UABDivulga - Barcelona recerca i innovació

Every year, advertising creativity festivals around the world reward campaigns considered to represent the best ideas in the industry. Among them, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity stands as the leading benchmark of professional excellence. Winning a Lion is often associated with prestige, visibility, and career advancement. But how do award-winning creatives themselves experience this recognition?

In this study, we explore the experiences of eighteen Brazilian creative directors who have won Cannes Lions awards to understand how they evaluate creativity festivals as systems of professional recognition. Through in-depth interviews, we identify a recurring pattern of emotional ambivalence. While creatives feel pride and satisfaction when winning awards and acknowledge their symbolic value, they also express skepticism about how merit is defined and granted.

Our findings show that festivals generate different forms of capital. Symbolic capital, embodied in awards, enhances professional legitimacy and career mobility. Social capital is built through networking opportunities, relationships with peers and clients, and access to influential professional circles. Cultural capital emerges from learning experiences, participation in talks, and exposure to global creative trends. These benefits explain why creatives continue to engage with festivals despite their concerns.

At the same time, participants highlight practices that undermine the credibility of awards, such as the prevalence of scam work created solely for competitions, the proliferation of award categories, political maneuvering within juries, and the increasing commercialization of festivals. These dynamics raise doubts about whether awards truly reflect creative merit or are shaped by strategic and economic interests.

Based on these tensions, we introduce the Ambivalence of Merit Theory, which explains how recognition systems can be both affirming and destabilizing. Merit is not experienced as a neutral criterion but as a socially constructed mechanism that can simultaneously support professional success and generate ethical unease in contemporary advertising.