Nabil Sleiman, Head of Marketing Communications, AlmaraiAsk someone to name the most creative ad they’ve ever seen. They’ll say Apple. They’ll say Nike. Maybe Spotify. Maybe a car brand. Possibly a bank. Almost no one says Ariel.
And yet, if you follow the awards, the ones handed out by the people who actually judge creative work for a living, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands have been leading the pack for years. We just don’t talk about it.
The numbers tell a story the industry keeps ignoring
Cannes Lions is the closest thing advertising has to a universal benchmark for creative excellence. And over the past decade and a half, two FMCG companies have dominated it in a way that should be impossible to overlook.
Procter & Gamble was named Brand Marketer of the Decade at Cannes Lions in 2020. In the decade between 2010 and 2020 alone, P&G collected 243 Lions, including seven Grands Prix, two Titanium Lions and 49 Golds, and it has continued winning at every festival since. It ranked in the top ten for Brand Marketer of the Year every single year of that decade. Not once. Every year.
Unilever was named Creative Marketer of the Year in 2024, having accumulated over 230 Lions between 2010 and 2025. It had won the same title in 2010. That’s a company that sells laundry detergent and mayonnaise, picking up the industry’s highest creative honour twice in fifteen years.
So why doesn’t it feel that way?
Part of the issue is scale. A tech company launches one product campaign a year. It’s an event. It gets written about, awarded, turned into a case study. An FMCG brand runs dozens of campaigns simultaneously, across multiple categories, in multiple markets, all year long. The volume makes the work invisible.
Part of it is also an industry bias we don’t like to admit. We’ve been trained to associate creative ambition with the campaign behind certain product qualities: uniqueness, sophistication and trendiness.
If a product feels new, exclusive or culturally relevant by default, the assumption is that the marketing around it must be too. It’s a comfortable bias. And it’s wrong.
And part of it is that the best FMCG creative work doesn’t feel like advertising. ‘#LikeAGirl’ by Always didn’t feel like a campaign. ‘Real Beauty’ by Dove didn’t feel like a campaign. They felt like conversations society was already having. That’s not a limitation of the category. That’s the highest form of the craft and we take it for granted precisely because it works so well.
The hardest brief in the room
Here’s what gets missed: FMCG briefs are genuinely difficult. The product is low-cost. The purchase is habitual. The audience is everyone. The competition is sitting on the same shelf. These are categories that have existed for generations. There is no launch buzz, no cultural novelty, no first-mover excitement to ride. You’re not selling a one-of-a-kind product or an aspirational lifestyle. You’re selling milk. And you have to make someone care enough about your milk to reach past the one next to it.
That takes real creative thinking. Not aspirational thinking. Behavioural thinking. Cultural thinking. The kind of thinking that connects a brand of laundry detergent to the global conversation about gender equality at home, as Ariel did with #ShareTheLoad, and turns a functional product into something people actually talk about.
The fact that great work still comes out of those constraints, consistently, at scale, across dozens of markets, is not a small thing.
It’s only going to get more complicated
As the industry moves further towards performance marketing and conversion metrics, this split is going to get wider. The more we obsess over last-click attribution and short-term sales lifts, the harder it becomes to justify the creative work that builds the brand in the first place.
P&G won ten Lions in 2021. Ten in 2022. Six in 2023. Four in 2024. That’s not a loss of creative talent. That’s a reallocation of priorities.
FMCG brands have always lived under this tension. A significant share of their investment goes into trade promotions and price mechanics, crowding out the brand-building story. The irony is that no category understands long-term brand building better and no category is less acknowledged for it today.
Shouldn’t we acknowledge creative work that works?
Today, the Grands Prix are going to tech companies, automotive brands, financial services and luxury houses such as Apple, AXA, Renault and LVMH. Categories with built-in creative momentum, new stories to tell every cycle, and budgets structured around brand investment.
Now don’t get me wrong, some of this work is phenomenal. I’ve sat in countless judging rooms in recent years. I’ve seen good work get passed over not because it wasn’t strong, but because the category it came from wasn’t considered exciting enough. The idea gets judged before it even gets heard. That’s not a creative standard. That’s a bias. As an industry, we should be celebrating work that works, not just work that shouts.
We’ve built a hierarchy in this industry that has more to do with how unique, sophisticated or trendy the product is than with how good the thinking is. And that hierarchy keeps us from seeing what’s happening at the top of the creative rankings.
The trophies didn’t disappear. They moved. They tell us where the industry’s attention is. They don’t always tell us where the best thinking is. And until we’re honest about that difference, we’ll keep missing the best ad in the room.
By Nabil Sleiman, Head of Marketing Communications, Almarai
