What Cannes Lions 2026 actually taught us
From Sport Beach to the Palais, here's what really stuck with our team after a week on the ground.
Let me set the scene: 95-degree heat. Shoulder-to-shoulder crowds on the Croisette. The scent of sunscreen, rosé, and ambition hangs in the Mediterranean air. Cannes Lions 2026 was, as it always is, overwhelming in the best and most clarifying way, especially for a first-time attendee like myself.
Our team spent most of the week at Sport Beach, Stagwell's flagship Cannes activation and by most accounts, one of the most magnetic spots on the Croisette. For us, that meant being embedded in the broader Code and Theory and Stagwell networks, surrounded by clients, partners, athletes, and brand leaders who turned Sport Beach into its own kind of main stage for the week.
What we saw was a Croisette transformed. Every stretch of real estate was a bid for attention, engineered not for the executives roaming the boardwalk in blazers, but increasingly for the creators documenting it. More on that in a moment.
More than a week has passed since we landed back in New York, a long holiday weekend in between, and these are the three things that haven't left us. Turns out fireworks and a few days off don't quiet the ideas that actually stick.
01. The work that broke through did more than advertise.
Year after year, the campaigns that rise to the top at Cannes are the ones that didn't just tap into a cultural moment, they created one. This year was no different, and the Lion-winning work backed it up on both ends of the spectrum.
At the high end of cultural noise: Kit Kat's Heist and Apple's "Shot on iPhone" capture of Bad Bunny's Super Bowl Halftime Show, a production so visible and so widely discussed that it became its own conversation entirely. These weren't campaigns that needed a press release. They announced themselves.
But the awards also recognized something quieter and just as important: brands correcting the record in their own categories. The Ordinary's ‘Periodic Fable’ took aim at the infinite scroll of dubious skincare tips crowding social feeds. Columbia Sportswear's ‘Expedition Impossible’ challenged flat-earthers, outfitted in Columbia gear, to go find the edge of the earth. Neither had the pop-culture wattage of Kit Kat or Bad Bunny, but both showed that storytelling with genuine conviction, work that has the nerve to say something, is as necessary as ever. There are more ways to build brand authority than issuing an official statement.
The through-line across all of it: the best creative doesn't run alongside the cultural conversation. It becomes the conversation.
02. Creators aren't a channel. They're the center of gravity.
Creators have officially arrived as the most important force in brand marketing. Not as a media buy, not as an amplification tactic, but as the driving force. And Cannes made that impossible to ignore.
Every major branded space on the Croisette, from Salesforce to Spotify to the Female Quotient Beach to Canva's Creative Cabana to Amazon Port, was architected for creator engagement, not for the CMOs and executives who technically ran the show. Charm bracelet booths. Selfie mirrors. Branded challenges. These activations weren't designed to impress the person in the blazer. They were designed to be documented.
The infrastructure is following the intent. Unilever has rebuilt its entire creator strategy as an operational model, not a campaign add-on. Amazon launched Creator Services on the same logic. Bose’s CMO told Digiday he hasn't used a traditional creative agency in four or five years, with creators filling that gap. That's a signal worth taking seriously, whether you're a brand rethinking your briefing process or an agency rethinking what you're actually being hired for.
The distinction that matters now isn't budget size, it's mindset. The brands and agencies winning this era aren't treating creators as vendors to activate on a timeline. They're treating them as genuine collaborators with their own audiences, instincts, and creative authority. Knowing when to give latitude and when to provide guardrails is the actual skill. It's less about building another "creator program" and more about building a fundamentally different kind of relationship from the start.
Year after year, the campaigns that rise to the top at Cannes are the ones that didn't just tap into a cultural moment, they created one.
03. AI was everywhere at Cannes, and almost nowhere in the work.
The French Riviera looked more like a Silicon Valley satellite office than an advertising festival this year. From the Nice Airport to the Palais, every billboard was plastered with some variation of "AI-powered workflows," "agentic tools," "intelligence economy." The talk was big. The claims were everywhere.
And yet, at the Grand Prix level, only two Lion-winning campaigns were from AI companies or directly about AI as a subject: Anthropic's Claude spot by Mother (Film Grand Prix) and Google DeepMind's Project Genie (Digital Craft Grand Prix). Two. In a year when Cannes added a dedicated AI Craft subcategory to its awards.
The dominant framing on the ground was operational: AI as business infrastructure, workflow acceleration, team capability expansion. That's legitimate and necessary work. But when you put the industry's best creative talent in one room and the most visible public-facing AI creative feels hollow, repetitive, and flat, that's worth naming. The category is asserting inevitability through sheer presence. That's not the same as demonstrating value through craft.
OpenAI's Chief Revenue Officer called this the shift "from an awareness to the intelligence economy." Fine. But the intelligence economy is going to need better creative.
Cannes is always what you make of it: chaotic, expensive, occasionally electric. What struck us most wasn't any single session or activation, but how much clarity a week on the ground actually produces when you're in the right conversations. We came back sharper on where the industry is headed and more energized about Kettle's role in it. Not a bad souvenir.
