Every June, the global advertising industry gathers on the French Riviera for several days of parties, panels, and self-regard called the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. The week culminates with ceremonies that bestow a raft of juried awards for the year’s best creative campaigns. Agencies self-nominate for these “Oscars of Advertising” by submitting entries that include brief videos and written case studies.
A win can transform an agency’s fortunes – vaulting smaller agencies to a richer tier of clients, inflating salary offers, and attracting top talent.
With the rise of “brand purpose” marketing over the past decade or two — cultivating customer loyalty by putting commitments to positive social and environmental impacts on par with selling more stuff and making more money — Cannes Lions has established “Awards for Good”, which recognise “the use of creativity to positively influence not only businesses and brands, but also the world at large.” Some of them mirror the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for global progress. Several SDGs concern environmental sustainability, ranging from “responsible” manufacturing and consumption, to combatting global heating with regulations and renewable energy, and protecting land and sea ecosystems.
Advertising has a very high credibility bar to clear when it comes to claiming the green high ground, thanks to the industry’s well-documented contributions to spreading environmental and climate disinformation. U.N. chief António Guterres has blasted ad agencies (which he’s termed the “enablers of planetary destruction”) for continuing to take on fossil fuel clients, and a small-but-growing number of countries and municipalities are banning fossil fuel ads.
DeSmog’s past reporting has found this tension playing out inside the awards themselves. A 2024 investigation found that SDG Lions and other top honours went to agencies owned by WPP, Publicis Groupe and Edelman despite those firms’ long-standing contracts with oil and gas companies and other heavy polluters. A separate 2024 investigation found that three-quarters of “green” campaign prizes at the UK’s Ad Net Zero awards went to agencies that also worked for fossil fuel producers and high-carbon utilities.
So, acting on the suggestion of industry insiders, DeSmog took a close look at 20 winners of Cannes Lions awards since 2020 whose primary purpose was environmental sustainability — and found a number of entries that fall way short.
Of the 20 campaigns analysed, at least eight made large, specific environmental impact claims — such as the tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions they claim to have avoided, acres of farmland converted to organic crops, metres of coral reef restored — that DeSmog could not confirm independently. Some of those campaigns, alongside others in the sample, took credit for outcomes — “we mapped”, “we transformed”, “we committed” — achieved by others, sometimes years before the agency arrived on the scene. In a few cases, the advertising campaign turned out to have barely existed, seemingly assembled for submission to the awards.
Presiding over it all: The festival organisers and jury members, who have few incentives to challenge even the most questionable claims made by agencies or brands.
“There’s a crazy incentive structure in the industry. In a big agency network, your annual bonus might depend on how your agency performed at awards that year — certainly your career progression is heavily influenced by how many awards you can put on your CV,” says Nick Asbury, a copywriter and author of The Road to Hell, a critique of the purpose movement in advertising.
The judging system’s weak spots were laid bare in 2025, when the festival stripped Brazilian agency DM9 of a 2025 Grand Prix for its “Efficient Way to Pay” campaign for the American home appliances manufacturer Whirlpool, after it came to light that the agency had used AI-generated images and fabricated testimonials in its case-study video.
The revelations and award-stripping shook the industry. When Ad Age’s Lindsay Rittenhouse, Brian Bonilla, and Ewan Larkin spoke with 22 industry executives after the scandal, they found that inflated claims were an endemic problem in Cannes Lions case studies, along with vote-trading and bribing jurors with job offers or money in exchange for votes.
“There’s the completely fake work – some charity no one ever heard of, never really run, maybe one poster in a bathroom somewhere,” a source close to the Cannes Lions awards, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of professional retribution, told DeSmog. “Then there’s work made specifically for awards, where an agency comes up with an idea and searches for a charity partner retrospectively to put their name on it. And then there’s sometimes an agency jumping on something that already exists and making a big case out of it.”
Cannes Lions has subsequently introduced new integrity measures. Entries are being assessed in part with an AI-assisted verification system, and senior executives must now sign off on case studies before they’re entered. Agencies risk a three-year ban for submitting falsified work.
These measures won’t mean much if they are not applied, said Sebastian Wolf, a professor of advertising at Stuttgart Media University, who has been cataloguing suspicious Cannes Lions entries since the DM9 scandal. “They are not going to make any difference. I don’t think agencies are really changing their practices when it comes to award entries.
