Rob Reilly at Cannes 2025: Why advertising needs better PR (and even better ideas)

As a familiar face—and past President—at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Rob Reilly is no stranger to the charged energy that descends upon the Croisette each June. This year, he’s buoyant.

“Maybe people are being more discerning, but the interest in Cannes and what this one week provides is the high,” the WPP global chief creative officer (CCO) says, acknowledging that while entries may have dipped, attendance has surged.

Reilly should know. Under his creative leadership, WPP was crowned Creative Company of the Year in 2025, with Mindshare tying for the highest points in Media Network of the Year. The holding company’s agencies bagged 168 Lions, including a coveted Titanium, 10 Grand Prix, 23 Gold, 53 Silver, and 81 Bronze. Mindshare’s Grand Prix marked the first time since 2018 that a media agency had clinched the award solo.

Standout work included Ogilvy’s ‘Vaseline Verified’ for Unilever (Titanium and two Grand Prix), DAVID’s ‘Haaland Payback Time’ for Supercell, and VML’s ‘Preserved Promos’ for Ziploc. Meanwhile, Dove’s ‘Real Beauty Redefined for the AI Era’—led by Mindshare and Ogilvy—swept three Grand Prix and the Glass Lion for Change. And in a show of creative range, AKQA, VML, and OpenMind delivered Czech Republic’s first-ever Grand Prix with KitKat’s ‘Phone Break’.

 

 

 

 

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But Reilly isn’t interested in listing medals. His real focus? Making advertising “earn” its place again—by rethinking how the industry thinks, behaves and even markets itself.

The brief is broken—Fix that first

When informed that Campaign would be meeting Reilly, copywriter Rahul Venugopal Pillai lobbed a deceptively simple question for the creative virtuoso: “What really wins at Cannes? A stupid idea presented brilliantly, or a brilliant idea presented stupidly?”

Reilly didn’t blink before giving his take. “Sometimes brilliant ideas presented stupidly win, and sometimes brilliant ideas presented brilliantly, win. Rarely do stupid ideas presented brilliantly. We're smart people and the judges are the best creative people in the world and can see through a stupid idea, even if the case is amazing,” he replied.

He adds that too much time is wasted on poorly crafted briefs. “The brief is not for everybody in a room... it’s for the junior team who has to show Liz Taylor (Ogilvy’s CCO), their work at 9am, and it is midnight and they have nothing. The brief’s either their best friend or worst nightmare.”

Reilly’s remedy is stark: fewer words, sharper focus. “Push the brief back if it has too many words on it,” he insists. “I spend more time on the brief than I do on the work. The brief is the most important part of great creativity.”

From earned mentality to ‘zero mentality’

Reilly admits he prefers to operate with a “zero mentality”: assume one has no budget and let the idea earn its way into the culture. “I go into every assignment thinking we have no media dollars. So how is this idea so good, bold and sharp that if you had no money, it would still blow up in culture and drive business?” he ponders.

This mindset, he says, forces teams to focus not on scale, but on originality and craft. “We have new tools and goals, but in the end, it’s still about who’s got the bigger idea and invests in the craft. That just takes guts.”

This refusal to chase paid virality for its own sake is especially relevant in the AI age. “Coming up with the idea is going to be the real premium versus how we’re going to make it,” he says. “We know how to make it. But is the idea worth making?”

As advertising confronts economic volatility and changing consumer habits, WPP is betting big on AI and streamlined operations. In his latest annual statement, CEO Mark Read outlined a future shaped by WPP Open, the company’s proprietary AI-powered marketing platform now used by clients like Google, IBM, L’Oréal, and Coca-Cola.

“AI is touching every single aspect of how we work,” he said. The global network is increasing its AI investment to £300 million in 2025, driving wins with Amazon, Unilever, and Johnson & Johnson.

AI is the accelerant—Not the answer

Despite being “the number one user of AI at WPP”, Reilly is unequivocal: creativity still trumps technology. “AI has the incredible ability to put out a lot of high-quality production work and every brand will be able to do it. So how do you break through? The genius human minds working with AI will be the highest premium.”

Reilly draws an analogy to the early steam engine era: “We seem to be at the beginning of the Industrial Age with steam engines, but when it’s 1000 times more advanced.”

Recently, Brian Lesser, CEO of WPP Media, stated that consumers already expect advertising to be relevant and engaging and buying experiences to be seamless—those expectations will only accelerate in the age of AI.” He added that WPP Media is built for a world “where media is everywhere and in everything.”

By investing in AI-powered products, integrating data and technology, and upskilling talent, WPP Media aims to help clients stay ahead of changing consumer behaviour and tap into AI-driven growth.

Reilly sees AI not as an end, but as a means to reach and test ideas faster—especially within WPP Open, the holding company’s AI-powered marketing platform. “I use it to get to some things faster, put it in our synthetic testing component. But I am also a big fighter for human creativity.”

His fear? That the industry will forget what makes ideas sticky: experimentation, imperfection, humanity. “We’re a bit crazy, odd and think out of the box... We’re artists, but we’re in a commerce business. Part of being an artist is experimentation and failure. We can’t remove that.”

Mentorship, not management

A key theme Reilly returns to is mentorship—or the lack of it in the modern agency. With teams getting leaner and juniors often relegated to grunt work, he’s pushing to reverse that.

“If someone asks whether AI can write a better Instagram post than a young copywriter, then great—let AI write that post,” he says. “I want that young copywriter sitting with the senior people solving the big, hairy problems instead.”

And WPP’s global creative bench reflects that ethos. He names Liz Taylor (Ogilvy), Gabriel Schmitt (Grey), and Peter Lund (AKQA) as leaders he actively engages with. “Omid Farhang, who founded Majority, was my intern and he is now working with Coca-Cola,” he says with a trace of pride.

“I have a T-shirt that says ‘We’re All Creators AgAIn.’ In the future, there will be less managers and more makers. That’s the exciting part.”

The industry needs a campaign for itself

For Reilly, all the talk about performance marketing eclipsing creativity is just noise. The real issue, he argues, is perception—and that’s something the industry has failed to manage.

“I hear all the time—how do we keep people interested? This is the greatest industry on earth where you get to use your brain in interesting ways every day,” he says. “Maybe we need to do a campaign about how great the business is!”

He laments that advertising often “whines about its own decline” rather than reframing itself as a platform for problem-solving. “What hasn’t changed is that it’s still the only business where we wake up every day and use our brain to solve a problem in a creative way. The tools have just gotten better.”

On India specifically, Reilly believes it’s time for more famous work to emerge from one of the world’s most dynamic creative cultures. “India is one of the most creative countries worldwide, but has it been doing this enough? Sometimes, young people join a tech company, and then return to the ad industry... they realise that the creative people are the stars of advertising agencies.”

For all the talk of AI, KPIs and ROAS metrics, Rob Reilly’s message is refreshingly clear—advertising needs to fall in love with its purpose again. That requires sharper ideas, tighter briefs, better mentors—and above all, a renewed faith in creativity as the most disruptive force in business.

“The business is hard for our clients,” he admits. “There’s a lot of pressure... but creativity is the answer out of this quandary.”

Because in the end, it’s not performance that creates memory. It’s meaning.