Something has fundamentally changed in how businesses think about their relationship with the public. The old framework was transactional: create a product, find buyers, repeat. What replaced it is more complicated and, for the companies getting it right, considerably more powerful. The organizations gaining ground today have accepted that they are not just in the business of selling things. They are in the business of earning attention, and the currency of attention is story. Whether or not they use that language, the most competitive brands have become media companies.
The numbers confirm what intuition already suggests. Worldwide content marketing revenue is projected to reach $107.5 billion in 2026, and the broader content marketing market, valued at $524.73 billion in 2025, is growing at a 13.53% compound annual rate, putting it on track to approach $989.84 billion by 2030 (Mordor Intelligence). That trajectory is not driven by experimentation. Content marketing budgets now represent 26% of total marketing spend in 2026, the single largest allocation in most marketing organizations, driven by the compounding economics of owned content assets that continue generating returns long after publication (Digital Applied).
Red Bull GmbH is the clearest illustration. The Austrian company produces documentaries, broadcasts extreme sports events, and runs a full publishing operation, all while remaining a company whose core product is a canned energy drink. The product itself has barely changed since launch. What changed is the ecosystem of content built around it. That content does not just sell cans; it creates a worldview that consumers want to be part of. Buying a Red Bull is less about the beverage and more about the identity the brand constructed through years of deliberate storytelling. That is a meaningfully different kind of loyalty than any traditional advertisement can manufacture.
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) built one of the advertising industry’s most studied campaigns around this same principle. Its “Shot on iPhone” series turned everyday product users into the source material for global creative campaigns, blurring the line between advertising and genuine expression so completely that the distinction almost disappears. The approach earned the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix at the 72nd Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, held in June 2025, which is not incidental. It is evidence that the most effective commercial creativity no longer looks like an advertisement at all.
There is no better place to watch storytelling and commerce converge at scale than that festival: the world’s largest gathering of creative professionals, held each June in Cannes, France.
The 72nd edition drew entries from more than 90 countries across over 30 award categories. The Dan Wieden Titanium Grand Prix, the festival’s most prestigious individual honor, went to AXA S.A. (EPA: AXA) for a campaign called “Three Words.” The work added the phrase “and domestic violence” to the most common insurance contract in France, giving women a legal mechanism to leave abusive relationships. It is the kind of campaign that lives at the precise intersection of brand purpose and genuine social impact. The Health and Wellness Grand Prix went to Unilever PLC (LSE: ULVR) for “Vaseline Verified,” in which the brand used scientific testing to verify or debunk popular skincare hacks circulating on social media. The 73rd edition opened on today, in Cannes, France, with results still being announced across the five-day program.
The festival’s origins look nothing like its present form. In 1954, a group of cinema advertising professionals gathered in Venice, frustrated that advertising films were screened alongside feature films at the Cannes Film Festival without any formal recognition of their own craft. They founded the International Advertising Film Festival, named their prize after the lion of Venice’s Piazza San Marco, and awarded the first Lion to entries from 14 countries. The festival relocated several times before settling permanently in Cannes in 1984. By 1992, the scope had expanded well beyond film and the name was adjusted to reflect it. The current designation, Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, reflects a further evolution: an acknowledgment that the work being honored can no longer be described by any single medium.
Roughly 15,000 delegates from more than 90 countries attend each year. What seven decades of Cannes Lions make visible is something most companies are still working out in practice: the boundary between creativity and commerce was never as fixed as the industry once assumed. The brands proving this most convincingly are not necessarily the ones with the largest budgets. They are the ones telling the most honest stories.