“Everyone knows about [the cheating], and nobody really likes it but at the same time, nobody really does anything about it.”
Cannes Lions did not respond to a request for comment.
Who’s to Judge?
Behind every every Cannes Lion award winner is a case study quantifying the campaign’s impact – from digital impressions to households reached or sign-ups achieved. Agencies and brands self-report these figures. The festival says this material may be used by its internal team (aided this year by the AI‑assisted system) to verify entries. However, that information isn’t shared with the awards juries, who typically make their decisions based on short case‑study videos and brief written summaries.
The source familiar with the judging process, who asked not to be named, said that when an entry’s claims raise questions, everyone tries to pass the buck. “As a judge you rely on the award show to have verified things for you,” they said. “And vice versa – the show relies on the judges to realise if something is completely made up, because they’re the industry experts. That’s where a lot of things just slip through the net.”
Once in the jury room, said Asbury, the Road to Hell author, the judging process is purely based on vibes. “If a project has got the right vibe, nice enough music, and a dramatic video, they go with that,” he said. “It’s doing a disservice to important social issues.”
A Creative Story
Digging into Africa Creative DDB’s “Amazon Greenventory” case study, which won a 2025 SDG Grand Prix, turned up significant credibility gaps.
The project described was real: Africa Creative’s client, a cosmetics company named Natura, funded the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and drone technologies to map 400 square kilometres of Amazonian rainforest. The mapping turned up around 30,000 trees with potential uses for cosmetics. Natura shared this information with local communities reliant on the forest for income, and committed to buying 100 percent of their harvests from these trees.
Africa Creative’s award entry noted the mapping project’s good environmental and economic justice outcomes: improving the long-term income potential for 10,000 families across 44 communities in the region, and showing that standing forests could be more profitable than deforestation.
According to source with direct knowledge of the project, however, Africa Creative came very late to the project, and invented the “Amazon Greenventory” concept for its Cannes Lions submission. The AI and drone mapping tech had been developed in 2019 by a company called Bioverse, according to the source, and Natura’s involvement also went back years.
There was independent verification of the mapping project and its outcomes, but little of that material included the name “Amazon Greenventory”.
A Natura data scientist named Vitor Paciello may have inadvertantly confirmed Africa Creative’s very limited involvement in the project when, in June 2025 LinkedIn post, he characterised Africa Creative’s contribution as compiling “our entire history in this beautiful video” that represented four years of work by the brand.
“It was never conceived as an advertising campaign” the source said. “Africa Creative was not part of the [conservation project] at all.”
In response to questions for this story, a Natura spokesperson said the mapping project began in 2021 as “part of the company’s long-term strategy to advance regenerative practices within the Amazon ecosystem among many other actions throughout more than two decades.” They confirmed that Africa Creative coined the “Amazon Greenventory” name, and said that the Cannes Lions submission was made “with the knowledge and consent of the partners involved, all of whom were credited and recognized in the video and related materials.”
Africa Creative DDB did not respond to a request for comment.
Fabricated or “scam” campaigns at Cannes Lions are not a new issue, said Asbury. “A lot of people in the industry who’ve been around for a while will roll their eyes and say, ‘what’s new?’ But what’s happened in the last 10 years is the whole industry has shifted toward this focus on purpose and social causes — and that’s what’s led to this wave of emotive, feel-good case study videos.”
This isn’t how the awards are supposed to be judged, said Thomas Kolster, a sustainability marketing advisor and former Sustainable Development Goals Lions jury member. “We are not awarding case study videos, we’re awarding innovation. Unless an agency can clearly show they were part of the innovation process and not just the case study video, it’s like awarding someone a football championship title for filming the match”.
A Load of Questions
One ad campaign that won a 2022 SDG Gold Lion really existed — but the entry’s environmental impact claims disintegrated under scrutiny.
Saatchi & Saatchi New York’s “#TurnToCold” brand purpose campaign, for Proctor & Gamble’s (P&G) Tide laundry detergent brand, featured rapper Ice-T and WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) fighter “Stone Cold” Steve Austen calling various stars of sports and screen to recommend washing their laundry with Tide on cold. Why? Because washing clothes in cold water instead of hot slashes energy use, and today’s Tide (unlike detergents that over-50 consumers grew up with) cleans great in cold water.
The agency’s #TurnToCold Cannes Lions case study claimed that the campaign prompted 1.3 billion loads of laundry washed on cold in its first year, with energy savings equivalent to preventing “500 million kilogrammes” (or around 492,000 metric tons) of climate-heating CO2 pollution.
