Cannes Lions 2026 Winners: Anthropic, KitKat, Apple, and More

The 73rd Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity wrapped on June 26, and the Grand Prix winners show where the best creative work is coming from.

Entries fell 25.5% this year, down to 20,050 from nearly 27,000 in 2025.

Tougher integrity rules arrived after last year's fakery scandals, which raised the bar for every entry.

The work that won the most contested categories this year had to earn it on the creative idea alone.

Here are the 10 winners that brands, agencies, and marketers should study most closely.

1. Anthropic's Claude x Mother London: Film Lions Grand Prix

Mother London's two Super Bowl spots for Claude, "Can I Get a Six Pack Quickly?" and "How Can I Communicate Better With My Mom?" won the Film Lions Grand Prix.

Both spots came from a wider campaign titled "Ads Are Coming To AI. But Not To Claude."

The work positions Claude as the AI platform that refuses to run commercial messages, a direct response to OpenAI's decision to add ads to ChatGPT.

Film Lions Jury President Pelle Sjoenell described the work as something that "reshuffled the perceptions in the most consequential technology race of our age."

2. AB InBev: Creative Brand Lions Grand Prix

AB InBev won the award, a new category introduced this year to recognize brands building the systems that make world-class creative work repeatable.

The brand also took home the Creative Marketer of the Year award, making it the most recognized brand of the week.

Senior marketers should watch this category closely, since it rewards the creative engine that produces great work year after year.

3. KitKat x Burson: PR Grand Prix

When 413,000 KitKat bars were stolen ahead of Easter, Burson created the KitKat Tracker and invited consumers to scan barcodes and track down the missing cargo.

It became a cultural phenomenon, appearing in films, songs, and even IKEA ads.

It also dominated day three at Cannes with four Gold Lions alongside the Grand Prix.

PR jury president Dana Tahir said the work "rewrote the rules entirely," noting that KitKat proved "creative bravery and crisis counsel can coexist."

4. Uber Eats x Special: Media Grand Prix

"Build Your Own Super Bowl Commercial," created by Special's U.S. and Australian teams, invited fans to build their own version of the Uber Eats Super Bowl ad inside the app.

The campaign generated more than 1,000 possible edits and drove the platform's best-ever Super Bowl sales.

The activation demonstrates what participatory media looks like when the participation is connected directly to a purchase mechanic.

5. Heineken x LePub Milan: Social and Creator Grand Prix

LePub Milan built a WhatsApp bot that converted forwarded voice notes into free beers at bars, making a real-world invitation out of a digital habit.

The campaign won the Social and Creator Grand Prix, Heineken was named Creative Brand of the Year, and LePub Milan took Agency of the Year.

The award recognizes work that found an organic cultural habit and built the brand into it in a way that felt unique yet natural.

6. Columbia Sportswear x Adam&Eve\TBWA: Brand Experience Grand Prix

Columbia Sportswear offered to hand the company over to anyone who could prove the Earth was flat.

The dare made the product's durability the whole point of the challenge.

The campaign, created by Adam&Eve\TBWA, pulled earned media across science, outdoor, and mainstream press by wiring the product truth into the stunt itself.

7. Apple x TBWA\Media Arts Lab: Design Grand Prix

TBWA\Media Arts Lab won the award for Apple TV's rebrand, praised as "gloriously handmade," while AI-generated design dominates.

The jury saw it as a creative position as much as a design project.

Picking handcrafted visuals while most brands chased automated visuals made the rebrand a statement on its own.

8. Adidas x Johannes Leonardo: Entertainment and Music Grand Prix

"Original Forever," set to Oasis's "Live Forever," dropped alongside the band's 2025 reunion tour.

Created by Johannes Leonardo, it earned Adidas two Grand Prix in one festival.

The campaign connected adidas Originals to one of the biggest music stories of the decade, and the reunion timing widened its organic reach.

The Entertainment Lions for Music jury recognized it as a campaign that read its cultural context before the opportunity fully arrived.

9. Suncorp x Leo Australia: Dan Wieden Titanium Grand Prix

Leo Australia made Suncorp's insurance product a long-term public initiative.

It combined education, design solutions, and policy advocacy to help Australians prepare homes for extreme weather.

The jury saw "Haven" as proof that an insurance brand could take responsibility for a societal challenge without losing its commercial identity.

10. AXA France x Publicis Conseil: Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix

Publicis Conseil added the words "and domestic violence" to the list of insurable events in AXA home insurance contracts.

The simple change made emergency relocation accessible for abuse survivors.

The category demands real results next to creative ambition, and "Three Words" delivered both, drawing recognition from France's highest public authorities.

The Strategies Behind This Year's Best Works

Ten Grand Prix winners across 10 categories point to patterns that brands and agencies planning work in the year ahead should look at closely.

Every campaign that won big this year found something already in motion and then gave the brand a place in it.

The work that drew the most jury attention also gave audiences a way to participate, whether it meant scanning, swiping, or building something themselves.

Uber Eats made fans build their own ads, Heineken made voice notes earn beer, and KitKat made consumers scan barcodes.

The effectiveness case was also more visible at this year's festival.

AXA, Suncorp, and AB InBev brought numbers to the table, while the new Creative Brand Lions category recognized the systems behind work like theirs.

The juries in the Creative Effectiveness category, the Creative Brand Lions, and the Titanium all arrived at the same point.

Creative ambition and commercial results aren't supposed to be enemies, and the best work this year delivered both at once.

Three things from this year's winners are worth acting on:

• Write your response brief before the crisis: A team with a creative posture already agreed on can move in hours, while everyone else is still booking the first meeting.
• Map cultural events a year out: The reunions, anniversaries, and releases worth riding are mostly public knowledge, so the win goes to whoever has the creative ready when the date arrives.
• Treat your creative system as an asset: The brands winning now invest in the process that makes good work repeatable, which holds value after campaigns fade.

What unites the agencies at the top of the table is range.

They carried a single idea across formats and markets without it thinning out, and this is what separates a one-hit shop from a durable creative agency.

Our Take: What Does Cannes 2026 Say About Creative Quality?

The most talked-about win of the week was a campaign for an AI company, judged by an industry that spent the same week warning about AI slop.

We think that this irony is the whole point of the festival.

Mother London's Claude spots won the Film Grand Prix because they were funny, sharp, and timed to a real competitor stumble.

Not one of these calls is something an AI could have made on its own.

People who understood tone, timing, and a rival's weak spot are the ones who made the ad worthy of a prestigious award.

We believe that this is the signal worth taking from Cannes Lions this year.

The work that wins is still decided by human judgment, and AI is just one more thing in the kit.

Agencies betting that automation alone will produce award-level ideas are reading it exactly backward.

Brands building work that competes at the highest level need partners who understand how to develop ideas with precision and execute them with craft.

Explore these top creative agencies in our directory.