Neurodivergence is a ‘powerful creative engine’ not faulty wiring

ANDREY Tyukavkin, chief invention officer and global executive creative director at Publicis-owned creative agency LePub, is at the Cannes Lions Festival to discuss how neuro- diversity can help unlock more and better creative ideas. Speaking to Lions Daily News ahead of Monday's session, Chronic Creative Disorder: Imagination as a Neurological Condition,

Tyukavkin said he aims to “reframe what we often call ‘improper wiring’ — the neurodivergent brain — not as a flaw, but as a powerful crea-tive engine. My mind sometimes panics, spirals, switches channels mid-thought. It doesn’t always think straight. But that unpredictability is often where the magic happens and it’s important to embrace this as a creative.”

Aside from the talk, Tyukavkin said the Cannes Lions is also “full of opportunities to connect and collaborate”. He added: “That mix of talent, energy and vision in one place is always electric. We’ll be making two presentations in the Innovation category and cheering on our LePub colleagues for their Titanium entry, which we’re incredibly proud of.”

The Virtual Heineken Silver

A core element of LePub’s mantra is that brands that embed themselves in culture thrive. An example, Tyukavkin said, is Heineken: “Year after year, Heineken enters new cultural spaces. In 2022, we took a bold stand to make fun of the metaverse [‘The Virtual Heineken Silver’], which we knew to be a fad, and it helped make us culturally relevant among online population and gamers.

The next year, we addressed social life in games [‘The Gaming Fridge’]. In 2024 and 2025, we found lateral ways to solve issues football fans are facing — again, often using a combination of insight and technology [‘Trust Bars’ in Korea] or used tech to communicate how we could use tech less for a better social life [‘The Boring Phone’, ‘The Flipper’]. If you look at key brand metrics like meaningfulness and relevance, you will see it grows with each activation.”

‘Trust Bars’ in Korea

Tech is a crucial dimension of LePub’s work, though Tyukavkin is quick to stress that he is not interested in tech for tech’s sake, but in how tech and culture collide: “We try to get inspired by aspects of technology to challenge cultural norms and ride — or even inspire — a countermovement, like we did with releasing a dumbphone [‘The Boring Phone’ campaign]. Dumbphones became extremely popular again last year as a sym- bol of digital mindfulness. By sensing this trend from the tech perspective and creating a tech piece, we were among the brave brands that stand with consumers in their battle with digital over- load. All without being preachy or unrealistic.”

With this in mind, the Cannes Lions is also a great opportunity for Tyukavkin to talk about LeGarage, a tech and innovation-driven collective launched earlier this year. In a landscape where efficiency often stifles creativity, LeGarage champions innovation as the key to exponential growth. More than a creative department, LeGarage is a hub for tech enthusiasts, innovators and culture-driven thinkers — a space where technology is applied to challenge the status quo.

Asked to specify which aspects of the status quo creatives should be challenging, Tyukavkin replied: “the overindulgence with AI and the fact that machines are becoming a part of social life, removing meaningfulness from communications.”

He also takes issue with “the ever-lasting race of gadgets — the craponomics, when tech products are predestined to be broken or become obsolete soon after purchase, so you keep buying new versions. The latter we are tackling with Philips. LeGarage exists to disrupt this loop, not by rejecting tech, but by demanding more from it.” By operating at the nexus of creativity, culture and tech, Tyukavkin said LePub and LeGarage have developed a unique edge.

“While our roots are in creative agency culture, the way we operate today often mirrors that of a tech company. We invent, prototype, build and scale in ways that go far beyond advertising.”