Seven marketing sins

Cannes Lions has introduced a new award for 2026. It's called the Creative Brand Lion, and it is the first in the festival's history that judges a brand's internal creative capability on its own terms. Entries won't be campaigns. They'll be submissions about the systems, culture, leadership and partnerships that make great creative work possible in the first place. Cannes describes it as celebrating 'the creative engine, not the creative output.'

That's a significant editorial position from the industry's most influential awards body. It is also, without Cannes quite saying so, a catalogue of the seven places where brand capability tends to succeed or fail. The framework names the organisational decisions that produce great creative work. By implication, it names the sins a brand can commit against them.

For seventy years, the festival has rewarded output: the campaign, the idea, the execution. The Creative Brand Lion rewards the decisions that produced the output. That's a shift the effectiveness research community has been pushing for years. Binet and Field's work on long-term brand-building, Byron Sharp's research on distinctive assets and mental availability, and the IPA databank's analysis of effective campaigns over time all point at the same underlying argument. Great creative work is a product of how a brand operates: how it briefs, who it keeps as a partner, what it protects as consistent, how it judges work internally. Cannes is now rewarding that, which means it is also, for the first time, publishing what it considers the failure modes to be.

The framework matters because it's specific. Cannes has broken brand capability into seven categories, and entries will be judged against four weighted criteria: creative innovation and originality, strategic alignment, scalability and sustainability, and commercial effectiveness. Worth noting before going further: LIONS, the business that runs the Cannes festival, also operates a strategic advisory arm that sells the kind of organisational work the new Lion recognises. That commercial logic is worth being clear-eyed about, but it doesn't undermine the framework. The ideas were sound before Cannes built an award around them. They're still sound now.

What follows is one question per category, lifted from the framework. Each names a sin the category is built to catch. Taken together, they function as a diagnostic any marketer can run on their own operation. Which of the sins apply to any given brand is a question the honest answers will reveal.

1. Talent and workplace culture

The sin: treating creative judgement as innate rather than developed.

How does your team get better at creative judgement over time? If the honest answer is that people absorb it by osmosis, or that judgement depends entirely on the taste of the current CMO, there is no capability being built. Creative judgement is a skill. Skills need deliberate development, which means dedicated time, shared references, and structured exposure to work across categories.

2. Collaboration and partnership models

The sin: churning agencies as a substitute for managing them.

How long has your lead creative agency been with you, and what would trigger a review? Effectiveness research consistently finds that long-tenured agency relationships outperform short ones on creative and commercial measures, which is the opposite of how procurement and review cycles are typically designed. If your lead relationship is under three years old, or if the trigger for a review is anything other than sustained under-performance, the partnership model isn't doing the work it should.

3. Creative technology and innovation

The sin: buying tools without changing the work they're meant to change.

Where has technology changed how your creative work gets made in the past two years? The question is deliberately specific. A new tool deployed without changing the underlying process doesn't count. If nothing about how the work is actually made has shifted, either the technology isn't earning its keep or the process was never examined in the first place.

4. Creative operations and process innovation

The sin: confining creative thinking to the marketing department.

Where has creative thinking changed how your business actually runs, outside of marketing? The category rewards brands that have used creativity to improve core operations: supply chain, service delivery, agility, how the organisation responds to the market. If the honest answer is that creativity lives in the marketing department and nowhere else, the brand is getting a fraction of the value creative thinking can produce. The most useful test is whether anyone in operations or product could point to a decision in the past year that was made more creatively because of marketing's involvement.

5. Customer experience and personalisation

The sin: leaving the gaps between functions unowned.

Who in your organisation is accountable for the end-to-end customer experience, and do they have authority over the parts of it that sit outside marketing? CX capability lives in the gap between functions. If no one owns the gap, no one can close it, and the experience the brand delivers becomes a series of disconnected interactions held together by the customer's goodwill.

6. Marketing effectiveness and growth

The sin: running campaigns without an idea connecting them.

What is the idea your brand has been expressing, in different ways, for the past five years? Not the tagline. Not the visual identity. The underlying thought the brand has stood for, consistently, across campaigns, CMOs, and agency changes. Dove has spent over two decades on Real Beauty. Guinness has been telling us good things come to those who wait for nearly thirty years. If your answer is that the brand has run a series of well-produced campaigns without a single idea connecting them, the growth you've been buying has been short-term activation dressed up as brand building. A brand platform is an idea the organisation keeps investing in even when the agency wants to do something new.

7. Brand positioning

The sin: mistaking a communications platform for a position.

When a decision gets made in your business that isn't a marketing decision, a pricing call, a product feature, a customer service policy, a supplier choice, does your brand positioning get consulted? If positioning only shapes the advertising, it isn't positioning in the Cannes sense. It's a communications platform. The practical test is whether you can point to a decision in the past six months, outside marketing, that would have gone differently without the positioning on the table.

Seven questions, seven sins, one per category. None of them require a consultancy engagement to answer. The whole diagnostic can be run in an afternoon, with honest conversation across the team. The answers point at where the capability is weakest, and which of those weaknesses is costing the brand most today.

The first Creative Brand Lion will almost certainly go to a large brand with a long-running advisory relationship and the institutional resources to assemble a strategic paper strong enough to impress a jury. The more interesting outcome is what any marketer does with the seven sins on Monday morning. A brand team of ten people can work through them in weeks and act on them within a year. A brand team of a hundred, with legacy processes and competing fiefdoms, will struggle to name which sins apply, let alone fix them. The smaller the team, the faster the answers.

The capability dividend is the sum of the seven sins confronted and corrected, made honestly, acted on over time. It doesn't win awards in the short term. Over years, it is what produces the work that does.

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