Key takeaways:

  • While only one PR agency was credited with “idea creation” for the Gold Lions winners, most of those in attendance came away inspired and optimistic about the industry’s role in the future.
  • PR briefs are “more interesting and more expansive” than others, and often don’t culminate in the kind of one-dimensional creative product that stands out in Cannes. The upside is that PR can be “format agnostic.”
  • A lot of the winning work this year was about solving “real world business problems” as juries looked beyond purpose-driven campaigns and focused more on business impact.
  • The agency leaders appreciate the focus on work that “lived in the jungle, not in the zoo,” that was not designed explicitly to win awards but to have real-world consequences.
  • PR people are well positioned to take advantage of the intersection between brand and culture because of their agility—accustomed as they are to responding in real-time—and because they listen to what’s happening across multiple media channels.
  • AI’s greatest impact is on planning, and particularly the impact to better predict the outcomes of campaigns, and on the ability to measure success in more bottom-line ways.

Meeting at PRovoke Media's Cannes HQ the morning after the PR Lions winners were announced in Cannes, the CEOs of some of the largest public relations agencies in the world took part in a wide-ranging discussion that covered the PR industry’s promising future (despite the lack of success in competition this year) from the ways we can help brands connect through culture to the impact of AI on campaign strategy and real-world impact.
Participating in the discussion were:

  • Paul Holmes, founder and editor of PRovoke Media
  • Corey duBrowa, CEO of Burson
  • Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman
  • Susan Howe, CEO of The Weber Shandwick Collective
  • Jillian Janaczek, CEO of Porter Novelli
  • Diana Littman, CEO of MSL North America
  • Matt Neale, CEO of Golin
  • Tamara Norman, US CEO of Ketchum
  • Krista Webster, CEO of Veritas Communications

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Paul Holmes: Let's start where we always start. How do we feel about last night?

Richard Edelman: So what I saw last night is the ad agencies are coming towards us. They're not stupid, and their own businesses are under tremendous pressure. So they're coming to where they think there's an oppotunity, which is where we are.

That campaign from India [Lucky Yatra, the PR Grand Prix winner] so moved me. I thought, god damn it, that's good. That's a problem solved. And I was like, we should be doing that kind of thing. But clients don't buy that from us. So that's our problem. We better muscle up.

PH: Did we feel like it was a step back, after last year’s success?

Susan Howe: I don’t feel thwarted, Paul. I feel inspired. I think there was a lot of good work. I loved [PR jury chairman and Weber Shandwick chief creative officer] Tom Beckman's framing around “work in the real world.”  I mean FCB did that, but we do it too.

Matt Neale: It’s important to remember we're taking Lions in other categories. And I don't think ad agencies are sat there going, why is the PR agency winning in this advertising category? So it's an unnecessary layer of anxiety that we place on ourselves, because we're doing really well across the festival.

Corey duBrowa: We won our first Lion. So I feel exactly like you do. I don't feel thwarted. I felt inspired.

One of our creative directors was on the jury for PR. So we got a bit of a readout on what the direction had been, which to me felt like the right kind of direction to give in terms of business impact. Like, let's sort of cool it with the stunts and let's look at things that are sustainable. Let's think about things that actually can be measurable from a business standpoint, not just how many impressions you were able to generate.

PH: I'm less concerned about who gets the trophies than I am about who is getting credited with idea creation. My issue issue is that clients are still not coming to us the way they should be for the idea.

CdB: I don't know that I totally buy that or agree with that. For those of us who sit within holding companies, the ideation is happening across the disciplines. So I'm not sure I'm completely buying that. It depends on your client. It depends on what the problem is.

RE: But we need to be more aggressive with our clients to bring them our ideas.

SH: Clients are coming to us, but it's also our job to go to them.

Diana Littman: I think it’s important to remember that our briefs are interesting and often more expansive than the briefs other kinds of agencies get. And I I think other disciplines are, in fact, jealous. Because our briefs don't necessarily end in “and then make me an ad.” Our briefs are more expansive, and often more open-ended than that.

The Lucky Yatra campaign, I think, is incredible. I was on the jury, and it was a an absolute fan favorite all the way through. And it was about solving a business problem, solving an issue. That was Tom’s guidance to the jury, to focus around real problems, real solutions, not vanity ideas and, by the way, not vanity metrics.

CdB: But it's also that we are format agnostic, right? So unlike advertising or unlike other awards categories that have very specific parameters, ee have relative freedom, which to Richard's point means that there is going to be more competition, more interest from other disciplines.

But I love the fact that it's format agnostic because for our creative team, it just opens up the aperture as wide as you can.

Krista Webster: I think it's incredibly daunting and flattering that everyone else wants to do PR work. Everyone loves our category.

SH: Clients need an agency ecosystem that is wired together. Our best work is when we are strategic partners and collaborators, and there's a back and forth between all of the partners. I think the clients that are demanding that kind of ecosystem are the ones that are going to see the best results.

