Hot take: PR people have spent too much time defending their existence. Defending budgets. Defending earned media. Defending why communications should be involved before the crisis, not after it. Defending why reputation matters.

But this year, the winning work at Cannes Lions made one thing abundantly clear: PR has moved on. Or up, rather. The business criticality is unignorable. And it’s the new center of gravity.

No more earned media first. It’s earned impact first. And everyone wants a piece of it.

PR Is No Longer Downstream

PR used to be the last stop. A product launches. A campaign gets approved. A crisis happens. Then PR enters the picture.

“Inside the PR Lions Jury Room” revealed what happens when PR moves upstream and shapes the agenda instead of responding to it.

The winning campaigns of 2025-2026 asked:

Could PR free a country from oppression?

Could PR influence government policy?

Could PR turn negative customer feedback into its strongest commercial driver?

The answer was a resounding yes.

When communications can change behavior, influence policy, galvanize communities, ripple culture and create outcomes that matter in the real world, the only thing left to ask is: when will the briefs catch up and what needs to happen to ensure they stay that way?

Upholding the Mantle: Our New Responsibility

One juror put it plainly: “PR is not a nice-to-have. It’s a must-have.”

If securing a seat at the table is yesterday’s battle, the responsibility now is to make communications worthy of staying there.

Of the winning work this year, here’s what that looks like:

Simplicity Is a Competitive Advantage. Simplify your programs; elevate the point of view. The Swedish Rx became one of the jury’s favorite examples: a Swedish prescription as a driver for tourism. The brilliance was in commitment rather than complexity. And while the execution expanded into multiple touchpoints, the idea remained pure. No twenty-slide explanation required. The jury repeatedly warned against a trap PR falls into all the time: “And then we did this. And then we did this. And then we did this.” Layer after layer until the idea disappears under the weight of its own presentation. Be integrated, but be clear.

Bring Levity in a Heavy World. While “nostalgia” wasn’t on repeat this year, the draw of escapism was still strong, but evolved into something closer to whimsy. Humor even. Effervescence in a weighted world. Not self-aware brand snark. Actual fun. The Swedish Rx is a great example. Attention can once again be earned through delight just as much as through purpose.

The Human CEO Is Finally Replacing the Corporate CEO. Don’t Revert. Gone are the days of the polished script. People are craving leadership and that’s coming through in the creative idea, not just the executive talk track. Campaigns from brands like Burger King and Columbia Sportswear reflected a growing appetite for executives who participate rather than perform. One standout example involved a CEO sharing a real phone number and actually listening. Accessibility became the story, transparency became the strategy, participation the platform. For years, communicators have focused on protecting executives. The next era is about connecting them. In a conversation with Fast Company and Inc.’s Stephanie Mehta, one of the top themes she observed was executives letting their guard down. Throw out the old script for good and lead through connection.

Reputation Equals Brand, and Vice Versa. The distance between crisis and opportunity has evaporated. If there was one piece of work that captured where PR is heading, it was the KitKat Heist. A communications idea that won both PR and Crisis. Rather than lawyer a presented problem, it acknowledged reality, then flipped it into participation, challenging the age-old notion that crisis communications is only about containment. Reputation and brand together, in harmony, reduce friction and create opportunity. That’s what gives communicators the license to lead, not just operate.

Business to the Center. While creative will always balance art, intuition and intelligence, evidence is still key. Prove the work is working for the business, or risk moving back to the sideline.

What PR Leaders Should Do Next

Stop measuring success by visibility. Start measuring movement, connectivity and effect.

Build ideas that people can participate in, not observe. Less flash in the pan, more longevity.

Trade safety for conviction.

Stop chasing culture. Understand its currents and contribute.

Bring your leaders closer to people.

Move faster. Intelligently. If uncertainty is the only thing we’re certain about, stop retreating. With reputation and brand at the center, you can turn a challenge into growth. That’s the Chaos Advantage.

PR leaders know the industry has already evolved. The only remaining question is whether the rest of us are still operating under the old definition.

More From Cannes: Leaders Know Bold Work Wins. They’re Just Not Moving Fast Enough | Why Playing It Safe Is the Riskiest Move of All | How Leaders Win in a Volatile World | How To Get Bold Work Into the World

Cameron Shields is FleishmanHillard’s Global Head of Consumer, Brand Impact .

