The agency’s standout win came with one Gold Lion in Sustainable Development Goals for Recipe for Change, a purpose-led campaign for Arla Foods that addressed food insecurity in Lebanon. The campaign transformed traditional home-cooked recipes into a scalable, community-first restaurant model, generating sustainable income and renewed purpose for local mothers.

Recipe for Change also secured a Silver Lion in Brand Experience & Activation and a Bronze Lion in Creative B2B, delivered in partnership with MCN sister agencies Current Global MENAT and Craft.

The agency’s creative work was further recognised with five Bronze Lions across multiple categories and client collaborations:

• One x Bronze in PR for Sponsored Balls, a campaign developed with the Testicular Cancer Society & Club Deportivo Leganés
• Two x Bronze in Digital Craft and Film for Read Better, created in collaboration with McCann Bristol and UM Central for Waterstones UK
• One x Bronze in Outdoor for Not for First Dates, for McDonald’s UAE, in partnership with MCN PR and media agencies: Weber Shandwick MENAT, UM, and Craft

In addition to its Lion wins, FP7McCann also contributed to 5 global wins, including a prestigious Titanium shortlist for Life Donor Card – MRM Germany that reimagines organ donation awareness in real-life moments. The agency also contributed to the Public Money ATM campaign with McCann Poland, further demonstrating the agency’s role in shaping ideas that go beyond borders.

In this panel, hosted by S4 Capital and joined by Linda Sheng (MiniMax) and Tanzeen Syed (General Atlantic), the discussion revolved around rethinking how brands approach creativity, production, and media in the age of AI.

The star of the session? Monks.Flow

Built over the last 18 months by .Monks this is more than a tool. It’s an end-to-end AI Marketing Orchestration Platform. A complete infrastructure to help brands control, execute, and scale their marketing, from insights and strategy to production and optimisation.

Here’s what it actually does:

• Pulls insights from brand data and market signals
• Automates content creation, versioning, and distribution
• Lets brands manage production and media workflows in one place
• Keeps ownership of customer interaction and outcomes fully inside the brand

It’s now being offered as SaaS, but with human support optional. Brands can plug in Monks’ teams where needed, or run it in-house. As Victor Knaap, Co-Founder at .monks, said: “We built it for the future, but it’s live today.”

This isn’t about replacing agencies. It’s about replacing fragmentation.

Sir Martin didn’t mince words. Traditional brand-agency models will collapse under the weight of complexity and inefficiency unless they adapt.

His key point:

• Attribution is inadequate
• Optimisation is complex
• Data is irrelevant
• Scale is daunting

AI, when integrated correctly, fixes all four.

But this isn’t just about cost cutting. As Linda Sheng noted, AI’s true advantage is speed and responsiveness. Campaigns can evolve in real time. Creative can be localised at scale. Feedback loops become instant.

So what’s the catch? Ownership.

If brands don’t own their data, tech stack, and creative flow, they’re handing power to middlemen. That’s the model Monks.Flow challenges directly.

The session closed with an open invitation: book a demo, try the platform, and see how your brand could run faster, cleaner, and smarter. In-house. At scale. Without losing the human touch.

The future isn’t AI vs creativity. It’s AI and creativity. But only if the brand owns the system.

Tourism accounts for 10% of global jobs and GDP. It’s also growing at 6.6% annually. But most of the industry still chases impressions. STA isn’t. They’re building what they call a “media model for memorability.” At Cannes, Fahd showed us how it works and why it matters far beyond tourism.

From Storytelling to Story Scaling

Back in 2019, STA began with no legacy to fall back on. So, they visited the world’s best. Their key takeaway? Stay original. Cut through advertising noise. Build from within. Since then, they’ve scaled Saudi’s story into one of the biggest tourism transformations globally, without selling a product they can control.

The Realities of Attribution and Optimisation

STA doesn’t own airlines, hotel chains or experiences. They can’t predict or control the service delivery. But they still need to drive performance. This makes traditional attribution models irrelevant. Optimisation becomes complex. The usual travel playbooks don’t apply. Then there’s scale. Saudi Arabia is two-thirds the size of Europe. Its consumer data isn’t structured. It has no mass purchase behaviour. But it has ambition and now, it has a model.

AI: Authenticity and Innovation

Forget generative content. STA’s AI isn’t about machine creativity. It’s about pattern recognition at a human level. They’ve developed a “memorability index” rooted in science, data, and human emotion. The top drivers? Surprising moments. Immersive, larger-than-life experiences. New learnings.

This isn’t travel content. It’s emotional mapping.

