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When Brazilian agency DM9, part of Omnicom Group’s DDB network, withdrew three Cannes-winning campaigns due to questions around their legitimacy, it came as a shock to many. But for some industry insiders, it was no surprise, given a culture they say pushes agencies to resort to desperate measures to win at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and other award shows.
For this story, Ad Age spoke with 22 ad executives, including chief creative officers and CEOs, most of whom have served on Cannes juries or participated in award submissions. Most sources were granted anonymity to speak freely due to the sensitivity of the topic.
While some of the transgressions they reported involved agencies gaming the system (more on that later), others said they witnessed firsthand agency executives try to take down competitors’ campaigns or bribe other jurors to get their work to win. One chief creative recalled being offered jobs and money several years ago in exchange for voting a certain way, adding that “the cheating is just getting really sloppy.”
The DM9 scandal, meanwhile, has drummed up speculation around the legitimacy of some other winning work, with industry professionals taking to LinkedIn to call out certain campaigns they felt also undeservedly took home Lions, leading to scrutiny of Cannes itself, which has since tightened its rules.
Sebastian Wolf, a professor of advertising and brand management at Media University of Applied Sciences in Stuttgart, Germany, has been compiling a database of allegedly suspicious Cannes award winners that people have sent to him. Currently, he has around 50 case studies that have been questioned.
“When you’re in the advertising industry, I would say everybody knows about [awards cheating], but nobody really cares much to change it,” he said.
It’s become a distraction from the work itself. Some marketers and agencies are reevaluating how they enter and vet awards, and several holding companies are contemplating investing less in Cannes next year, according to numerous people close to the matter.
“The collusion is a problem. The lying and competitive takedowns are the cancers,” said one agency network chief creative officer who has participated in Cannes Lions judging for the past few decades. “We need an ethical revolution.”
A Cannes Lions spokesperson told Ad Age that the festival employs “a number of measures to ensure that the judging process is fair and robust. Our juries are a carefully considered balance of companies, countries and specialisms. Within an Awarding Jury, no network will have more than one juror participating.”
Cannes Lions last week also issued a refreshed code of conduct that included strong sanctions for misrepresented work, stringent checks and balances to deter cheating, and a three-year ban for shops that transgress. But the motivation for bad behavior still needs to be examined.
The underlying question remains: How did the industry get to a place where awards matter so much that integrity is often thrown out the window?
Awards carry higher stakes as jobs and bonuses depend on wins
While gaming the system is not new—Ad Age has written about so-called “ghost” ads that never ran but were still submitted for awards as far back as the 1990s—several people said it’s getting worse amid growing uncertainty about the future of holding companies and widespread agency layoffs.
“Let’s say I’m a North America chief creative officer of a large network,” one agency chief creative said. “That points system [in which the amount of winning work determines awards like Network of the Year at Cannes] is somehow, not explicitly, but it is going to affect how much money I make. It is going to affect my bonus. It is going to affect what I can ask for from a compensation standpoint, an amenity standpoint, and from a resource standpoint, for my office.”
In some cases, insiders said, shelves full of award trophies are seen as job security for top creatives. Brand marketing leads can also benefit when their agencies win multiple Lions, One Show Pencils and other awards because it can support their positions with upper management and prove they are working with the best creative agencies.
Winning awards is also important to employees for their résumés and morale. “This is the thing we don’t talk about. We don’t talk about pressure, and this is self-induced pressure … it’s part of the business,” said another agency chief creative. “People are crying … people feel like, ‘If I haven’t delivered for you, I’m going to be fired.”
This person added: “We’ve created an industry where you get promoted because you won a Cannes Lion or a One Show Pencil, versus you get promoted because you solved a giant business problem.”
Why case studies are under more scrutiny
At the center of this year’s DM9 cheating scandal was the agency’s “Efficient Way to Pay” campaign for Consul Appliances, which initially won the Grand Prix in Creative Data. The award was later rescinded after the campaign’s case study was accused of featuring manipulated footage, including a Ted Talk, a CNN Brasil report and a customer testimonial. The incident resulted in Icaro Doria, DM9’s co-president and chief creative officer, stepping down from the São Paulo-based agency.
Interestingly, it was not the campaign itself but the case study that caused the Grand Prix to be revoked.
As case studies have become more critical at award shows for highlighting how campaigns come together and their effectiveness across different platforms, executives said they’ve also become more vulnerable to exaggeration or outright lies.
