Franziska Brunner Joins CICLOPE Jury as Mercedes-Benz Creative Director Challenges Lone Genius Era

Berlin, Germany, August 14th, 2026, FinanceWire

Franziska Brunner has been appointed to the Executive Jury of CICLOPE, the international festival dedicated to craft in advertising and branded content, and will appear as a speaker at this year's Berlin Commercial Festival. Both roles place her among a small group of European creative leaders shaping how the industry judges its own work.

Brunner is a Creative Director at antoni in Berlin. Her remit covers some of the most guarded territory in automotive marketing: Mercedes-Benz itself, including its Motorsport segment AMG, the G-Class, and Maybach, the manufacturer's highest luxury tier. She is also among the youngest Creative Directors in Germany, having been appointed to a global role at an unusually early stage.

An appointment with an argument attached

Jury seats and festival stages are ordinarily quiet honors. Brunner is using hers to push a position that cuts against a story the advertising business has told about itself for decades.

The lone creative genius, she argues, is a myth that has outlived its usefulness. Campaigns now move across markets, languages, platforms and production cultures simultaneously, and a single vision holder cannot see far enough into any of them. What replaces that figure is a Creative Director who functions as a bridge builder, and she is precise about what that means. It is not a softer word for having ideas together. It is knowing exactly who needs to be in the room in the first place, deciding which points of view take priority, connecting disciplines that would otherwise never meet, and identifying which voices have to come together to cover a given territory. The better idea follows from those decisions. It is a quieter definition of authorship, and a harder one to perform.

From Vienna to the Mercedes-Benz global account

Brunner studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where her training moved across psychology, film, writing, illustration and design rather than settling into one discipline. She approaches creativity through human behavior first, treating brands as machines for building meaning, shifting perception and forming emotional attachment across cultures.

Before Berlin, she worked at Jung von Matt, one of Europe's leading creative agencies, on assignments that ranged well beyond conventional advertising: zeitgeist defining campaigns, economically significant mergers and political crisis communication. Her client list from those years reads unusually wide for someone now identified with a single automotive account: T-Mobile, the Vienna Tourist Board, the Federal President of Austria, Apple and Sony Pictures.

Freud in the Metaverse

The Vienna Tourist Board work shows a particular kind of smartness: using what already exists rather than building something new to prove a point. Brunner helped create campaigns that looked for audiences where tourism marketing had not gone, including bringing Sigmund Freud into the Metaverse while the concept was still emerging, on an existing platform, turning the city's own heritage into a cultural connection.

At antoni, her work includes the global brand platform "Because it's Mercedes-Benz," which converts brand doctrine into visual narrative that people actually feel, and cinematic approaches to technically dense stories such as the E-Class campaign "In Her Shoes," directed by François Rousselet.

Across these projects a consistent method appears. Conceptual ambition sets the target; craft decides whether the work survives contact with an audience. Brunner moves between visual languages and formats deliberately rather than defending a signature style, holding a fixed standard for detail and emotional impact whatever language a project speaks. That work has been recognized by Art Directors Club Europe, New York Festivals, Ad Age, Campaign, Little Black Book and Shots, among others.

Why the industry is listening now

Creative leadership is under real pressure. Timelines have compressed, markets demand local specificity, and the number of disciplines that must agree before anything ships keeps climbing. The agencies hitting their limits are not only the ones built around a single visionary. They are any shop still running a traditional structure that makes no room for the people who build thoughtful bridges through that complexity.

Brunner's answer places curiosity, empathy and connection in the skill column rather than the personality column. In her framing these are not pleasant traits that some leaders happen to have. They are the operational abilities that decide whether a brand can carry its needs across borders, through stringent campaigns that hold together inside its own world and inside very different cultures at once.

The themes she plans to bring, not only to Berlin Commercial but to every stage she takes, follow directly from that position: why creative leadership belongs to bridge builders, how global campaigns get built through collaboration across disciplines and cultures, and why the softer skills have become the load bearing ones.

For an industry still deciding what its next leadership model looks like, the argument arrives from someone young enough to live inside the answer.

About Franziska Brunner

Franziska Brunner is a Creative Director at antoni in Berlin, leading global creative work for Mercedes-Benz, including its Motorsport segment AMG, the G-Class and Maybach. She previously worked at Jung von Matt, with work for T-Mobile, the Vienna Tourist Board, the Federal President of Austria, Apple and Sony Pictures. A graduate of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, she serves on the Executive Jury of CICLOPE and speaks at Berlin Commercial Festival.

Article By: Jeremy Wright

Website: www.franziskabrunner.com

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