After more than 15 years advising some of the world’s largest brands through reinventions, crises, cultural shifts and periods of profound uncertainty, I’ve learned something we’ve intuitively known all along:

The moments that feel riskiest are actually the moments that demand the most conviction. And playing it safe is the riskiest move of all.

That was the underlying theme I heard across the Croisette this week at Cannes Lions 2026.

Lou McEwan from McLaren shared a staggering statistic: 50% of McLaren’s audience is new over the last decade. That’s not an audience challenge. It’s a reminder that many of the assumptions we built brands around are quietly expiring.

On stage, Marisa Thalberg, EVP & Chief Customer and Marketing Officer of Catalyst Brands, put it even more directly: “I’ve been brave because actually I’m afraid not to be.” That sentiment surfaced repeatedly throughout Cannes.

Consumers are changing. The same tricks won’t work. Culture is fragmenting. Trust is harder to earn. Attention is harder to keep. And yet so much marketing is still optimized to avoid mistakes rather than create momentum.

One deeper challenge kept following me from stage to stage: The demand for performance has become performative, forcing some of the best marketers in the world into a cycle of retreat.

Somewhere along the way, organizations became obsessed with proving value now instead of creating it.

Yet the most compelling conversations at Cannes weren’t about choosing between brand and performance, reputation and growth, or creativity and data. They were about recognizing those are false choices.

In fact, many of the CMOs drawing the biggest crowds were making the same argument: risk isn’t something to mitigate. It’s a capability to build.

Which brings me to what may be the defining challenge facing modern marketers:

How do you get bold work approved and shipped?

The challenge isn’t conviction. It’s getting bold, smart work through the system.

At Cannes, FleishmanHillard and Contagious unveiled new research: The Chaos Advantage. The findings validated a tension many marketers have felt for years.

88% of marketing leaders believe bold work is more effective. Yet 78% say their organizations produce mostly safe work. The overwhelming majority of leaders already believe bold work wins.

But what does that tension actually mean in practice?

If bold work becomes controversial, the answer is the same: better intelligence.

One of the most fascinating conversations at Cannes came from Craig Brommers, reflecting on one of the most polarizing campaigns of the past year.

At launch, the infamous Sydney Sweeney-helmed campaign had helped drive a 25% increase in stock value.

Then Brommers’ high school daughter came home and told him, “Dad, you’re getting canceled on TikTok.”

The tension was real. But instead of reacting to the loudest voices, the team went to the data.

Traffic was up. Transactions were up. New customer acquisition was up.

They quickly commissioned research to understand how actual customers—not social media commentators—felt about the campaign.

That intelligence helped guide decisions that ultimately contributed to a 180% increase in stock value.

When asked what got them over the finish line, Brommers’ answer was simple:

“Real-time data allowed us to make the right decision not just for social media and outside voices, but for the business.”

That’s the difference between reckless risk and informed confidence.

Too often, risk management has evolved from an enabling function into a veto function.

Our research found that 66% of marketers say risk management blocks more than it enables. Bold work takes an average of seven days to approve. Safe work takes three.

That delay may seem manageable in isolation. But multiplied across approval cycles, cultural moments and competitive opportunities, it becomes a growth problem.

Almost half (42%) have watched competitors capture a cultural moment simply because they moved faster.

Most telling of all, 85% agree delayed decisions cause more damage than imperfect ones.

Yet many organizations continue to operate as if the greatest threat is making the wrong move.

The greater threat is making no move at all.

That same tension surfaced throughout Cannes:

In creator marketing, the conversation is no longer whether creators matter. The question is whether brands can loosen control enough to preserve the authenticity that makes creators effective in the first place.

In women’s sports, the opportunity isn’t simply increasing investment. It’s having the conviction to build fandom, tell richer stories, and establish credibility before the rest of the market catches up.

Different categories. Same challenge.

The organizations pulling ahead aren’t taking bigger risks. They’re making better decisions faster.

That’s why I believe the most important insight from Cannes isn’t that chaos exists. It’s that chaos can be an advantage.

For years, organizations have treated uncertainty as something to defend against. The brands creating disproportionate growth are treating it as an opening to challenge category conventions before competitors do.