In its 2023 sustainability report, P&G claimed that “2 million tons of CO2 [about 1.8 million metric tons] have been avoided in the first two years” of its efforts to promote cold-water laundering, and that it was working “to achieve an ambition of 75% of laundry loads washed on cold by 2030”.
When asked to provide supporting data, a third-party audit, or the methodology behind its claims, P&G’s media relations office responded that “while we are unable to share the detailed background data with you, claims shared by the company are carefully substantiated.” Saatchi & Saatchi did not respond to a request for comment.
Verifying the numbers in an awards case study presents challenges for jurors, said the source close to the Cannes Lions judging process. “Often the client or the agency will have their own tracking systems, or I guess nowadays they might just ask AI.”
Cannes Lions now requires entrants to include a “proof of impact” document that lists their sources for any numbers, “so in theory this should give [the jurors] a way to check,” the source said. “How much this means that they will actually check every entry, or if it will deter entrants from making up fake sources remains to be seen, but at least it’s another hurdle for fake work.”
The Promise Vanishes
Some case studies hyped bold environmental commitments by clients that ultimately faded away — including a 2021 winner of a Titanium Lion, which is the very top of the awards’ metallurgic heap.
In the “Contract for Change” campaign, created by FCB (which has since merged with BBDO) for Michelob Ultra, the beer brand offered American farmers contracts that promised Michelob Ultra would buy their crops if they switched from synthetic pesticides and fertilisers to organic farming. According to FCB’s case study, the campaign led growers to convert 104,000 acres of croplands to organic. Even better, FCB said, Michelob Ultra planned on contracting for change for years to come, “effectively securing the future of American farmland”
Health and eco-minded Michelob Ultra drinkers presumably liked the idea that their brand had a green conscience, but since FCB won its Cannes Lion, the “Contract for Change” has faded away. Anheuser Busch InBev, Michelob Ultra’s parent company, celebrated the campaign’s Titanium Cannes Lion in the “Awards and Recognition” section of its 2021 sustainability report, and again in 2022 after the same campaign won a Grand Prix in the “creative effectiveness” category. No other information about the status of the campaign, or its impact were available. The campaign was not mentioned at all in subsequent ESG reports.
Neither Anheuser-Busch InBev nor FCB responded to requests for comment.
“Cannes was set up basically to judge funny ads and logos,” said Asbury, the Road to Hell author. “Now it’s using that same process to judge what are supposedly big societal interventions and major climate change projects. It’s just a crazy way to try to judge those kinds of serious issues.”
Backed by Evidence
Not every campaign DeSmog analysed fell short. A handful of award-winning entries were backed by evidence that existed independently of the case study.
Superunion, a branding agency owned by London-based ad giant WPP, won a Grand Prix for design in 2021 for its brand design for Notpla, a seaweed-based packaging material. Notpla conducted pilot programmes, including with the food delivery service Just Eat, prior to winning a 2022 Earthshot Prize (a set of high-profile environmental awards founded by Prince William) in the “Build a Waste-free World” category. Earthshot nominees are independently reviewed by panels that collectively include more than 100 experts.
Google’s “Contrails: Making Flying More Sustainable with Google AI” campaign, which won a Silver Lion for design in 2024, is backed by a peer-reviewed randomised trial published in the journal Communications Engineering. The study found that AI-guided altitude adjustments cut satellite-visible contrails by roughly two-thirds while burning about 2 percent more fuel on those adjusted flights, with the climate trade‑off openly discussed in the article.
How We Did It
Drawing on publicly available information, including press releases, media coverage, and corporate ESG (“environment, social, governance”) reports, along with awards case studies provided by industry sources from the Cannes Lions winners database, we ranked campaigns between 2020 and 2025 whose main purpose was environmental sustainability. This included the 2020 campaigns that, due to the festival’s cancellation amid the Covid-19 pandemic, were judged in 2021.
Each of the 20 campaigns were assessed for their veracity: Did the award-winning agency overstate its role in the campaign’s development? Did the green claims hold up under scrutiny? Did the promised impact actually materialise after the trophy was handed over?
A claim was counted as unverifiable if it was a specific, quantified environmental impact figure that did not appear in any investor-facing disclosure, peer-reviewed study, or independent audit, or for which no methodology was publicly available.
