What Percentage of Indie Entries Won at Cannes? We Pulled the Data

For all of the cool, exciting and good things that come out of it, it’s safe to say that Cannes Lions is a corporate affair. It’s a helluva business model, and no one can deny it’s effective.

On a micro level, the investment in one entry can go into the thousands with the entry fee, time and resources put into assets needed. It can be tough for an indie to justify the expense though, anecdotally, winning a Lion can have myriad benefits—from biz dev to talent acquisition and retention. It stands to reason that most indies may feel intimidated by Cannes or not feel it’s worth the investment.

Yet, indies indeed rise to the top each year—and the community comes together, albeit not at nearly the same level as holdcos and well-moneyed corporate and tech entities (special props to Little Black Book for another great beach week featuring a lot of great indies).

So, just how much impact do indies have on Cannes awards? We decided to look at the data to see how they fared in a sea of DDBs, VMLs and TBWAs. We haven’t necessarily seen anyone parse out the data for Cannes Lions indie shortlists and winners—so we decided to give it a go this year to find out how indies performed.

Behind the data

Of this year’s 28,753 entries, 2,710 made shortlists, with 832 total awards, regardless of affiliation or ownership structure.

We did our best to get all indie shortlists and awards entries accounted for. Our methodology had some considerations:

• If an indie worked with a holdco or non-indie company (defined as a publicly-traded company with a primary business in the advertising/marketing industry), we did not include it in the count.
• We did our best to find out the indie status of agencies, using all publicly available information.
• We used the “Entrant / Idea Creation” field as the main criteria. Plenty of indie companies (i.e., production companies) were involved in creating work for holdcos. Still, we decided to focus on this category since it reflects the leading company driving the work.

Below is the indie data from this year’s Cannes Lions shortlists and awards.

Again, we’re unaware of previous data scrubs like this— and it is a baseline from which to work for future projects for Cannes Lions like this.

2024 Cannes Lions Indie Data: Totals

2024 Cannes Lions Indie Data: Shortlists

2024 Cannes Lions Indie Data: Winners

For errors and/or omissions, please contact us here.

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