From Segments to Souls

Most destinations bucket audiences by “travel purpose.” Business. Leisure. Adventure. STA rejected that. They didn’t segment travellers by intent. They focused on identity. What makes a trip memorable for you may not be a tick-box activity. It may be a cultural moment, like young Saudis singing in Korean at a BlackPink concert in Riyadh. That’s not tourism data, it’s soul data. STA is now engineering for that.

Affinity Over Awareness

Fahd broke their strategy down into four circles: True Voice, Soul Segments, Collective Precision, and Connection. At their intersection? Affinity. That’s the shift: from awareness to emotional fit. And the results? In the first year of this model, STA cut budget waste by 25% and reduced CPA by 60%.

Global Impact

Saudi isn’t just trying to attract more tourists. It’s trying to reshape tourism. At Cannes, Fahd said: “There’s no such thing as overtourism. It’s just traffic management.” The real issue isn’t the destination, it’s the distribution of attention. 10% of travellers go to 10% of the world.

Saudi is trying to break that pattern. It’s addressing friction points: visas, perception, product access. It’s making tourism a stage for culture, music, sustainability and technology. And in November, Saudi will host “Tourise”, a global summit for leaders across sectors. Not just tourism. Culture. Finance. Energy. All of it.

The Bigger Picture

Tourism creates jobs at a time when everything else is being automated. STA’s story is about more than travel. It’s about how marketing can fuel real growth, build national image, and bring people together.

Media doesn’t just sell. It can shift how people feel, think, move. Saudi knows that now. And they’re inviting the world to join them in rethinking what destination marketing can be.

Another Cannes Lions is wrapping, but don’t let its lessons fade away into the summer dog days. If you’d rather those memories stick like the floor of the Carlton Terrace, read on for a refresher. Whether you’re nursing a sunburn and a rosé headache or a grudge because you had to stay behind, here’s what people were talking about all week.

Access for all
France isn’t known for making things easy for outsiders. Visitors with mobility issues contended with haphazardly arrayed security lines and stairs everywhere. (An elevator at the Le Grand Hôtel refused to budge for more than two people at a time, not that it would have fit a single wheelchair.)

Read had been floated in past years as a possible successor to WPP’s iconic leader, but WPP always remained quiet about its potential future leadership. As far back as a dozen years ago, Read was considered to be one of Sorrell’s right-hand men.

AdAge met with Read at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity to ask him about WPP’s future, gender equality and what he thinks about Sorrell saying his new venture won’t compete with WPP.

This conversation has been edited.

[Tweet ““I’m really focused on WPP more than I am on what Martin is doing.” – Mark Read.”]

So, you’ve had a big couple months…

It’s an amazing company, amazing opportunity. We’ll see. Obviously, Andrew and I have been appointed chief operating officers, so we’re in a little bit of a transition phase. I sort of stuck my hand up – if that’s the right word – for the permanent job. The board wants to make a decision as quickly as they can. They obviously know what they need to do, and to do the right thing to do for our clients and our people.

But in the meantime, we’re not standing still. Ours is not an industry where you can sit back and wait for things to happen. There’s definitely continued momentum in the business. I don’t think it’s a position that can be left unfilled for an extended period of time. But, I think Andrew and I can provide the leadership the company needs in the interim.

READ: All the Cannes 2018 winners from MENA

Someone asked us the question: Does WPP need a new beating heart? Clearly, it does. Whether that beating heart is one individual or something different is a question we need to ask.

Do you mean a different kind of leadership structure?
Us and our peers are all broadly the same structure. I have no doubt that WPP can survive and prosper without Martin at the helm. Does that mean that whoever comes in will structure and manage the business in a slightly different way? I’m sure they will.

What would that look like with you? How would you restructure?
Restructuring is too radical a word. We sort of laid out stuff at the Annual General Meeting: We need to be more client-centric, and more focused on our clients. And more focused on them than on us. When I talk to clients, they want to have simpler access to all of WPP.

How about offloading assets?
We have agreed with the board, we’ll look at kind of Kantar and we’ll get to that I guess when a new CEO is appointed as a part of the strategy. I can see strong advantages to having Kantar within the group, but we need to look at what creates the most value for shareholders.

READ: 5 things we learned from Martin Sorrell at Cannes 

We’ve also said we need to reduce our leverage, but our focus is actually going to be working through what we have from an associate investment perspective. We’ve been very successful in that area. And maybe, from an investment perspective, now is the time to sort of look at that, review that. Not to say we won’t continue to make investments, but I think there is a natural life cycle in that, where our role diminishes and the companies stand on their own two feet.

