Ad Campaigns
Edelman, IPG, Omnicom and WPP join Publicis for working with Cancer’s next action
Mumbai: Following a launch at Davos and a mass media global campaign around the Super Bowl, Working with Cancer is entering its third landmark moment of the year. At this year’s Cannes Lions, Working with Cancer will be opening up a brief to the whole industry to help erase the stigma of Cancer in the workplace.
As a true cross-industry coalition, Edelman, IPG, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP will come together to invite creatives to join the briefing for this pioneering workplace movement. Participants will compete with the best creative minds of the industry for the opportunity to create a campaign that will run on World Cancer Day 2024, in a global multi-media campaign supported by $100m.
The Working with Cancer brief – entitled ‘The Big C’ – will be given on Thursday 22 June, at 10 am CET in the Lumiere theatre, Palais I. Entrants will be briefed to create a culture-defying campaign for everyone living and working with cancer.
Cannes Lions will facilitate the judging process, using their world class systems, with a jury made up of senior creative and strategy leads across the five holding companies that are supporting the initiative. The team of jurors will include: Susan Credle (global chair & global chief creative officer, FCB), Chaka Sobhani (global CCO of Leo Burnett), Luiz Sanches (CCO of BBDO NA), Judy John (global CCO of Edelman) and Debbi Vandeven (global CCO of VMLY&R) .
Participants will be able to enter starting Monday, 10 July, with a submission deadline on Friday, 15 September. Judging will take place throughout October, with the winner announced at the end of that month.
Working with Cancer aims to completely erase the stigma and insecurity of cancer at work. Today, the program initially launched by Publicis Groupe is an alliance of major international companies, with over 600 pledging businesses impacting up to 20 million employees, united by the aim to create an open, supportive and recovery-forward culture for cancer sufferers. The program continues to be powered by partnerships with key cancer research bodies and influencers, including Dani Trops, The Stroups, CancerChic and Laurie MacCatskill.
This week, Cannes Lions has already recognised Working with Cancer with the Lions Health Grand Prix for Good, which celebrates the powerful use of creativity to positively impact not only business and brand, but also the world at large.
“LIONS is a proud supporter of the Working with Cancer pledge and happy to lend our world-class judging process to a competition that provides an exciting opportunity for the industry to unite and work towards removing the stigma of cancer in the workplace,” said LIONS CEO Simon Cook.
“Since launching Working with Cancer at the start of this year, we have had an overwhelming response from our peers and clients. The program has evolved into a true cross industry coalition and today, alongside Edelman, IPG, Omnicom and WPP, we invite the industry to step up to arguably one of the most worthwhile and high-profile creative challenges they will ever work on. In raising awareness for Working with Cancer and encouraging more pledging companies, we will redefine cancer in the workplace and enable recovery forward environments worldwide,” said Publicis Groupe global CSO Carla Serrano.
“On behalf of Omnicom, we are thrilled to support such an important and critical initiative alongside our industry partners. No one chooses cancer, cancer chooses you, and the workplace must be a safe and supportive environment. There is no better place than Cannes Lions to continue to drive the mission of Working with Cancer, and I look forward to seeing the incredible work we are able to do for this special organisation,” said Sanches.
“Advertising is a highly competitive industry. We all like to win. This initiative calls us all together to beat the stigma of cancer in the workplace. This is going to be a collective win for everyone,” said Credle.
NATIONAL: Amazon Ads has laid out a sharply tech-led vision for the advertising industry in 2026, arguing that artificial intelligence, streaming TV and creator partnerships will combine to turn brand building into a more precise, performance-driven business.
At the heart of the shift, the company says, is the fusion of AI with Amazon’s vast trove of shopping, browsing and streaming signals, allowing advertisers to move beyond blunt reach metrics to campaigns designed around real customer behaviour.
“The future of advertising is not about reaching more people, but the right people with messages that resonate,” said Amazon Ads India head and vice president Girish Prabhu. “By combining AI with deep customer insights, we help brands move from broadcasting campaigns to having meaningful conversations wherever audiences spend their time.”
One of the biggest changes, according to Amazon Ads, will be the collapse of the wall between media planning and creative development. Retail media, powered by first-party data, is increasingly shaping everything from brand discovery to final purchase, pushing marketers to design campaigns around audience insight rather than internal instinct.
AI is also moving from a support tool to a creative engine. Agentic AI, which automates and accelerates production, is expected to make high-quality creative accessible even to small businesses, compressing weeks of work into hours and giving challengers the ability to compete with larger brands on speed and scale.
Behind the scenes, AI-driven analytics will take on a bigger role in campaign optimisation, identifying patterns, spotting opportunities and recommending actions that would previously have required teams of analysts.
Streaming TV is another big battleground. With India’s video streaming audience now above 600 million and connected TV users at 129.2 million in 2025, advertisers are set to treat streaming not just as a branding channel but as a performance engine, measured increasingly by sales, sign-ups and bookings rather than just reach.
Finally, Amazon Ads sees creators and contextual advertising reshaping how brands tell stories. Creators will act less like influencers and more like long-term partners, while scene-aware ads on streaming platforms will allow brands to insert hyper-relevant offers into the flow of what viewers are watching.
Taken together, Amazon Ads argues, these shifts mark a move towards advertising that is both more human and more measurable, where AI handles the complexity, and creativity does the persuading.