MN: And with that approach, you've got earned at the center, serving up the insights, driving the cultural work, and then you're integrated with the media partners to accelerate it. It's a perfect modern client.

RE: But we do need to address the fact that we are associated with yesterday as opposed to today, meaning purpose and sustainability and DEI. I'm not saying that any of this was wrong because that was a decade's worth of work for agencies, but that has come to a screeching halt. So we have to reinvent ourselves.

Jillian Janaczek: Well, there were still a lot of campaigns that I think had a lot of social impact. I love the campaigns that have real impact. I think they were really powerful because you saw real change in society.

Solving Real Business Problems

PH: One of the things I’ve heard from a lot of the people here is how much of the work—especially in the PR category—that got recognized was about solving real business problems, which is not necessarily what Cannes has been known for.

KW: I was pleasantly surprised because I think it's also a very ownable area for our discipline, especially in the B2B space, which is never considered the sexy side of the business, but it's the it's where the consultancy side has an impact, really understanding true business insights and then being creative on how you bring that to life.

Tamara Norman: A lot of the work started with, what is the business objective, what is the business problem that we're trying to solve? I think our discipline is very well suited to answer that question because of the way we the way we approach a problem. And then, of course, we have to look at, what is the impact? What were the results for the business. Some of it was societal, but then, okay, how does that impact the actual business?

DL: Krista and I were on the jury together and a lot of people from around the world do veer in the direction of social impact. But I hink we want to recognize the diversity of the work that we do…

RE: And half the world doesn't want social impact right now…

KW: The things that resonate with the jury are often driven by the social purpose. But there are also incredible things like Progresso Soup Drops, which was just a brilliant, beautiful example of what we do from an earned standpoint. I think the great debate in the room, but also in our industry in general, is what is PR? And it might be delightful or silly without any kind of social purpose guided and that’s not a bad thing.

RE: It's actually what we're good at. It’s like your work for Pop Tarts last year.

SH: And that’s where I think we are owning the future, is moving through culture and orchestrating where the story should be told and how to have relevance and impact. That’s where I think we have all the opportunity in the world.

RE: But we have to do better with influencers. We have to grab it, because everybody else is trying to grab it. 

MN: Susan, I couldn't agree more. But there were three or four pieces that won Gold Lions yesterday—not in the PR category—that we would not even have sent in the entry form. They were beautiful films, maybe, but there was no way that that's actually gong to create impact in the real world. It was a beautifully packaged film that would not have created the kind of consumer behavioral change that our clients expect. We’re not chasing that kind of work.

KW: That goes back to even Tom talking about, “does this live in the zoo, or does it doe it live in the jungle? And that was the litmus test for everything that we we looked at. Did it work?

CdB: That’s a great metaphor, though. The idea of living in the jungle, which means it can survive on its own in the wild. That's how ideas live in culture, how they find relevance, how they create impact, and are sustainable. And that’s where it is so important that we can be  format agnostic, we can live anywhere.

RE: So, Paul, another area to think about is that too little of our great creative comes from Asia, Africa. We don't get good enough fees there. It's tough in India. It's tough in China. It's tough in Africa.

MN: When you see what wins a PR Week award in Asia versus Europe versus The US, it is easier to win in Asia. The bar is lower, and yet here we are on a global stage, and you've got Asian work rising to the very, very top. So there's a strange kind of dichotomy there.

PH: To disagree slightly, if you look at the inners of the Global SABRE Awards, the Best in Show award went to Edelman’s HP StreetCode campaign, which came out of Asia, and we had a top five campaign last year from Pakistan. I'm not sure that I buy the idea that there is a link between region and creativity, or even between budget and creativity. I've seen campaigns that have a huge impact that have been done on budgets that nobody in this room would go after.

CdB: That's true. One of our Gold winners from Australia was a $30,000 campaign. I think the bigger thing is to talk about impact. Right?

Why PR is Winning in Culture

PH: This is something that's been central to a lot of the conversations I've been having over the last year, this whole thing of tapping into culture and cultural salience, whether it’s sport or pop culturem, gaming, Every PR person that I talk to thinks that this is a huge advantage for PR, that we have a unique ability to identify cultural trends and tap into them. Why do we think that PR has an advantage in this area?

MN: Agility. Advertising agencies are used to moving slowly, planning six months, 12 months out. We've been working day-to-day since day one, and then it's hour-to-hour and minute-to-minute. So  we have an inbuilt agility to do this kind of work.

CdB: We're very catholic, aren't we? Not in a religious sense, I mean our tastes and our aperture is as broad as the world. Being format agnostic or catholic in our approach is really important. Ir gives us the leverage to work in culture.

TN: And we listen, right? Listening is built into what we do, and we've been doing that for years, listening and reacting. And now that's on hyperdrive.

DL: You think about before you have any meeting with anybody, any client, we are all trained, we are all looking at what happened in the news, what’s happening that impacts them, what’s happening with their competitors? It comes from a news obsession, watching what is current.  So we are constantly in movement and in current events.

