On a warm evening on the French Riviera, as the 2026 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity handed out its most coveted hardware, one category quietly made the loudest argument for the future of marketing: Creative Data.
And for Anupriya Acharya, CEO of Publicis Groupe South Asia and Jury President of the Creative Data Lions this year, the work that emerged from this year’s submissions was nothing short of a paradigm shift.
“The Grand Prix winner stood apart for the beautiful simplicity of its idea and the imaginative use of data,” Acharya said, reflecting on the category’s top honour. “Data used to protect data. It turned an everyday payment terminal into a lifeline at a moment of real vulnerability.”
That winner was SOS POS — a campaign created by Circus Grey Lima for BCP, Banco de Crédito del Perú. By repurposing complaint and location data, the work transformed point-of-sale terminals across Peru into emergency protection points for people in danger. A banking tool. A data asset. A lifeline. In Acharya’s words, it “solved a human problem, strengthened trust in a difficult-to-differentiate banking category, and showed how Creative Data can drive business impact while scaling meaningful protection for people and society.”
It was, she suggested, exactly what the category is for.
Reading the Room — And the Data
Presiding over a jury that sifted through submissions from around the world, Acharya identified three distinct creative currents running through this year’s strongest work — each illuminating a different way that brands are learning to wield data with purpose and imagination.
The first trend: Sophisticated data, made powerfully useful.
A number of standout campaigns this year took on genuinely complex datasets and bent them toward meaningful ends. Suncorp Australia’s Haven drew on climate, property and peril data to create personalised resilience plans for homeowners — turning actuarial intelligence into something intimate and actionable. Fantasy Herd harnessed live farm data to build an entertainment platform around dairy, injecting positivity into a category not typically associated with delight. The Philipstown WireCar Grand Prix used mapping and real race data to transform a local children’s pastime into an interactive global experience. And 600K Network turned citizens themselves into data infrastructure — converting QR codes and smartphones into a real-time, verifiable election dataset under conditions of extraordinary civic risk.
What united these campaigns, Acharya noted, was not the size of the datasets but the intent behind them. “Not to show off complexity, but to solve meaningful problems.”
The second trend: Simple data, elevated by human ingenuity.
Perhaps the most instructive pattern for the industry was the work that proved you don’t need a data lake to win a Lion. SOS POS itself belongs here — relatively straightforward complaint and location data, transformed by a creative leap that no algorithm could have made. Skoda’s DuoBell used acoustic data to close a genuine safety gap. Elegantly. Efficiently. Effectively.
“These ideas proved that great Creative Data is not about how much data you have,” Acharya said, “but what you do with it.” It’s a democratising message for an industry that sometimes mistakes volume for value.
The third trend: Unseen data, becoming systems of change.
The most philosophically ambitious work in this year’s category did something rarer still: it made invisible realities visible — and then built infrastructure around that visibility. Mastercard’s Here to Stay took the largely hidden phenomenon of migrant underemployment and transformed it into career pathways and new economic opportunity. Forests Without Names for Hyundai surfaced fragmented kelp data and wove it into a shared environmental mapping standard. Dying Reviews for Hospice NZ illuminated the needs of people at the end of life, making them legible — and actionable — for organisations that serve them.
“The best work did not just reveal problems,” Acharya observed. “It created ways to act on them.”
A Category Coming Into Its Own
What Acharya’s analysis reveals, read together, is a category that has quietly matured. Creative Data is no longer a niche discipline caught between the data science team and the creative department. The work being celebrated at Cannes in 2026 suggests it has found its footing — and its conscience.
The thread connecting a Peruvian bank’s payment terminals to an election integrity project in an at-risk democracy, a Scottish dairy entertainment platform to a hospice’s visibility campaign, is not technology. It is intention. The question being asked by the best entrants this year was not what can the data do? but what should it do?
For Acharya, who leads one of the region’s most expansive marketing operations, the lessons are clear. The data itself — whether vast or modest, live or archival — is only the raw material. The creative leap, the human insight, the decision about which problem is worth solving: those remain irreducibly human.
“Data used to protect data,” she said of SOS POS. It sounds simple. But in that simplicity lies the entire argument for why Creative Data, at its best, is not a category at a festival. It is a practice with real stakes — one that, on the evidence of Cannes 2026, the industry is finally learning to take seriously.
