B2B at Cannes Lions 2025

The huge shift in the importance of trust and recommendations largely stems from the change in the demographics of B2B buyers. Opening the LIONS B2B Summit, LinkedIn’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer Jessica Jensen revealed that millennials and Gen Z represent 71% of B2B buyers today. And they don’t want a traditional relationship with a sales rep or a conventional demo: they want to hear from people with expertise.

Jann Schwarz echoed this point, explaining that millennials and Gen Z are used to basing their personal buying decisions on trust and recommendations – and this is influencing their business buying decisions. “We need to play into that,” he said.

This is leading to ‘The Rise of the Professional Creator’, as it was described in a session on the LinkedIn Rooftop. Silicon Valley entrepreneur and creator Marina Mogilko, who has nearly 30,000 followers on LinkedIn, talked about her experience of being the first creator to be backed by her investor Slow Ventures. “Their thesis is trust,” she said – and added that they chose her because she wasn’t chasing views or brand deals, but authentic long-term ventures.

‘Unstoppable’, SAP’s collaboration with BBDO New York, was shortlisted in the Creative B2B Lions. This work took real customer stories and turned them into allegories – a CEO literally ‘lost in the woods’ because of his company’s rapid growth, a Chief Creative Officer fighting an ‘uphill’ battle to deliver innovation, a human resources officer finding his office ‘swimming’ in problems. This didn’t just weave intriguing narratives – it also built trust by showing clients that it knew the problems they were facing. And it was the right partner to help solve them.

Another example came from Peruvian bank Mibanco, which turned estibadores (informal market porters) into moving billboards – not just for itself, but for other brands. By renting out ad space on their carts, estibadores earned extra income, opened bank accounts and accessed credit for the first time. ‘EstibADores’, by Circus Grey, Lima, attracted eight major brands and increased profits for estibadores by 30%. And it won a Silver Lion in Creative B2B.

And IKEA attracted new applicants by opening a store on online game Roblox. ‘The Co-Worker’, by Mother London, offered ten virtual workers the chance to experience what it’s like to work for IKEA while earning money online – and led to a 50% increase in applications for the flat-pack furniture store chain.

Bridget Evans, Global Head of Business Marketing at Spotify, shared how this challenge has manifested at her brand, which is well known and well loved among consumers – but forgotten about by those same consumers working in marketing and media when they plan their advertising. Treating people like people and appealing to their loves, likes, interests, fandoms, etc. is a universal truth, she argued. This is a competitive advantage that many B2B brands are ignoring.

SAP and Adobe have managed to leverage human emotion to break the ice and build trust – giving them the opportunity to show their customers that they can deliver what they need. Tim Hoppin, former Chief Brand and Creative Officer at SAP, and Stacy Martinet, VP Marketing and Communications at Adobe, explain how they did this in the video below.

So emotion is big in B2B. But did it win big?

Creative B2B Lions Jury President for 2025 Wendy Walker, VP of Marketing ASEAN, Salesforce, discussed the importance of emotion in the B2B work her Jury looked at. Purpose-led work that delivered impact was also on the rise this year, according to Walker. When combined with emotion, this created a powerful advertising alchemy.

Apple won over 15 Lions at Cannes Lions 2025, including the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix for its long-running ‘Shot on iPhone’ campaign. It was also named Cannes Lions Creative Marketer of the Year for 2025, in recognition of its continued commitment to innovative and creative marketing. Joe Stubbs, Interbrand’s VP and Global Brand/Marketing Director, pointed to the brand as the ultimate storyteller in a stage talk at Cannes Lions 2025. What started as a tech-driven consumers electronics brand, he said, has captured hearts and minds by using storytelling to articulate tangible outcomes for customers – repositioning the product as a must-have that will enhance their lives.

B2B brands can mimic that inspiration – but first, they have to emulate the vulnerability and relatability of the cast of very human characters portrayed in Apple’s advertising. Being authentic and vulnerable – and human – is the starting point for B2B brands, according to SAP’s former Chief Brand and Creative Officer Tim Hoppin, who is now Global Head of AWS Brand and Creative Amazon Web Services. Speaking on the LinkedIn Rooftop, he offered up the example of SAP’s ‘Unstoppable’, shortlisted in the 2025 Creative B2B Lions, which we saw earlier in the section on trust and which was inspired by real customer stories. His call to action? “Be bold, be free, be emotional, tell stories.”

