The temperature on the Croisette this year was apparently so extreme that it became difficult to concentrate on anything but the physical act of not perspiring. This did not stop the advertising industry from gathering, as it does every June, to celebrate itself and hand out lions made of metal that would have been genuinely painful to touch.

WPP emerged from the heat with bragging rights it has not held in 16 years: both the top network, Ogilvy, and the runner-up, VML, came from the same holding company. Rob Reilly, WPP's global chief creative officer, was understandably willing to discuss this outcome at some length.

"We're very proud of that metric," Mr. Reilly said in an interview with Campaign. He noted that the work that won at Cannes had also performed well at other awards shows throughout the year, which is the sort of thing one says when one has won and would like the victory to seem less like a fluke.

The company said it had submitted 36 percent fewer entries this year compared with the previous festival, in what it described as a focus on "quality over volume." (One might observe that this strategy is easier to articulate after the trophies have been counted.) Mr. Reilly pointed to work for large consumer brands — Nestlé, Mondelez, Adidas — as evidence that the wins were commercially meaningful rather than the sort of cause-related work that occasionally dominates awards shows and then vanishes from memory.

The campaign that Mr. Reilly called "the star of the show" was "The Kit Kat Heist," created by VML in London and amplified by Burson, which he offered as a model for how WPP's various divisions might collaborate going forward.

Cindy Rose, who became WPP's chief executive this year, has made creativity a stated priority, Mr. Reilly said, alongside a "deep belief in technology and things like AI as an instrument for creative people to be even more successful." This is, of course, what every holding company executive says in 2026, but Mr. Reilly seemed to mean it, or at least to believe that Ms. Rose means it.

On the matter of whether Cannes Lions matter to clients year-round, Mr. Reilly was refreshingly candid: "Do people forget about it? Do clients talk about it year round? I'm not quite sure."

The trophies, at least, will remain on the shelf until next June, when the industry will return to the south of France to do it all again, weather permitting.

Original story published in campaignlive.com: "WPP global CCO Rob Reilly on winning Cannes Lions Network of the Year | Campaign US"