You talked about retiring the term ‘horizontality,’ which describes the WPP practice of building custom shops for clients by drawing from multiple agencies in your portfolio. What will that look like?
Horizontality is a lot about us, and a lot about people thinking about organizational structure. That’s not a strategy, really. So how do we make it clear to people what behaviors are expected, how they should work together?

Location plays a big role in it. I think we need to be much more flexible about co-locating teams and much more flexible about locating teams on clients. If clients are in-housing resources, I think what clients find the most attractive about that is the physical proximity. So why aren’t we doing that?

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Historically, agencies have thought, ‘Oh, I have to be here and I have to control them and they have to sit here,’ but we need to think about things in different ways, learn from the consultants. How do they approach it? Accenture has plenty of people that sit around on-site in client offices, so we should do the same.

At WPP’s annual general meeting, WPP leaders cited Sorrell’s claim that he didn’t see his new venture as competition for the company. Are you really not keeping an eye out for that?
I’m really focused on WPP more than I am on what Martin is doing. So we’ll see.

What are you doing to retain Ford’s creative business, which went up for review earlier this year?
We’re working closely on the review. It’s an important relationship, good people on it, and demonstrate what we can do to the clients. We know we need to be radical and listen to the client in the way we respond.

(Image credit: Illustration by Tam Nguyen/Ad Age)

By Brian Braiker, editor, AdAge

W. Somerset Maugham was onto something in 1941 when he wrote “the Riviera isn’t only a sunny place for shady people.” While still hilarious in 2018, there was significantly less shadiness – both in conference-goer behavior and as a reprieve from the blazing sun – at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this year. But don’t take my word for it.

“It’s back to business,” said at least three people to me, verbatim, from different corners of the industry. Those very words were uttered by Jen Wong, the former Time Inc. executive recently tapped by Reddit as its chief operating officer, who reported a flurry of activity in her four days here. Nick Brien, CEO Americas for Dentsu Aegis Network, said as much while holding court at the Ad Age lawn party with two sets of sunglasses clipped to his shirt. Yannick Bolloré, the dashing young chairman and CEO of Havas, described this year’s event as having more gravitas than in recent years, yielding more business, fruitful talks with clients and promising prospects.

OPINION: “I left [Cannes]. Forever.”

All three noted that agency contingencies were smaller by at least a fifth (more so in the case of Publicis, which mostly stayed true to its abstention), but client teams remained level, giving the impression of a brand-heavy Cannes. I’ve been twice now, so I only know what I saw last year and what people tell me: The driveway at the Carlton hotel was noticeably easier to navigate; the crowd palpably thinner. “People are going to bed at 11, taking meetings at nine in the morning,” one agency executive told me.

The Spotify party, with headliner Travis Scott, was surprisingly easy to get into and navigate. Yacht row was conspicuously less populated by ad-tech bros and their boats. There was still extravagance, but the piers resembled a “gap-toothed smile of an industry that’s taken a few punches,” my colleague Jack Neff wrote in our blog.

In short, this was the Diet Coke of Cannes: slimmer, caffeinated, slightly less bad for you.

“All the people who should not be here were not here,” 360i Chairwoman Sarah Hofstetter said to me before the dust had settled. The Carlton driveway may have been empty, but the panels at the Palais were well attended. Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff in conversation with adman Jeff Goodby was full to overflowing. Hofstetter’s own panel had attendees sitting in the aisles.

READ: Which MENA agencies won at Cannes 2018?

Even the winning work felt more grown-up; the theme of doing ‘good’ seems to be sticking. In years past, you could feel awards lust driving a lot of the work centered around fixing the world, creativity editor Ann-Christine Diaz points out to me. Ideas that won big this year – “The Palau Project” and “The Trash Isles” – had true sustainability woven into them.

And yet.

The concierge at Le Grand Hôtel estimated that bookings were down 20 percent. The creatives, by and large, weren’t spending a lot of time on the Croisette, Hofstetter said. They were swimming at St. Tropez; they were lunching at Hotel du Cap. Hofstetter and I debriefed at the Nice airport Thursday as we waited for the Delta flight back to New York. There was a surprising number of industry folks both on our flight and the Air France direct, which left an hour before us.

“Three days is all you need, innit?” asked one British agency creative. “Otherwise, you risk starting to believe this is real life.”

The question is, which three days?

Cannes hadn’t ended yet and already a critical mass of attendees were fleeing. The main event, at least from a gossip’s perspective, had yet to even happen: Former WPP honcho Martin Sorrell was slated to take the stage for an interview with Frenemies author and New Yorker writer Ken Auletta Friday. But, it turned out, even that yielded little in the way of news.

