Beyond Cannes Lions 2025: Three insights every APAC marketer should act upon

This post is sponsored by We. Communications.

As digital acceleration and geopolitical shifts continue to reshape the communications landscape, simplicity may seem like the safest route. But at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the most powerful work didn’t dilute complexity – it embraced it. It met audiences where they were, with nuance, cultural intelligence, and emotional weight.

Cannes may be fading in the rearview, but the work it spotlighted continues to shape conversations across the region. We. Communications’ president of APAC Nitin Mantri, and managing director of Singapore Daryl Ho unpack three takeaways that remain highly relevant: purpose with proof, co-creation with influencers, and connecting with humour.

Is “doing good” still enough or have the goalposts for purpose shifted?

Mantri (NM): What stood out at Cannes this year is that intent is no longer the only benchmark. Brands are also being judged on tangible, measurable outcomes. In APAC, where public health, education, and sustainability are front and centre, it’s not enough to say you stand for something. You need to show the receipts.

Take Amazon’s “Box to Beds”. What began as a sustainability story became a deeply human act: upcycling delivery boxes into beds for pilgrims attending the world’s biggest religious festival. Or ACKO’s “Tailor Test”. By training local tailors to measure waist-to-hip ratios, the campaign reframed healthcare access as a community interaction, bridging the gaps in a culturally intuitive way.

At Cannes, both earned Lions. And, as their PR agency, I’m proud to have played a role in that success. But more importantly, they proved that culturally grounded, data-backed storytelling, can drive change and connect the dots between reputation and value.

Ho (DH): I agree with Nitin. Purpose demands proof not promises. “Doing good” is no longer a competitive advantage, but a baseline expectation. Consumers no longer just want to hear about impact. Today, they demand to see it, measure it, and verify it.

One standout example is IKEA’s “Better Shelter” initiative. Instead of aspirational messaging and lofty claims, it provided exact figures: families housed, shelters deployed, and outcomes measured – transforming purpose from marketing rhetoric into business accountability.

While stakeholders may still ask for reach and impressions, audiences have evolved. They can spot the gap between performative corporate promises and delivery, and brands that are unable to articulate impact with revenue-level rigour risk falling into irrelevance.

How is the creator economy reshaping marketing in Southeast Asia?

NM: What I saw at Cannes reaffirms what many of us in APAC already know: the creator economy isn’t a trend, but a transformation.

In mobile-first SEA, the creator economy is worth an estimated S$19 billion and is expected to continue at a compound annual growth rate of 30% until 2030. Just last year, YouTube alone reached 290 million people or 85% of the region’s online population. That’s scale with intimacy.

The real shift though is that creators, especially micro and nano-influencers, are now trusted more than brands. For instance, campaigns such as Vaseline Verified showed that they can bridge trust gaps with content that’s practical, personal, and community-first.

DH: Absolutely. The old influencer model – transactional, top-down, brand-dictated – no longer works. We’re now in a co-creation economy, where creators are business partners and not just content amplifiers. This addresses a critical flaw in traditional influencer marketing campaigns: forced, inauthentic content that simply doesn’t resonate.

Think Blackpink’s Jennie for Gentle Monster, Jackson Wang for Cartier or PP Krit as Balenciaga’s first Asian brand ambassador. These aren’t just faces; they’re co-authors of brand voice. By leveraging the creators’ audience intimacy and platform expertise, these partnerships underscore the value of creators integrating into the creative process, resulting in authenticity and creative possibilities that neither party achieves independently.

We understand that authenticity cannot be manufactured, it can only be earned through genuine collaboration and transparency – and we’ve applied this philosophy across a breadth of clients and sectors.

For example, with AIA International Wealth, we empowered Indonesian and Thai creators as cultural consultants, shaping local brand narratives. Our partnership with TOUCH Community Services engaged advocates to co-create content that addressed mental health stigma based on lived experience, not PR talking points.

Similarly, our work with Sentosa Development Corporation evolved from creator campaigns into a fully fledged creator programme that demonstrated a true collaborative partnership.

This is our new reality: audiences have fired brands as the exclusive narrators of their own stories. And the future belongs to brands sophisticated enough to prove purpose while sharing creative control.

What’s your take on humour showing up across some of the more serious Cannes campaigns?

NM: Humour, when done right, is emotional intelligence at work. At Cannes this year, more than three-quarters of the winners used humour to connect emotionally, including on serious topics such as mental health, stigma, disability or rare diseases. Far from trivialising the issues, it helped humanise them.

Our 2025 Brands in Motion research backs this up:

• 68% of people say they’re more interested in messages from an organisation with some humour.
• 64% of people say humour makes even scientific or technical content easier to engage with.

In a region as diverse as Asia Pacific – with multiple languages, sensitivities, and subcultures – humour is a shortcut to being relatable. It breaks through jargon. It invites people in. But it must be done carefully, with cultural nuance and empathy.

In light of these trends, what advice would you offer to brand leaders in APAC?

DH: Success requires mastering both imperatives: proving impact with precision while partnering authentically. Everything else is noise.

NM: Exactly. And I’d add a few more:

• Be locally grounded, and globally attuned. Ground the work in your market’s specific values, behaviours, and context, while remaining globally relevant.
• Put humans first. AI may be making headlines, but at Cannes, it was emotional intelligence that won juries over. Use AI to augment – not replace – human creativity.
• Prioritise authenticity. Smaller creators often drive deeper engagement as their audiences trust them more.