands wasted a record $6 billion in digital ad spend in 2023, up 17% on the year before. That waste was 43% of the $14.1 billion put into digital advertising nationally. Nearly half. Gone. Not invested badly, wasted outright, on the digital channels that are supposed to be the measurable ones.

The pot keeps growing too. Australia's ad market is forecast to reach $30.7 billion in 2026. More money flowing into a system where the people allocating it are increasingly being rewarded for craft that doesn't touch the result.

This is the part that should bother you if you run a business. The same industry that can't account for nearly half its measurable spend is the one telling you a Lion proves it's good at marketing.

I've sat on the agency side and the client side, so I'll say what each one won't say about the other.

On the agency side, the award is the product. It wins new business, it justifies the rate, it gets the case study written. The attractors will all say they're doing a really good job, because they're incentivised to do exactly that. A lot of it comes down to their own interest rather than what's best for the client.

On the client side, I've watched marketers green-light work because it might win something, not because it would shift volume or margin. They're often flying blind on the commercial side, so the award becomes the scoreboard they can actually understand. It feels like a win. It photographs well. It doesn't pay rent.

The award is the agency's product. Your revenue is supposed to be yours. Don't confuse the two.

The pattern is consistent in the businesses we have scored across the Australian market. The ones leaking the most money are rarely short on creative ambition. They're short on knowing what's earning value and what isn't. The work looks good. The numbers tell a different story, and most of them have never bothered to read it.

I'm not telling you craft doesn't matter. Good creative compounds. The car runs better when you get under the hood and tighten it. But you fix the engine before you order the racing stripes.

Run every piece of work through a simple commercial test before you fall in love with it. Does it make volume? Does it make margin? Does it keep the regulators happy? If it doesn't do one of those three things, I'm not sure why you're doing it. A Lion is none of those three.

Then sort out your numbers, because that's where the actual leak is. Do you know how much money you make? Do you know how much you spend? Work back from there. Nearly half the national digital spend is wasted, which means the win for most businesses isn't a more beautiful ad. It's plugging the hole in the boat you're already paying to keep afloat.

Be honest about who you're paying. If you're handing an agency a budget and you can't say what it's earning you, you're paying someone to bring a friend. Make them show you the numbers, not the trophy cabinet.

The agencies celebrating this week did make good work. Take nothing from the craft. But a record Cannes haul and a healthy Australian business are now two different things, and the data says they've been drifting apart for over a decade.

Numbers on the board. That's the lifeblood. The Lion is sprinkles, and you can't run a business on sprinkles. If the work sells, frame the award. If it doesn't, the award is just proof the room you impressed was full of marketers, not customers.

Grade your own homework if you want. The market grades it for you regardless, and it doesn't care how the work looked in Cannes.