AdMiration feature: Cannes Grand Prix Creative Effectiveness & Creative Strategy winners

For this week’s AdMiration feature, we looked at consumer response to Dove’s “Real Beauty” and Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” campaigns. Each of these campaigns just won the Grand Prix awards in the Creative Strategy & Creative Effectiveness categories at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. 

Read on to learn about consumer response to these campaigns and what makes them successful. 

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the advertising industry’s most prestigious event held every year on the French Riviera. While there are nine tracks with multiple subcategories and multiple winners for each, we’ll be focusing on the Creative Strategy and Creative Effectiveness categories specifically. Here's a look into each. 

Creative Strategy category

This category celebrates the idea behind the idea, which involves looking at how strategic planning can redefine a brand, reinvent its business and influence consumers or culture. It often focuses on the behind-the-scenes work of strategic planners and honors the role of strategic thinking in transforming a brand's identity.

For example, last year’s winner was Dutch telecom company KPN for their “A Piece of Me” campaign, which started an important conversation with its #betterinternet platform. They partnered with Dutch singer-songwriter MEAU and used the power of music to raise awareness about online shaming and influenced the Dutch Sexual Crimes Act, making it illegal to share intimate content without consent.

Creative Effectiveness category

Ultimately, this category, which sits under the Strategy track, celebrates the measurable impact of creative work. 

According to the festival, this means it should demonstrate how an effective strategy (rooted in creativity) has met business objectives, generated positive customer outcomes and driven sustainable business impact over time.

For example, last year’s Creative Effectiveness Lion went to “Ketchup AI" for Heinz. This campaign used artificial intelligence to go “behind the scenes” and uncover “ketchup fraud,” reinforcing Heinz's iconic status in the ketchup market.

Dove’s “Real Beauty”

Taking home the Creative Strategy Grand Prix award was Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, which began in 2004 to empower women to redefine beauty.

Running for more than 20 years now, “Real Beauty” has become a powerful demonstration of how brand-building can drive growth, now sitting at the heart of Dove’s business, Dove’s operations and across everything the brand does.

In their entry, Dove shared: 

Our insight inspired a creative objective: help more women feel more beautiful every day. But if we wanted women to believe in their own beauty, we couldn’t just call out the beauty industry, we had to show radically different depictions of beauty to aspire to. The subtle but pivotal shift from everyday women to real women, led to an idea that made advertising history: The Campaign for Real Beauty. Beyond advertising, this was a social protest that created the framework for purposeful marketing. The Dove Self-Esteem Project (DSEP), a pledge to educate girls on body positivity launched, adding weight to our message and helping millions of girls.

The idea became the basis for everything Dove has done since, inspiring product innovation, brand partnerships, and facilitating entry into new categories as diverse as Men, Baby and Deo.

The results? DSEP has reached 94.5 million girls and Dove now competes in 60% of all beauty and personal care buying occasions (had it remained a soap brand, this would be only 5%). Dove is now purchased by 37% of the global population and Real Beauty has driven approximately $28 billion in incremental revenue since 2004, growing its brand value by over 350% since 2009. The once humble soap company now spans 7 product categories, with a brand value of $7.5 billion and a creative strategy that empowers women. 

What Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign gets right

Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign has stood the test of time by doing something few brands manage well: Staying consistent in its mission while evolving with cultural shifts. 

Since launching in 2004, the campaign has challenged narrow beauty standards and aimed to boost self-esteem, especially among young girls. 

Their 2013 “Real Beauty Sketches” spot showed how women often describe themselves more critically than others do. It struck a chord, opening up a bigger conversation about self-image. 

But Dove hasn’t stopped there. It continues to push boundaries, taking on new threats to self-image. As digital tools like filters and Photoshop became more common, Dove shifted focus to the impact of unrealistic beauty online, especially for young girls.

More recently, Dove has turned its attention to the next big challenge: Artificial intelligence. In “The Code,” the brand calls out how AI, when trained on narrow beauty ideals, can reinforce harmful stereotypes. 