“Case study videos have now become their own thing, especially with certain sorts of campaigns,” said Cindy Gallop, founder and CEO of IfWeRanTheWorld and MakeLoveNotPorn, who has served on and led several Cannes juries. “They are not straightforward documentation. They are absolutely creatively manipulative in terms of how they’re put together.”
One holding company agency executive who has been in charge of leading award entries for years said there is an “art” to putting together these case study videos. “If you don’t have the results, there are creative ways to combine results” to make a campaign seem more effective, this person said. “There are not many people who know how to do this well. You have to be a real student of the business.”
A large number of employees are involved in creating these case study videos on the agency side—the holding company executive said anyone who had a hand in developing the campaign will often be involved, and chief creative officers and executive creative directors almost always lead their creation. The client has to approve the case study videos, and usually, the agency CEO will see it before it is sent off as well, this person said.
The cost of putting cases together can be “significant,” the holding company agency executive said. “There’s the cost for editing, voiceover, then there’s graphics,” the person said. “All in for a case study, it’s probably $20,000 and I think that’s on the cheap end.”
AI tools may eventually reduce some of those costs, but the tech could also open the door for even more cheating and manipulation.
In a statement last week about its new measures to improve vetting of entries, Cannes addressed AI concerns. The festival said it would roll out an “AI Integrity Handbook,” designed for use by entrants, jurors and stakeholders. The handbook will “outline what is acceptable, what must be disclosed and what constitutes a breach” in regards to the emerging technology.
The agency network chief creative said typically, judges can sniff out when numbers are wildly overinflated in a case study. “You see sales went up 98% and you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a lie,’” this person said, but now AI is allowing “evidence to get corrupted, as well,” and that’s harder to catch.
“You see a 20% sales raise and see enough footage of people talking about it, you’re going, ‘Yeah, that sounds reasonable,’” the person said. “The moment you cannot trust the evidence, then it becomes a big crisis for the industry and our ability to judge.”
Advertising professor Wolf has a different take—that maybe effectiveness should not count in the calculus.
“Creative award shows have turned into effectiveness award shows,” he said. “If we would just stop asking for results, nobody would have to fake them. And we could still focus on the imaginative part, the beauty, the smartness of great advertising ideas.”
Lobbying and collusion infiltrate Cannes juries
The bad publicity around Cannes also sparked renewed scrutiny about the lobbying and collusion on juries that many people interviewed said happens every year behind closed doors at the festival.
The holding company agency executive who oversees award submissions said that, typically, there is an executive from the holding company who pulls the strings behind the scenes.
“At the holding company level, if they know you’re on the judging panel, they’ll familiarize you—they say ‘You don’t have to vote for this work, but I wanted to let you know this is some of the best work we’re doing in our network,’” the executive said. “The implication is ‘hint hint’ [vote for this work]. These are the kinds of things that are all in the area of lobbying.”
The agency network chief creative said lobbying isn’t typically an issue because, in the end, good work will win out over mediocrity. What is a problem, this person said, is the collusion that happens—for example, one holding company telling its executives to vote against a competitor’s campaign. If you get just a few people to score a campaign low, “you eliminate that thing from winning,” the chief creative said.
Several executives said the burden falls on judges and jury presidents to question everything going on inside their judging rooms. The agency network chief creative said jury presidents need to scrutinize results, and if they hear of lobbying or collusion happening, they need to deal with the perpetrators. Years ago, this person said, a juror was expelled for inviting all his fellow judges to his summer house to get them to vote for his agency’s campaign.
Cannes representatives are in every jury room to try to ensure everyone is playing by the rules, but they don’t always understand what to look for, one agency network CEO said, noting as an example jurors frantically messaging one another on their phones during breaks.
Cannes reps in the jury rooms are “like temporary hires,” the agency network CEO said. “They are not picking up on it. They don’t see the nuances of that stuff.”
A growing glut of categories and entries is also weighing on the festival, making it harder for judges to distinguish legitimate campaigns, one agency executive said. “It used to be that before you went into Cannes, you’d have seen almost all the work,” they said. “Now it’s almost impossible to.”
The Cannes Lions spokesperson detailed some of the steps it takes to prevent bad practices from taking place in the jury room, including prohibiting jurors from judging work that could be related to them, their company or their agency network.
“Should a piece of work a jury member has been a part of make it onto the shortlist, they will be asked to leave the room while the rest of the jury discuss the work. It then takes a two-thirds majority vote before any decisions can be made,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson added: “During voting, our bespoke system assesses voting patterns in real-time and flags anomalies for closer interrogation and analysis. All our results are audited and verified by our independent, third-party awards auditors, MediaSense.”
Who is really to blame?
