Pats McDonald On Leading The Cannes Lions Jury For Creative Strategy: 'Emotions Can Run High'

Celebrating the idea behind the idea, the Creative Strategy category at Cannes Lions examines the strategic thinking that has gone into developing some of the most important work.

Leading this year's jury will be Dentsu Creative's own strategy leader, Patricia [Pats] McDonald, with a panel that also includes VML's chief strategy officer Alison Tilling, Dentsu Creative's brand strategy director, Joseph Temitope and McCann Worldgroup;s executive VP, head of strategy for global brands, Sarah Styrons Watson, to name a few.

Together, the jury will ensure that the entered work demonstrates exceptional interpretation of the business/brand challenge, breakthrough thinking, and transformational problem solving, leading to a compelling creative strategy.

McDonald shares a few of her experiences of previous tours of duty at Cannes alongside her expectations of what she wants to see from this year's entries.

Creative Salon: What are your expectations around the experience of being a jury president? 

Patricia McDonald: It’s a huge honour and a big responsibility! We have a fantastic and really committed jury, who are interrogating the work in real detail.  So I’m expecting a great debate, particularly around the Grand Prix, with potentially some late nights in the jury room.

CS: What have your past experiences been like on previous juries? What did you enjoy most about the process?

PM: Being a juror is an incredible immersion in the best work in the industry at a moment in time. It’s genuinely a privilege. One of the things I love is hearing different cultural perspectives on the work. Sometimes what seems extraordinary in one culture feels expected in another. Sometimes there’s a very subtle but important cultural nuance you might miss, and again it’s a real privilege to get to understand that better.

CS: What do you think makes a strong jury president? 

PM: I think it’s finding the balance between having a vision for the category and making space for everyone to be heard. It’s helpful to start with a discussion about the criteria we’re going to come back to when making the tough decisions: what’s our strategy for Creative Strategy?

Emotions can run quite high; people are in this conversation because they care passionately about the work. They care passionately about the message it sends to the industry about what they value. So it’s really important to create a safe space where people feel comfortable to have the tough debates, to draw people out if they’ve gone quiet, to check everyone’s on board.

CS: What are you looking out for this year? What do you expect to see from this year’s entries/winners? 

PM: I’ve been talking to the jury about the 4 As. (The day AI learns alliteration, strategists will be in real trouble.) The 4 As are:

• Knowing the Audience, knowing the Algorithm.

• Knowing how to connect AI and Human craft. Most important of all is Ambition.

• Knowing the Audience means real, intimate human understanding. The kind of insight only another human can have.

• Knowing the Algorithm means understanding culture and community dynamics, designing ideas to win with the algorithm without just chasing trends.

I’m also interested to see work that connects AI and human craft to deliver a level of relevance, personalisation or responsiveness that wouldn’t be possible alone, and work with a really bold ambition at the heart.

CS: How are the best submissions put together that will win jurors over?

PM: The best submissions are an art in themselves, not to mention the case films! (My husband: “Are you watching a bunch of…. adverts for adverts?”) 

 The key thing to remember is that jurors are reviewing hundreds of cases at a time. The simpler and clearer you make it for them, the better. Make the entry form tell a story. Use the opening paragraph as a kind of 'trailer' for the submission. Tell the jury why they should sit up and pay attention to this one. 

Keep writing, re-writing, editing, and honing the language until you can summarise the strategy, the insight, and the idea in a brilliantly pithy sentence that sticks in the mind through multiple rounds of judging and debate.

For Creative Strategy and a few other categories, a presentation deck is required. Really spend the time to craft it, in terms of design, storytelling and data visualisation. Think about how you can make it memorable in a sea of other submissions; how can the experience of reading the deck bring the strategy to life for the reader, not just play it back?

CS: How would you describe the industry’s creative landscape compared to years previous? 

PM: That’s a great question.  I think we’re at a time of huge transition for the industry. Attention is shifting. Creators have bigger audiences than the world’s largest streaming platforms. Search is set to be completely disrupted by AI.  We know some of the tried and tested techniques aren’t working as well as they used to, but we don’t have the same body of evidence for newer approaches.

You can see some of that sense of uncertainty pull through in the work. I’m seeing a lot of work that leans into nostalgia and superstition. A lot of work that celebrates older generations, or preserving traditions.

On more future-facing note, I’m seeing a lot of work that’s very consciously building its own audience and its own cultural momentum, which I think is super interesting. Our work for Nutter Butter for example understands exactly how online fandoms are powered by easter eggs, conspiracies and internal lore but it doesn’t chase trends, it creates its own weird and wonderful universe.   

CS: What would you like to see the industry doing more of? 

PM: There are two things I’d love to see more of:

One big trend we see around the world is fragmentation. Not just fragmentation in media, which has been with us for a long time, but fragmentation in society. People have fewer shared aspirations and fewer shared experiences - call it 'The Togetherness Deficit.' I think the 'watercooler moment' will look very different in 2025 and beyond, but we still need to aspire to create those moments, and I think they can have a positive effect on society as well as brands and businesses.

I would also love to see us do more as an industry to tackle online safety. Every day, we see more disturbing headlines about the impact on young people’s mental health. A recent survey showed that almost half of young people would prefer to live in a world where the internet didn’t exist. That’s an extraordinary finding. I’ve been passionate about the potential of the social web as a force for good for many years, and I still believe there are real upsides, connecting communities and empowering entrepreneurs, but it needs to be a much safer space for our children. That’s why the work our clients in the Netherlands at KPN are doing, among others, is so important.

CS: What have been some of your highlights over the last year with Dentsu Creative? What work are you most proud to have been a part of?

We’ve had some great new business wins over the last year that have really shown the best of our network coming together. Adobe, for example, involved teams across the world combining absolute global consistency with brilliant local relevance and combining data, creativity and in-depth understanding of the modern content supply chain to great effect.

We’ve always had a strong reputation for craft and innovation, but I’m proud to see we’re now also being recognised on some of the biggest stages for strategic excellence and effectiveness. I don’t think many agencies are showing up at the Effies and the Emmys!

I think we’re also showing up consistently with work that really understands the modern media ecosystem and sets the bar for how to win with communities and win in culture. Work like Nutter Butter from our team in the US and KPN from the Netherlands, as I’ve mentioned, but also work like UR: Cristiano, grounded in a really smart understanding of the evolution of YouTube from a social network to a streaming giant. It’s not the second screen anymore, it’s the screen, and the work from our team in Iberia really understands its role and designs around that. So I think that’s a really exciting place to be as we look to a future where brands are going to want to build their own platforms and their own audiences.

Stay tuned to find out what else has entered this year's awards throughout the week and keep up to date with our Cannes Lions 2025 coverage.