Proving the potential of strong storytelling was the Creative B2B Lions Grand Prix winner, ‘B2B: Act Like You Know’ by web domain seller GoDaddy’s in-house team in Arizona, USA. It recruited American actor Walton Goggins to launch a product demo for its new AI tool through a real business, Walton Goggins Goggle Glasses – and delivered a $1.6bn boost in market value. Creative B2B Lions 2025 Jury President Wendy Walker said her Jury were all “grinning and smiling and laughing” when they saw the work because it was so entertaining. It proved, she said, that “B2B can be bold, entertaining and brilliantly effective.”

“The C-suite are constantly in pursuit of value,” said Crum. They want to know that the business is resilient and that it will still exist in five years’ time. Getting rid of business blockers plays a huge role in this – and creativity can help.

Spotify has a high level of brand love and awareness as a consumer app – but it was struggling to build consideration of its advertising space among brands and CMOs. Its solution came in the form of 2022 Lion-winning campaign ‘A Song for Every CMO’, by FCB New York. Spotify Global Head of Business Marketing Bridget Evans said at the LIONS B2B Summit that this reached 14 people – but it was “the right 14 people”, as she argues in the video below.

More recently, its 2024 Lion-winning ‘Spreadbeats’ campaign, also by FCB New York, originated from a deep understanding of media planners’ experiences during planning season – tired, working late and heavily relying on spreadsheets. The creative solution? A media channel within a spreadsheet. It was a clever innovation that resonated with the audience because it directly acknowledged and integrated into their workflow and behaviour.

In a session on the LinkedIn Rooftop, Adobe’s Chief Marketing Officer Rachel Thornton offered up another example of a creative execution unlocking value for consumers in ‘Fizzion’, the brand’s collaboration with Coca-Cola. Sitting at the “intersection of creativity and marketing and AI”, the Fizzion design intelligence system transforms traditional brand guidelines into intelligent, adaptive assets, so that Coca Cola’s creative teams can produce content 10 times faster, without sacrificing quality or originality.

But be purposeful about your use of AI, warned Jeremy Hull, Chief Product Officer in North America for Brainlabs. Speaking on the LinkedIn Rooftop, he said that you can’t inspire your teams if you don’t explain to them what you’re using AI for. Colin Fleming, Chief Marketing Officer of ServiceNow, concurred – stressing that curiosity is key to this type of visionary creative work.

Perhaps the most obvious example of Lion-winning B2B creativity in 2025 was ‘Caption with Intention’ by FCB Chicago for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Rakish, and the Chicago Hearing Society. Winner of three Grands Prix and a Titanium Lion, as well as seven other Lions, it reimagined captioning for the 433 million people globally with hearing loss, delivering a richer and more emotional way to experience film and TV. The new system transformed captions into dynamic visual language, maximising clarity and legibility while preserving emotional integrity. It’s now required for all Oscar-eligible films and has been adopted by major studios.

This question was posed both by Tom Stein, Chairman and Chief Brand Officer of Stein, and Dr Marcus Collins, Professor of Marketing at the University of Michigan. In a LIONS B2B Summit session titled ‘B2B’s New Brand Manifesto’, Stein pointed out that the way we view brand in B2B has evolved – and there’s now an opportunity to treat it as “something that drives commercial effect” and put it “at the heart” of what we do. And Collins posited that “a brand is a vessel of meaning” – adding that “all the receipts of the brand’s kinetics, how it communicates itself – these help us justify these irrational decisions that we have rationally decided to accept. Because we trust it.”

And how do you build your brand? Jean English, Chief Marketing Officer of CoreWeave, advised B2B brands to ask themselves: “What do customers love about you?” She urged brands to tell their own stories “before someone else tells it for you” – and get the whole leadership team behind it.

Emotions. Storytelling. Trust. Creativity. These all feed into the strength of your brand. They build the confidence of your buyers and their buyer groups – and help them defend their choice if something goes wrong.

The Creative Commerce Lions Grand Prix winner, Ziploc’s ‘Preserved Promos’ by VML, New York, was a prime example of a brand putting its identity at the heart of a campaign. What’s Ziploc famous for? Preserving products. It extended this benefit to expired coupons – allowing customers to revive them if they added a Ziploc to their carts. The brand delivered this multi-Lion-winning work on the insight that 99% of issued coupons go unused – and saw its customer base grow by 14%.

Here are some more examples of work that centred on brand identity.