Every June, the marketing world studies Cannes Lions winners for the big idea: the creative leap, the emotional hook, the cultural moment, the case film.
But the winning campaign is only one part of the story.
What happens when you look beyond the award entry and examine how those same brands advertise in the broader market?
MediaRadar analyzed 5 Cannes Grand Prix-winning brands’ advertising compared with their category peers—pairing creative signals and dollars spent thanks to MediaRadar’s Creative Intel and Competitive Intel platforms. The goal wasn't to explain why any single campaign won. It's to see whether a brand's day-to-day creative posture, weighted by real spend, looks different from its category.
The finding: Cannes-winning brands don't share one universal creative formula. But several show a creative signature that's genuinely different from their category peers, once you weigh by spend instead of counting ads.
To make the comparison, we indexed each brand's creative mix against some of their closest peers—100 means the brand looks like its category, above 100 means it over-indexes on that signal, below 100 means it under-indexes.
| Brand | Category | Brand Signature Signal | Brand Signal Spend % | Peer Signal Spend % | Index vs. Peers |
| Adidas | Sportswear | Branding | 72% |
44% | 163 |
| DeLonghi | Small Appliances | Product + Branding | 78% | 6% | 1,392 |
| Coinbase | Crypto/Fintech | Product | 90% | 30% | 299 |
| Hyundai | Auto | Product | 40% | 23% | 172 |
| Heineken | Beer | Branding | 40% | 28% | 145 |
Every brand over-indexes somewhere, but on different signals, in ways that fit how their categories actually compete.
Adidas: brand over performance, well ahead of the category
Adidas skewed heavily toward Branding—72% of tracked spend carried Branding signals, against 44% for its peer set, an index of 163. Direct Response ran the other way: just 3% of Adidas spend, against 12% for peers, an index of 25.
The lesson generalizes beyond Adidas: ad frequency and ad spend can tell different stories. Counting ads alone would have suggested a brand running plenty of tactical, price-led creative. The spend-weighted view says something different—Adidas's real media dollars lean toward brand-building and well away from short-term response, more than the rest of its category.
Hyundai: product storytelling in a deal-driven category
Automotive is one of the most promotion-heavy categories in advertising—lease offers, monthly deals, and sales events dominate. Hyundai's peer set reflects that: value-led messaging accounts for roughly two-thirds of peer spend.
What makes Hyundai stand out isn't that it avoids value messaging, it's how far it leans into product. Product signals made up 40% of Hyundai's spend against 23% for peers (index 172), and combined Product-plus-Branding storytelling reached an index of 257—more than two and a half times its category. In a segment that competes mostly on price and offers, Hyundai put a distinctive share of its dollars behind the product itself.
DeLonghi: product-led doesn't have to mean purely functional
In small appliances, product messaging is expected—consumers need the feature, the use case, the reason to buy. DeLonghi's pattern went further. Its Product signal indexed at 812 against peers, and its combined Product-plus-Branding signal reached an index of 1,392—the sharpest signature in the entire set.
That's the more interesting story: DeLonghi isn't just selling appliances based on function. It's tying product communication to a broader brand world—lifestyle, design, premium positioning. That's the difference between "here's what the product does" and "here's what the product means in your life." The second version is where product advertising starts behaving like brand advertising, and DeLonghi's spend leans hard in that direction.
Coinbase: peer selection is the whole game
Coinbase shows how much a benchmark depends on who's in the comparison set. Against the full Financial Products & Services category, the read would be noisy—that category folds in banks, tax providers, mortgage lenders, insurers, and debt-relief advertisers, none of which compete with Coinbase for attention or make sense as a creative comparison.
Narrowed to crypto, trading, and fintech peers, the picture sharpens. Coinbase's spend was 90% product-led against 30% for peers (index 299), while its value/promotional messaging under-indexed heavily (index 8) in a peer set where value accounts for nearly 60% of spend. Coinbase was communicating platform function and utility while its competitors leaned on offers. That's a meaningful signal, and a reminder that "peer benchmark" is a modeling choice, not a fact. A technically correct industry category can still produce a strategically useless comparison.
Heineken: brand still matters in beer
Beer is one of the clearest categories for brand-led advertising—product differences are subtle, so brands compete on occasion, culture, humor, sports, music, emotional association. Heineken's spend-weighted profile came in more brand-led than its peer benchmark: 40% Branding against 28% for peers, an index of 145.
That tracks with category intuition—in beer, the brand world is often the product. It's also a useful reminder that the same spend-weighted lens surfaces a brand-led read here and a product-led one in fintech, depending on how the category competes. The category, not a fixed formula, sets the expectation.
The bigger finding: there is no single Cannes formula
The most important conclusion isn't that Cannes-winning brands all over-index on Branding, Product, Value, or Direct Response. They don't. It's that award-winning brands show different creative signatures depending on category, and the index tells that story cleanly:
| Brand | Over-Indexes On | Under-Indexes On |
| Adidas | Branding (163) | Direct Response (25), Product (25) |
| Hyundai | Product + Branding (257), Product (172) | Direct Response (85) |
| DeLonghi | Product + Branding (1,392), Product (812) | Value (28), Direct Response (46) |
| Coinbase | Product (299) | Value (8), Direct Response (15) |
| Heineken | Branding (145) | Product (0) |
Adidas leaned into brand-building. Hyundai and DeLonghi told product and product-brand stories in categories where peers competed on price. Coinbase communicated utility where its peers ran promotions. Heineken leaned into brand-building in a category that depends on it.
Cannes-winning brands aren't following one template. They're making different creative choices based on how their categories work.
Why spend-weighted creative intelligence matters
For marketers, the practical takeaway is that creative analysis gets more useful when it connects three things: what the ad says, how much money is behind it, and how it compares with relevant competitors.
Creative classification without spend can overstate low-investment messaging. Spend without creative context tells you where money went but not what strategy it served. Benchmarks without careful peer selection produce false comparisons, a technically correct industry category can still produce a strategically useless one, as the Coinbase example shows.
Together, the three show how a brand is actually competing in-market.
Cannes will always be about the winning idea. But the winning idea doesn't exist in isolation. Behind every awarded campaign is a brand with a broader advertising footprint—the messages it repeats, the peers it competes against, and the creative choices it funds.
This doesn't replace the case film. It doesn't explain the jury room. It doesn't claim to prove why a campaign won. But it does answer a different, commercially useful question: when award-winning brands show up in-market, what creative strategies are they actually putting money behind?
That's the story marketers can act on.
*This analysis pairs spend data with creative signals, covering classified advertising across TV, print, radio, outdoor, cinema, and digital display/video (Jan 2025–May 2026). Each award-winning brand is compared against a spend-weighted peer set from its own category. Creative signals are classified into four non-exclusive dimensions — Value, Product, Branding, and Direct Response — so percentages reflect the share of spend carrying each signal, not slices of a single total. All figures use total tracked spend as the denominator, applied consistently to brand and peers. The index (brand % ÷ peer % × 100) shows how each brand compares to its category: 100 is parity, above 100 over-indexes, below 100 under-indexes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR | Kelly Killips
Kelly Killips is the SVP of Marketing at MediaRadar, where she leads marketing strategy to drive brand growth. With 15+ years in creative direction and a decade of team leadership, she brings a data-driven approach honed across AdTech, B2B, and B2C campaigns—building collaborative teams and scalable creative that turns marketing intelligence into measurable impact.
