Cannes 2025: Craft Outlasted the Demos

I spent last week at Cannes Lions doing what you actually go there to do, which is not attending the beach activations. You go to sit in the Palais basement with the shortlisted work, hour after hour, and calibrate your eye against the best the industry produced this year. I take the same notebook every year. Here is what filled it this time.

The gap between the stages and the shortlists

The defining feature of Cannes 2025 was a gap. On the main stages: AI, wall to wall. Platform announcements, agentic workflow demos, panel after panel about the transformation of creativity, every holding company presenting its proprietary AI stack with the enthusiasm of a species describing its successor.

In the winners' galleries: craft. Human, laborious, decision-dense craft. Work with hand-drawn letterforms. Film with real texture and real duration. Brand identities where you could feel someone agonizing over a curve. The juries, made of practitioners with trained eyes, kept reaching past the technically novel and rewarding the emotionally precise. Nobody planned that as a statement, which is what makes it one. When the people who make things for a living choose what deserves to endure, they choose evidence of care.

That gap is not hypocrisy, by the way. It is sequencing. The tools are everywhere in process and nearly invisible in the winning output, which is exactly where tools belong.

Three patterns from the design juries

• Identity systems are getting more opinionated, not more flexible. For a decade the fashion was infinitely elastic systems, endless variation from a kit of parts. This year's most awarded identity work went the other way: fewer elements, harder rules, stronger commitments. My theory: when AI makes infinite variation free, variation stops being impressive, and conviction becomes the scarce material. The tightest systems in the gallery felt almost defiant.
• Typography as the whole idea. A striking share of winning brand work led with type doing the conceptual heavy lifting, custom letterforms carrying meaning rather than decorating it. Joe has been shouting this from our studio for years, so the vindication was received insufferably.
• The return of duration. Multiple juries rewarded work that asked for real time: long film, slow reveals, campaigns that unfolded over months. In a feed economy optimized for the first half-second, asking confidently for three minutes reads as a status move, and audiences apparently accept the premise when the craft warrants it.

The conversation under the conversation

The most honest exchanges happened off-stage, at dinners where nobody was selling a platform. The anxiety among senior creatives is real, but it is not the anxiety the panels perform. Nobody serious fears being replaced by a model. What they fear is a market that stops being able to tell the difference, clients so flooded with competent output that the case for care collapses.

I came home believing the shortlists are the counter-argument. Difference was visible in that basement to anyone who spent an hour there. The work that stopped people, that made strangers call colleagues over to a screen, was work where the decisions showed. The market's ability to feel that difference is intact. Our job, as it has always been, is to keep making the difference big enough to feel.

What we brought home

One practical resolution: our identity work is going to get more committed, not more elastic. Harder rules, fewer elements, opinions worth defending in a basement in France. The tools will be everywhere in our process next year too. If we do it right, you will only ever see them in the time we spent on the parts that matter.

Same notebook, next June.