At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the Creative B2B Lions, introduced only in 2022, might just be one of the most demanding categories yet. The challenge is not only to craft a creative, clever, and buzz-worthy campaign; it is to create work that is innovative enough to impress creatives, strategic enough to satisfy marketers, and effective enough to convince business decision-makers.
Unlike consumer-focused advertising that can sometimes rely on broad cultural appeal, B2B (Business-to-Business)campaigns must resonate with an often smaller, highly informed, and far more skeptical audience. Business decision-makers — chief information officers, procurement heads, finance executives, and the like — expect more; they cannot be swayed by spectacle alone. While they see the value of creative executions, they also seek numbers as proof. Tangible commercial results are necessary, and it’s actually part of the judging criteria —covering 30%, to be exact.
“The category is about how you build a business connection with another business. It’s not just communication; it’s getting into the actual business itself, understanding how they operate with other businesses,” VML Chief Creative Officer and Creative B2B Cannes Lions juror Park Wannasiri tells adobo Magazine President, Founder, and Editor-in-Chief Angel Guerrero in an exclusive interview.
“And the category isn’t just B2B — it has to be ‘creative’ B2B. So what we’re looking for is creativity within the B2B space.”
Park admits that the category is still defining itself and likens it to “a baby that’s still growing.” Unlike mature categories with well-established conventions, Creative B2B demands that entries first prove they are solving a true business-to-business problem.
“The first question everyone in the room asks is: is it B2B? It’s a new and evolving category, so there’s a lot of work submitted that might not actually be B2B,” Park says, shedding some light into the level of discernment that goes into the selection process.
“We go through rounds — first round, second round, shortlist, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Grand Prix.”
Work that turns things around
For the Creative B2B Lions, jurors expect not only originality and craft, but also clear evidence that the idea solved a real business challenge, generated measurable impact, and influenced purchasing behavior. The work must earn attention while maintaining credibility, making creativity and commercial logic equally important. And that balance is what makes the category so difficult.
“We’re looking at how B2B work inspires one business to connect with another, builds a platform, and changes the fundamentals of how they do business — including the buyer decision and how that moment of choosing to buy into a business gets created,” Park explains.
He admits that the jury receives awareness, PR, and stunt work as entries, but also reveals that such entries don’t particularly perform well in the category. It’s because Creative B2B requires so much more.
He delves into its complexity and how different it is from B2C (Business-to-Consumer), saying, “B2B requires you to dig into the fundamentals — who is the business audience, what is the business problem, and how creativity solves it. Effectiveness counts for 30% of the criteria. It’s not about awareness. It has to turn something around.”
Opening doors, unlocking opportunities
Park recalls a recent discussion in the Creative B2B jury room, where he and other jurors saw how B2B used to be uncharted territory for agencies.
“It’s never really been touched by creativity,” he concedes.
The paradigm, however, is shifting.
“What this category is showing is that when you bring creativity into B2B activity, it turns into something brilliant — something that’s a result, inspiring, memorable, distinctive for the brand, and effective. It’s a new territory for agencies to tap into, to help brands actually do business.”
He argues that effective B2B campaigns involve strengthening how one business engages with another businesses as partners. In the quick-service restaurant (QSR) sector, for example, it’s about how you engage with franchisees, according to Park.
To further illustrate his point, he cites the inclusion of a ball bearing brand entry in the Creative B2B category, pointing out the obscurity of such a product to mass consumers but recognizing how, on the flipside, it is relevant to automotive and aircraft manufacturers.
“There’s so much that usually just sits inside a client’s office, untouched by any creativity. This category is shining a light on that — and agencies need to really get into it.”
Using business data creatively
One standout initiative that illustrates the effectiveness of a B2B campaign is the award-winning Soil Stay, a program developed by VML Thailand for Tra Mongkut Fertilizer. It earned Thailand’s first-ever Creative B2B Cannes Gold Lion under the Brand Experience subcategory.
Instead of blatantly positioning fertilizers as the absolute saving grace of farmers and creating a traditional testimonial campaign on fertilizer use that the client initially requested, VML Thailand proposed a better one.
The agency used readily available soil data that Tra Mongkut had collated for years to create an experiential program that would help farmers better understand soil health and empower them.
“Thai farmers themselves don’t actually know their own soil. Thailand has around 300 different soil types, each needing different treatment and care,” Park explains. “So what we changed was turning that soil data into a platform that lets farmers experience their specific soil type. If a farmer’s land has a certain soil type, the brand sends them to a model farm with the exact same soil type — but one that performs better.”
“Soil Stay” reimagined what a fertilizer brand’s relationship with farmers could be. It became a platform for the Tra Mongkut to engage and build relationships with farmers. As of writing, the platform has provided 10,000 farmers with practical knowledge on soil regeneration and sustainable cultivation.
“The jury noted how hard it is these days just to get people to click into a website — and here, 10,000 people experienced something new that made their lives better. They learned, and they returned to their land to farm smarter. It’s not even about selling fertilizer anymore — it’s about selling just enough for them to become sustainable, to know their soil, and to use the brand better. It became an education platform, built on top of their data.”
A quiet year for Asia
While Thailand, through VML, has made a strong showing in Cannes, Park reveals that Asia, as a whole, has not been vastly represented. Park sees gaps that the region could still address, while acknowledging opportunities in how the festival has learned to embrace more diverse perspectives.
“We have insight, we have tension — for example, something the first-world market would never fully understand: soil, and countries where agriculture is the main industry,” Park says, again referencing the campaign his agency developed.
“Other countries might build around something like cars or automotive, but we’re farming countries; we eat rice. You build on that specific tension, solve a problem specific to your country, and solve it in a proven way where you can actually see the impact — on society, on the brand, and on the marketing objective.”
Park believes that creative agencies should adopt the above-mentioned approach in crafting B2B campaigns. He insists that there is no longer room for one-off campaigns or PR stunts, and that B2B campaigns should now be platform-based, grounded in fundamental knowledge, and deliver solid results.
That approach, that formula, Park believes, was instrumental to Soil Stay’s big win at Cannes.
Remarkable Cannes Lions awardees
According to Park, being shortlisted for a Gold Cannes Lion is extremely difficult; only 1% of all entries make it to the shortlist. Winning one is a groundbreaking feat.
He cites two campaigns that to him, are truly exceptional.
One is Tocayos, Inc., a Heineken campaign by LePub ,which allowed the global beer brand to work with independent bars bearing the same name and enable them to be part of a global franchise.
Another is the Faroe Islands Space Program campaign created by NORD Stockholm for the industrial bearing maker SKF, which took home a Gold in Creative Strategy and the Grand Prix in Creative B2B at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Rather than presenting a highly technical B2B product through dense specifications, the campaign brought SKF’s ball bearings and friction technology to life through the lens of space exploration, showing how they perform under extreme conditions.
‘The most inspiring place on Earth’
Despite having attended the festival previously and being exposed to creativity on a broad scale, Park still sees Cannes as “the most inspiring place on Earth for creative work.”
“Someone reminded me yesterday why we live in this industry — and even though everyone’s talking about struggle right now, we still see the light, we still see how we’re going to get through it,” he said.
Even with the existence and proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI), Park still believes in the inimitable power of humans over AI, and how they can be pilots of the AI machine.
“I think we really need to go back and find the right partners to work with — to create work that’s human, work that AI or anything else cannot take from us. I think this year’s theme is really about that — work that still makes us dream, that still inspires us to go to work, despite the struggle. The Cannes spirit stays the same, but the topics keep evolving every year,” Park said in conclusion.