Other hot topics for the week included diversity and discrimination. #MeToo and Time’s Up. AR, VR, XR, MR. Consultancies and viewability. AI and voice.

But maybe the biggest one was anxiety.

“Anxiety around the duopoly was at an all-time high last year,” Tim Armstrong, CEO of Verizon-owned Oath, told me. “This year, it’s two or three times higher.”

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica imbroglio and brand safety scares on YouTube have taken their toll: eMarketer estimates the two companies will still capture a combined 56.8 percent of US digital advertising dollars in 2018, down slightly from 58.5 percent last year. Brands “are going back to the tele [TV] because it’s safe,” Oath’s Shingy says.

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It’s not just advertisers who are anxious. Audiences (or ‘consumers,’ if you will) are too. The agency Hearts & Science released a report along with the Center for Humane Technology during Cannes about our device addiction and how to ethically game social media algorithms. We get a dopamine rush from the likes meted out to us; we get fake news confirming our biases. We get Donald Trump threatening to nuke North Korea off the planet one day and saluting Kim Jong-un’s goons the next.

Shingy’s keynote was about this very tension between anxiety and trust. How can brands and their agencies enter the fray in a way that’s both ethical and effective? Brands care. Or at least they say they do.

Other Cannes attendees were slightly more gimlet-eyed. “It’s all so fake and crazy,” one vendor said about the Lions. “But I’ll take the money.”

 By David Parkinson, co-founder, Brave & Heart

I went to Cannes Lions. Once.

It started well: flight into Nice, taxi to Cannes, take in the narrow streets with a sense of excitement in the air. The streets were thick with older dark-rimmed glasses in sailor tops mixed with younger preppy types wearing lanyards and backpacks proudly.

Then it all went downhill. Quickly.

Almost immediately agencies pounced on me with wild ideas they had been saving up. Tactics with a distinct lack of strategy behind them. The assumption that a glass of Rosé in a private free food and drink area would prise the brand wallets open.

[Tweet “Is #Cannes a celebration of creativity? Or a holiday for creatives?” asks @DaveParkinson”]

I was then paraded around the social teams. More wallet prising ensued as I was wheeled in on a tight schedule behind other brand heads eager for a “selfie” with the famous thumbs up logo. All desperate to monetize and unable to articulate how or why. The good old days.

READ: How many MENA agencies won at Cannes 2018?

I was then party to the single most embarrassing technology demo in my life – bear in mind I spent a decade working on the coalface of the IT industry. What was to be a swan song of technology was little more than a clunky demo of various pieces of unconnected software and hardware that left me (still) shell-shocked that anyone would fall for this. We did have a video call from an LA band I had never heard of. Pre-recorded.

They were in bed.

There was a multitude of social and tech beach parties with freebies here and there – usually cheap sunglasses made to look like fake wood. Groups of socially awkward people on a beach watching football.

Some of the old 90’s giants had taken over top floors of most hotels. We did the rounds of mainly empty spaces of clearly lost or dying companies filled with bored US college students playing beer pong. Beer. Pong.

MUST READ: 74% of digital video budgets are being wasted. Here’s what you can do about it.

Finally, there were the famous tables at the Carlton. Reserved years in advance, Rosé flowing like water with much backslapping and congratulations between old friends (and enemies). On the street, people were drunkenly swapping cards or vying for access with the cry that they “knew someone inside”.

I was confused. And I have been to SXSW. Twice.

What was all this about? Why were we here? Where were the groundbreaking ads? Where were the maestros of creativity? Why were all the “disruptive” social brands flooding Cannes with billboards and traditional adverts?

Is Cannes a celebration of all that is creative? Is it a milk round for money between agencies and clients? Is it a massive holiday for the world’s creatives?

My final realization was that all of the above was true. To which degree depended if you were client, agency, creative or advertiser. It served no real purpose to progress any of them thought and apart from the stories, sun and yachts could all be achieved on home turf.

I left. Forever.

Yet, we see the Groupe’s agencies winning some awards.

Publicis Groupe clarifies in a statement that these entries have been entered by clients themselves, representing 399 campaigns as of 9th June.

The only exception to this is BBH London’s “3 Billboards” campaign for Justice4Grenfell, the organization trying to get justice for the victims of the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster in London. “Publicis Groupe is proud to support this cause and creativity for good at the Cannes Lions,” it said in the statement.

[Tweet “Publicis Groupe’s clients entered 399 campaigns for awards since the company’s no-awards policy.”]

READ: What you need to know about Facebook’s privacy blunder. Again.