Both brands and agencies shoulder blame for questionable entries, said a senior marketer at a major brand. Clients need to do a better job providing “clean, consistent and verifiable” data, but they also must hold agencies more “accountable for their submissions.”
“Especially in large organizations, there’s a tendency to delegate everything to the agency and trust that they’ll handle it,” this person said. “That trust can be too high in some cases, clearly.”
Most people interviewed didn’t place all the blame on Cannes, seeing it as more of an industry-wide issue affecting many award shows, and placed the onus on agency leaders to ensure they are policing and vetting submissions more closely in the future.
The agency network chief creative said it’s incumbent on agency executives to eliminate bad practices.
“It’s very cowardly to expect Cannes to solve all these problems when the problems are not coming from them,” the chief creative officer said. “What are the heads of the network going to say? Why is there not anyone in the network blowing the whistle? I still believe in the integrity of the people in our industry. There are some wrong players. But I believe most people would choose to do the right thing.”
Multiple people interviewed said they believe it is incumbent on Cannes to verify the case studies and awards because judges are under the assumption that the work has been verified once it gets to them.
Cannes’ new guidelines state that every submission must be approved by the entrant company’s business leader and a senior marketer from the commissioning brand. The festival said these declarations are designed to confirm that “case films, written submissions, data and claims are factually accurate, responsibly sourced and representative of real-world events and outcomes.”
Alex Lubar, global CEO of DDB Worldwide, in responding to the cheating scandal, said the following statement:
“We deeply believe in the power of creativity to deliver real results for our clients,” he said. “My commitment, and DDB’s, is to be responsible stewards of the industry we love, partnering closely with those across the ad landscape to take meaningful steps to protect the integrity of our creative product.”
DDB will be strengthening its “training, policies and creative review process to ensure our standards remain clear and true to our ethos of work that moves the needle for clients,” he added. “Simply put, we want to win, but for all the right reasons. We owe that to our people, our clients, and the future of this industry.”
Under Cannes’ new rules, companies found to have willfully submitted false or misleading work may be banned from participation for up to three years, with jury eligibility also potentially being revoked. Sanctions will be determined through an independent review process, the festival stated.
However, one longtime awards manager said they don’t see the matter getting better with harsher punishment. “Until Cannes starts doing what the Effies do and requires real proof of results via footnotes, nothing will change,” this person said.
Cannes last week said it’s implementing a “new dual-layer verification system” that will “combine manual checks with AI-led analysis to interrogate the veracity of claims made by each entry.” Juries will also have access to an “objective and independent data and measurement expert” throughout judging, aimed at providing “further technical scrutiny across impact claims, campaign effectiveness, media impact and data interpretation,” the festival stated.
Implications for Cannes and beyond
This latest scandal “harms the credibility of the entire industry, not just Cannes,” said the agency network’s chief creative officer.
Already, several holding companies are considering reducing their investment in Cannes award entries next year, Ad Age has learned. None of the major agency groups—WPP, Omnicom, Interpublic Group, Dentsu, Havas and Stagwell—provided comment on the record.
Some of the industry’s top brass are also already pushing for a refocus at Cannes. Ahead of this year’s annual gathering, Publicis Groupe Chairman and CEO Arthur Sadoun said agency leaders have to move beyond celebrating creativity alone and focus on helping clients find immediate solutions to their business problems. “At the moment,” he previously said, clients “taking a week to come to the south of France better have a good return on investment.”
Most people interviewed for this story said Cannes still matters and it’s up to the entire industry to help it maintain that relevance, including keeping the celebration of creativity at its core. That’s even more urgent now, given that tech companies are taking more control over the narratives at Cannes and a slew of agencies used their platforms to reposition themselves as AI-powered tech firms.
“It is supposed to be a festival of creativity,” the agency network CEO said. “Until agencies or creative organizations can bring some importance back to that, it kind of changes what Cannes is.”
I have worked at several large agencies at hold cos and can verify that unfortunately all of this checks out. It’s insane.
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This article is less of a smoking gun than I expected.
It confirms that CEOs and CCOs approve the entries - we knew this already - like most awards, Cannes asks for executive sign offs.
The worst behavior in the article - a juror offering a stay at their vacation house in exchange for votes - got them disqualified.
Collusion is probably the worst part, I’ve witnessed it first hand and both ways sadly. Explains why some campaigns can win a gold in one category and nothing else despite being entered everywhere.
Can’t wait for the press to find out about the let’s call them “regional” WhatsApp groups…
This isn’t a Cannes cheating scandal—it’s a Cannes getting caught scandal.