KW: I agree, and I also think what is different is we're looking at all of the different channels of news, including social. Whereas in advertising they are looking at a narrower… they're not looking at the issues or the news broadly—or the stakeholders that are impacted, all of the audiences that we think about all the time

CdB: Including employees, which no other discipline really does.

SH: And let's be sure we're not saying pop culture. Culture is so much broader than that.

TN: I also think if you look at the winners, so many of them were exactly what you said, deep culture, not pop culture. Problem solving in culture.

Is AI Impacting the Work?

PH: Let's talk about AI because one of the things that people have said is that it still feels transitional. It doesn't feel like AI has arrived yet.

CdB: It depends upon what your definition of “arrived” is.

PH: It hasn’t transformed the work. We’re working faster, cheaper, maybe even better. But the work mostly still looks the same.

CdB: If you look at the progress just in the last 12 months, if you think about what you were using AI to do 12 months ago compared to what you do now, the products have improved greatly. The ability to do things has improved greatly. Our understanding of what the tools actually can do has improved greatly. It's like any other platform shift we've ever experienced, we're going from the gee-whiz part of it to actually taking the tools and applying them.

MN: You're seeing the best work made by human beings in the world here. The vast majority of advertising very soon can be largely done by AI. But the work that is shown here may not be representative of the stuff that we all see on our TVs when we're catching an ad break. It's kind of against their interest to spotlight that.

So I don't think it's going to drop the way that you're maybe suggesting, but it is going to be embedded in the process.

JJ: As we move from generative to cognitive, as we move into a sentient space, you are going to be able to use AI for culture foresight. Like, you are going to be able look 12, maybe 18 months out with some of the tools you have now and provide insight on a specific topic, and you're going to be able to use that.

CdB: A lot of the impact in predictive analytics. As a client, your CEOs are forever asking you as a CCO, to lick your finger and put it in the wind, and say which direction is the wind going. And largely we were relying on lived experience, some dribs and drabs of data, and our instinct to sort of point us in the right way. So now we have tools that can actually pinpoint much more clearly direction of travel.

PH: So AI will have more impact in terms of strategic direction and insight, rather than on the product?

CdB: Back in my client life we used to talk about generative AI as being a place where we're going to see the biggest delta in productivity and where ultimately the industry is going from a creative point of view. But anyone who sat inside a company will tell you that companies have been collecting data for decades. But they have a real struggle extracting insight from all that data.

If we can develop tools, cognitive AI tools that can help predict the direction of travel and give us the kind of insight the companies are really craving. How do they figure out how to travel to the spots where there are gaps in the culture where they can live comfortably and actually build brand and reputation.

That's the opportunity for me for AI. It can pinpoint the actual business value of something. There's some interesting correlative data between events and stock price, events and sales direction, events and purchase preference. This is all coming.

RE: You're making a very important statement, because as this changes, we are going to have to sell results as opposed to effort. Yes? We're going to have to face up to that in the marketplace.

CdB: I don't know about you all, but for decades, I sort of resisted the idea of linking the work that I did to, for example, the sales outcome. But I think it's headed in that direction.

SH: Some of our best partnerships, though, have that expectation. And when you have that kind of skin in the game, then you have the upside potential. We we have a lot of relationships that are going that way, and impact is how we're measured.

PH: But for as long as I’ve been doing this, the primary model has been selling efforts, selling billable hours. So Corey, you say you resisted linking the work to impact?

CdB: Because I didn't feel like I had the proof that I would be comfortable presenting to my board of directors. If I don't have the data, if I don't have the proof, I don't have a linear connection between the action and the impact or the action and the outcome, then I can't make those statements.

DL: I think also there has been a lack of any guarantee that what we put out into the world will have the impact we want.

CdB: But AI is changing all that.

TN: I think as we talk about, you know, results and getting paid for results Yes. I think we're gonna have to pull our clients along in terms of how we define results. Because we still have some clients that are not sophisticated that are talking about reach and impressions. If we're gonna get paid for results, we need to be thinking about what are the business results and getting paid for business impact.

KW:  The more tools we have to actually make sure there is more certainty, that’s wonderful. But there's also that thing, the emotional reaction, and we need to make sure we don’t lose the very essence of what we do, which is really create magic.

PH: Yeah, I don’t think it’s necessarily the best campaign I saw, but it was my favorite: the Nutter Butter work. That was magic, but it may be because they had nothing to lose.

CdB: But that’s the old Janis Joplin quote, “freedom is another word for nothing left to lose.” You're not sure if it's going to work, and then culture takes over.

TN: And that’s what worked with Gen Z and Millennials, on TikTok. Humor. But it also solved a business problem.

SH: Nutter Butter absolitely solved a business problem. It solved the problem of what do we do when our brand is dead and completely irrelevant and isn't part of any conversation anywhere.

CdB: This was a piece of work that is very extraordinary. I couldn't have loved it more.

PH: That seems like a great place to wrap things up, with the work we loved. Thanks, everybody.