Involvement at Cannes 2018

This year,

• 12 Publicis Groupe leaders have been invited to attend the Festival as Jury Presidents or as part of the awarding juries. Their presence will be financed by the Cannes Lions, in line with the Festival’s policy of covering the cost of all delegates, from any company, who serve on its juries. 12 additional Publicis Groupe leaders are members of the shortlist juries and will NOT be attending the Festival.
• 12 members of the Publicis Groupe community have been invited by the festival to compete in Young Lions competitions after winning at regional stage competitions.
• 25 Publicis Groupe employees have been invited to attend Cannes Lions by their clients and by other industry partners.
• 15 Publicis Groupe employees have decided to attend the Festival by personally funding their trip.
• 20 Publicis Groupe account leaders will be participating in key client meetings taking place in Cannes – NOT attending the Festival. Their presence will be funded by Publicis Groupe.

REVEALED: This industry is way more connected than social media apps

Additionally, Publicis Groupe has partnered with the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity as its Learning and Inspiration Partner to access The Work, a digital platform that showcases over 200,000 pieces of award-winning creative work from 2001-2018.

At the invitation of the Festival, Publicis Groupe’s chief strategy officer Carla Serrano, chief creative officer of Publicis Groupe and President of Publicis Communications Nick Law, and Chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe Arthur Sadoun will present Marcel on June 19.

The ad business is gearing up for another trek to the south of France for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. But this year, the sunny Mediterranean skies greeting us will belie more ominous, metaphorical clouds looming over our industry.

Last year’s announcement by Publicis that it would skip the ever-costlier festival this year led to much speculation about the future of advertising’s most celebrated event. And the leaders across all major holding companies met with Ascential to consult on how to reimagine it – even possibly moving the gathering out of Cannes altogether.

But we will be there again. Publicis too, albeit in reduced numbers. It’s not about FOMO (fear of missing out); it’s about FOCU (fear of clients unattended).

And there is much that is great about the festival…

Taking home a Lion remains one of the highest honors anyone in our business can attain. And, some of the most important and accomplished people in the industry, from all over the world, attend.

MUST READ: Which agency is in the driving seat for this $4.1 billion global client?

It’s a networking opportunity that’s hard to beat. Relative to all other conferences, ceremonies and celebrations out there, Cannes Lions represents a singular opportunity to rub elbows with decision-makers across agencies, media partners and technology vendors, as well as current and potential clients. And it remains a place for all of us to celebrate the work that’s creatively inspirational and the people who make it great.

So, there are clear benefits of attending.

But, the expense tallies to millions of dollars in terms of award entries and sending our troops to the Riviera.

It’s little wonder that bottom line-vigilant CEOs are monitoring tightly the return on their investment. I can tell you we’re focused even more keenly on efficiency and results in our participation this year. It’s a “roll your sleeves up” event for us, symptomatic of the industry in general.

As anyone who has attended the Lions over several years knows, it has evolved into quite a different beast in recent years. What was once an event firmly grounded in celebrating the greatest ad campaigns in the world has become broader, bigger, and a little star-struck – and we must ensure that we don’t lose sight of the core purpose.

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If we use the language of Hollywood and the famed Cannes Film Festival that spawned the Lions back in the ’50s, the work of advertising has been downgraded from a starring role to a supporting one. As creatives collect their prizes at the Palais, tech companies and management consultants lure clients to spectacular positions on the beach and marina where the rosé flows.

In recent years, we’ve seen artists like Flo Rida and Chris Martin play for ad-land luminaries. Vendors commandeered yachts and hotels and erected enormous tents for A-list parties featuring the likes of Martha Stewart and the Kardashians. Helicopters, skywriters and fireworks fight for still more attention over the azure sea.

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The Hollywood Reporter once suggested that the Lions had become an even glitzier affair than the film festival. I’m not sure that chimes well in a low growth, super cost-conscious environment, and I expect to see more balance, and restraint this year.

How many festivals have you attended without ever going into the Palais to take in the fantastic work on display? Let’s not get distracted from what’s most important, our clients, and the work we do in service of their growth.

So, there is a simple question we should ask ourselves amid all this noise.

Isn’t the work important enough and impressive enough to be the star of the show?

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Those who love this industry getaway – at best, half of us (me included) – may find this difficult to accept, but moving the “Cannes” out of Cannes itself could be an important first step in a bigger industry transformation that’s truly needed.

The challenges we all face require that we develop truly inspired collaboration to solve for how advertising will continue to meaningfully connect consumers with brands in ways that deliver sustained growth.

This is the core of what we do, and putting advertising agencies and their brilliant, growth-driving, culture-changing work back in the spotlight will make the Lions more vital than ever, for an industry that is as vital as ever.