Six Years, One Shoe, and the Lion That Proves It
A Canadian Cannes Lions juror on this year's Grand Prix win.
Sabaa Quao speaking on a panel at Cannes Lions
TBWA\Canada just won Cannes Lions' Innovation Grand Prix for a running shoe six years in the making.
The project, Supernova Adaptive, is a performance running shoe for Adidas, built with and inspired by the Down syndrome community. Not six weeks of sprint planning dressed up as innovation. Six years of actual work.
We caught up with Sabaa Quao for his read on what made this year different. Quao sat on this year's Innovation jury representing Canada, sits on the Cannes Lions Advisory Board alongside The Globe and Mail, and co-chairs Canada's Digital Young Lions. Between building PlusCo Venture Studio out of Cossette and sitting on more than twenty creative and marketing juries over his career, he's got a fairly rare vantage point on where the industry's attention actually belongs.
Proof of Concept Is the Starting Line Now, Not the Finish
Jury president Kazuhiro Shimura set the tone early. “Proof of Concept is no longer the finish line," he told the jury. “It is becoming the starting point. What matters now is whether that idea can create real change."
From there, the jury applied that shift through three lenses: whether an idea has already started to shift something real, what future it opens up, and how deeply it could reshape what's around it. Supernova Adaptive is the case study for all three. It's already on runners' feet, it opens the door for adaptive design to become standard rather than niche, and it reframes who performance footwear is built for in the first place.
From 162 entries, the jury awarded five Lions total: one Gold, one Silver, two Bronze. “We were well past the shiny-object phase, at least among this year's winners," Quao says. By the shortlist stage, he says the technology and the outcomes in the winning work were simply “byproducts of maturity and longevity," which he calls hallmarks of professional creativity rather than novelty for its own sake. Six years of work with the Down syndrome community is exactly that kind of byproduct: nobody set out to make headlines, they set out to make a shoe that fit.
That's a different bar than whether a campaign went viral. It's asking whether the work is still standing a year later, doing what it set out to do.
Big Tech Wants In. It's Not Steering.
Ask Quao where big tech fits into the creative agenda and he doesn't hedge: “Big tech is entering marketing and advertising looking for revenue. I don't see technology companies driving the creative agenda."
The upstream thinking, he says, still belongs to creative decision makers, specifically the ones “willing to challenge a category's core assumptions before reaching for a piece of technology." The shoe is a case in point. The idea didn't start with a piece of adaptive tech looking for a use case. It started with the question of why performance running shoes had never been built for the Down syndrome community at all, technology came second.
Worth remembering next time a platform update gets treated like a strategic pivot.
Two Very Different Clocks
Judging Digital Young Lions and the Innovation jury within months of each other gave Quao a side-by-side view most people in the industry never get. The young competitors, he says, “showed an intuitive, natural fluency with the zeitgeist," building ideas for the moment and responsive to what's happening right now.
The Innovation work runs on the opposite clock. “The art of the long view was in full effect," Quao says, with much of the hardest work happening upstream inside client organizations long before a campaign ever launches. The project is the extreme version of that clock: six years of collaboration before it ever hit a store shelf. Both are valuable creative skills. They just don't move at the same speed.
The Real Story Was Never the Technology
Quao's highlight from the week wasn't a piece of tech or a stage moment. It's the timelines. “We didn't award any flashes in the pan," he says. “We awarded work well beyond campaign thinking." The winning teams took on genuinely complex problems and stuck with them long enough to see the collaboration through properly, none more than the team behind it.
“That kind of patience isn't glamorous," Quao says, “but it's the thing I keep coming back to as the real story of this year's Innovation shortlist and winners."
Six years on a single shoe says more about where the creative bar has landed than any AI demo on the Croisette this week.
About Sabaa Quao:
Sabaa Quao is an entrepreneur, creative lead, and strategist with three decades of experience at the intersection of creativity, technology, and business model innovation. He is Founding President of PlusCo Venture Studio, an innovation spinoff from Cossette, Canada's largest marketing and advertising agency, where he previously served as Chief Creative and Innovation Officer. Quao has served on more than twenty national and international creative and marketing juries, sits on the Cannes Lions Advisory Board in partnership with The Globe and Mail, co-chairs Canada's Digital Young Lions, and represented Canada on the Innovation Awarding Jury at the 2026 Cannes Lions Festival.
About Cannes Lions:
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the marketing and advertising industry's leading global awards show, held annually in Cannes, France. Its Innovation category, launched in 2013, recognizes work where technology and creativity combine to solve real-world problems.
