McKinsey had the opening keynote at Cannes this year. They presented a study from 16 years of award data @ Cannes and created the Award Creativity Score. This score was based on three things for a company: number of Lions won, breadth of winning categories, and year-over-year consistency. What they found was that companies with a higher Award Creativity Score also had higher total return to share holders, higher economic value, and higher organic growth.
There are other good things happening too, as McKinsey further explains... Higher ACS scoring companies have more ways of finding consumer insights and their unmet needs, use more advanced insights and analytics, use ethnography, consider themselves 'fast decision makers', have more iterative approaches to creative development, etc. Or, bottom line: they just care more. About creativity, insights and customer knowledge.