Trends Report: Key Takeaways for Pharma from Cannes 2025

Cannes Lions 2025 underscored a deepening trend for the pharmaceutical industry, moving beyond traditional functional messaging to embrace bold creativity and human (patient focused) approaches. These are our top insights from the festival:

Pharma's Creative Ascent

This year more than ever, health and pharma found itself in the spotlight of conversations and work across all categories, earning some of the airtime that often heads only to the consumer and tech giants. Campaigns such as "Glowing Relief," which provided glow-in-the-dark medicine packaging for areas prone to power outages, stood out for their ingenuity, humanity, and sophisticated product design. This wider recognition shows that pharma is successfully expanding its creative boundaries.

Embracing Analog Creativity & Human-Centricity

Despite the pervasive discussions around AI's rapidly evolving capabilities, the most successful pharma campaigns at Cannes 2025 prioritized nuance, empathy, and a distinctly human touch. Even when AI was integrated, as seen with the "DawAI Reader" that translates prescriptions into audio, it was used subtly to augment, rather than overshadow, the core human element. This emphasis on "artistry AI can't fake" highlights a continued appreciation for tactile design and storytelling that feels authentically made by humans, demonstrating that genuine connection often stems from empathetic, human-centered approaches.

Creativity in pharma is still expected to align with and amplify the industry's core mission of improving lives.

The Power of Humor

For the second year in a row, we saw pharma's growing comfort with humor. The industry, often perceived (for good reason) as serious, showcased patient focused campaigns that found pockets of levity even when addressing challenging topics like cancer and rare neurodegenerative diseases. "Friedreich’s Back," which imagined the German neurologist returning to learn about modern treatments, and "Pick Up Your Poop," a talking dog's humorous plea for colon cancer screening, proved that humor can be a powerful tool for engagement and awareness. Carefully pitched humor is increasingly being recognized as a viable creative approach for pharma.

Creativity with Purpose: Taking a Stand

Beyond a focus on craft, a strong current of purpose continued to run through the most awarded pharma work. At a time when programs promoting diversity and supporting underserved communities face scrutiny, many campaigns at Cannes unabashedly stood up for marginalized populations. Efforts like "PainVisible" and "Glowing Relief" exemplified a creative North Star rooted in the industry's fundamental purpose: helping people. This trend reinforces a critical message: creativity in pharma is still expected to align with and amplify the industry's core mission of improving lives.

Leveraging Creator Culture

Cannes 2025 underscored the increasing imperative for pharma to fully embrace creator culture. This means moving beyond traditional celebrity endorsements towards authentic partnerships with well-known creators, whether they are Instagram stars or influential leaders within online health communities. The key is to grant creators the freedom to connect with their audiences in their own authentic way, even if it means pharma needs to "stomach more risk" than it's accustomed to. The immense value of creator content, especially in a world where many switch off to traditional ads, demands that pharma learns to "let creativity lead," whist being guided by experts to navigate regional regulatory frameworks.

The most successful pharma campaigns at Cannes 2025 prioritized nuance, empathy, and a distinctly human touch.

Shifting to Experiential Marketing

The festival highlighted a broader industry movement towards an "age of experiences." Pharma brands, increasingly challenged to move beyond standard product promotion, are curating memorable interactions to build deeper connections with consumers. Aligning with consumer lifestyles - becoming "experience providers," rather than just advertisers. No doubt that this presents a greater challenge than for consumer goods, but Cannes reminded us once again that judges and consumers expect the same level of creativity and engagement from health brands as they do from retail and tech. Making experiential marketing a crucial and evolving frontier for pharma.

AI as Augmentation, Not Replacement

While AI continues to transform so many areas in pharma including drug development and clinical trial enrolment, Cannes 2025 provided a crucial perspective on its role in the creative process: AI is an augmentative tool, not a replacement for human ingenuity. The discussions around AI at the festival often emphasized the irreplaceable value of human insight, craft, and technique. Award-winning pharma campaigns that subtly integrated AI demonstrated this balance, proving that human creativity remains the "superpower." The industry is striking a thoughtful balance, using AI to empower and enhance, while ensuring that the core artistry remains authentically human.