An opening to build relevance while others are waiting for permission.

The irony is that cautious behavior doesn’t necessarily create safer outcomes.

Our new data showed bold brands experience backlash at roughly the SAME rate as cautious brands.

The difference is whether something meaningful was created in return.

So how do we seize the Chaos Advantage?

From what we’ve seen, it isn’t bigger budgets. It isn’t louder ideas. And it certainly isn’t fearlessness. It’s confidence built through evidence.

The organizations getting bold work into the world are doing three things differently.

✅ They distinguish perceived risk from actual risk.

✅ They use predictive intelligence to understand how stakeholders are likely to respond before decisions are made.

✅ They build approval processes designed to accelerate decision-making rather than slow it down.

This is where agencies must evolve. Our role isn’t simply to generate ideas. It’s to help clients move.

To expose where risk management has become a veto function instead of an enabling one.

To distinguish perceived risk from actual risk. To bring together reputation expertise, cultural fluency, predictive intelligence and creative ambition into a single decision-making framework.

To provide the evidence, guardrails and intelligence that transform “that’s risky” into “we can stand behind this.”

The brands moving fastest aren’t ignoring risk. They’re building systems that allow them to move confidently within it. That’s how bold work gets approved. That’s how bold work gets shipped.

And increasingly, that’s how growth happens.

More ‘Chaos’ at Cannes: Leaders Know Bold Work Wins. They’re Just Not Moving Fast Enough | Why Playing It Safe Is the Riskiest Move of All | How Leaders Win in a Volatile World

Cameron Shields is FleishmanHillard’s Global Head of Consumer, Brand Impact .

88% of marketing leaders believe bold work is what drives results, yet 78% admit their organizations mostly produce safe work. That’s the action gap.

We spotted this tension in our new Chaos Advantage research, based on a survey of 1,000 senior marketing and communications leaders around the world. The study reveals just how costly the gap between knowing and doing has become.

The gap doesn’t start in the brief. It starts in the room where the brief gets approved. Leaders don’t lack conviction. They lack cover. They want the big idea, but they want it armed with evidence, guardrails, and real-time intelligence. Because a great idea without a great argument is just an expensive mistake.

That’s the tension. We know bold works. But bold without proof feels reckless. And in an environment where every dollar is scrutinized, bravery needs backup.

But what does BOLD really look like?

On day one at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, humanity showed up everywhere in the winning work. Bold, unapologetic, and perhaps hidden in plain sight.

Novartis’s Relax Your Tight End tapped into the very human fear of a colonoscopy, using humor to reframe an uncomfortable conversation and make it approachable.

Beat Cancer Off leaned into another undeniable human truth: people masturbate. Instead of avoiding that reality, it embraced it—boldly encouraging men to do more of it in the name of early cancer detection.

Viagra found a way around strict advertising regulations in China by creating hilariously blue branded products—sex innuendos brought to life. If we can’t talk about sex, let’s talk about sex without talking about it. A perfect example of creativity subverting the rules.

And then there was Not Manufactured Reviews – not polished copy or over-engineered messaging, but the real, messy, human words people use when they actually experience a product. Maybe the most innovative product demo of all.

The common thread? None of this work spoke to “consumers.” It spoke to people. And that’s the truth: we are humans first.

The same should be true of marketing. The best ideas don’t target consumers—they connect with humans.

But connection alone isn’t enough. To get brave work through the system, it needs both instinct and infrastructure. The human truth, backed by the right proof.

So maybe the question we should ask ourselves isn’t, “What will perform?”

It’s: What is the beautiful truth of being human here?

That’s where bravery lives. That’s where courage starts.

I’ll leave with something our client and Catalyst CMO Marisa Thalberg said on stage with Ashley Graham at The Female Quotient:

“Listen to what people are saying about your brand, look for the signals, and then blow wind onto them.”

So is the most audacious thing a marketer can do simply this: act on what we already know?

Because doing what we believe doesn’t require a secret formula. It requires something much simpler: humanity. The rest is just the proof to make others believe, too.

And maybe that’s the point. The best creative work doesn’t start with the “consumer” lens. It starts with the human lens.

Get More From Cannes: Why Playing It Safe Is the Riskiest Move of All

Colleen McTaggart is a global executive creative director based in Chicago.