Dove is also expanding its mission beyond appearance to focus on confidence in action, especially in sports. Through the #KeepHerConfident initiative, Dove is working to keep girls in the game during puberty, when many drop out due to body image issues. Ads like “These Legs” from this year’s Super Bowl show just how much pressure girls face and why support and visibility matter.

What sets Dove apart is its consistency. Whether through art, AI or athletics, Dove adapts its message to stay culturally relevant — while always championing real, inclusive beauty. As a result, Dove’s ads typically score very well in both potential to drive immediate sales as well as potential to drive brand equity over the longer term.

With this campaign, Dove has tapped into something that truly matters to today’s consumers: the desire for authenticity, representation and emotional support in a world that’s full of pressure. By aligning its message with what people care about (while staying rooted in what the brand delivers), Dove consistently conveys relevant associations making the brand feel like it meets needs and in a highly resonant and enjoyable way. 

Apple’s “Shot on iPhone”

Apple landed this year’s Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix for their “Shot on iPhone” campaign, which began in 2015 with “World Gallery.” The brand took an entirely different approach to smartphone advertising with this campaign, focusing on showing what the iPhone could do rather than talking about megapixels and lenses. 

The shot on iPhone campaigns built brand affinity and purchase consideration around the world. 10 years later, it's the most enduring and effective campaign for Apple, ultimately leading to the iPhone becoming the best selling smartphone in the world. 

In their entry, Apple shared: 

Shot on iPhone campaigns changed photography and filmmaking forever. We teamed up with award-winning directors to create Shot on iPhone (SoiP) films while becoming a proving ground for young filmmakers with several film schools offering an iPhoneography course. Shot on iPhone images have graced the cover of Rolling Stone, while films hit big screens (Most recently Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later). Shot on iPhone also built affinity and purchase consideration around the world. We’ve partnered with local creative talent, from K-pop favorites New Jeans to Japanese directing legend Takashi Miike, to launch more than 35 local campaigns.

The results? Over 20 billion OOH impressions, 14 billion campaign views and, more than that, engagement for this campaign on @apple alone reached over 265 million. The campaign also significantly increased consideration for the brand, with over 40 million visits to iPhone product page in 2025 alone and 5 pp growth in market share since 2015 (Source: Canalys). And to top it all off, a Cannes Grand Prix win!

What Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” campaign gets right

Apple has always been a master at advertising. Not because it talks about what its products do, but because it shows what they make possible — a truly distinct take for their category. 

From the beginning, Apple has focused on benefits rather than specific features. For instance, the original iPod wasn’t sold as a device with “5GB of storage,” it was “1,000 songs in your pocket.” And that simple, human message made it instantly human and distinct. 

That same approach can be seen across their “Shot on iPhone” campaign, putting the focus on the incredible things people can create with just an iPhone, resulting in above average ad (4.1 vs 3.8 norm) and brand (3.9 vs 3.7 norm) distinctiveness scores in one ad from the campaign entitled “Snowbrawl.”

Most importantly, by showing outcomes instead of talking specs, the campaign lands the message very well. “iPhone is capable of shooting high-quality, cinematic video” is both very clear and believable as viewers can actually see the high-energy, cinematic snowball fight in “Snowbrawl” — unsurprisingly resulting in above average clarity (4.5 vs 4.2 norm) and believability scores (4.3 versus 4.1 norm).

As a result, the campaign communicates that the iPhone is strongly associated with high quality technology and being a trusted brand, with viewers actually being able to see the result of what’s been created on the iPhone. Playing like a blockbuster action scene, it perfectly demonstrates that pro-quality filmmaking can be in your pocket. 

The ability to focus on the human impact, not the technical detail, is what consistently sets Apple’s marketing apart. 

Apple’s distinctive approach to messaging and the campaign’s beautiful approach to visual storytelling gives us another well-deserved Grand Prix win! 

Congratulations to both Dove and Apple for this prestigious win! We really enjoy these campaigns and think both of them are truly a lesson in the power of fresh consistency in advertising.  

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