LePub won a Cannes Lion on a New Balance case study a journalist couldn't verify

LePub's São Paulo office entered 'Followers Store,' a campaign for New Balance built around São Paulo FC and a geo-targeted push-notification system, into Cannes Lions 2025. The case film described fans near the club's stadium receiving alerts for a limited shirt drop and reported it sold 45,000 shirts in a single day, backed by footage of media coverage and fan reaction. It won a Bronze Lion.

Brazilian journalist Demétrio Vecchioli investigated the entry after the festival and could not find public evidence the push-notification presale had taken place. Several of the media outlets shown citing the campaign in the case film had not covered it, or did not publish in Brazil at all, and some of the influencer reaction clips appeared to have been edited or presented out of context.

New Balance said it had not approved the case study's contents and had been unaware of what LePub submitted to Cannes under its name — placing responsibility for the entry's claims on the agency rather than the client. LePub acknowledged inaccuracies in the submission, said it had zero tolerance for the situation, and opened an internal investigation; its head of creative and co-president departed shortly afterward.

The case became one of several fabrication scandals to hit Cannes Lions 2025 alongside DM9's AI-manipulated Grand Prix entry, prompting the festival to require every future submission to be personally signed off by both the submitting agency's business leader and a senior marketer from the client.