Inside the Jury Room: Social & Creator Lions

Mihnea got into advertising when he was 19 in Bucharest, Romania, as a junior copywriter.

In the years that followed, he first dropped out of business school and went on to work in Hamburg, Paris, London, Madrid, Toronto, New York and Amsterdam. The work he created and creative directed over the years has won 152 Cannes Lions Awards, including two Grands Prix and one Titanium Lion, together with some other hundreds of awards (D&AD, Clio, One Show, LIAA, Eurobest, Golden Drum, ANDY, NYF) and mean comments on some advertising blogs.

Some of these awards helped him become the 10th most awarded chief creative officer in the world in 2023 and the 8th most awarded chief creative officer in the world in 2024 and made LePub Milan the 1st creative agency in the world in 2022 and 2023 in the WARC rankings.

Mihnea likes to think of new things to say or new ways to say the same things. He really enjoys that stuff. That, and raccoons. Mihnea thinks that raccoons are cool.

Since 2017, he’s been at Publicis Milan, overseeing the global work for DIESEL and Heineken, first as Global Creative Director, then as Global Executive Creative Director and finally being appointed as Chief Creative Officer of Publicis Italy in 2021 and later Global Chief Creative Officer of the LePub network in 2022.