This year's Cannes Lions brought together some of the brightest minds in marketing, communications, and creativity to discuss the ideas shaping the industry's future. We asked leaders who were on the ground to share their biggest takeaways—from AI's growing role in the creative process to the power of creators, community, and cultural storytelling. Here's what stood out.
Liza Suloti, Co-founder and Chief Communications Officer, SHADOW
My greatest takeaway from Cannes was the power of human-to-human connection. Big ideas, big connections, and culture-shifting moments, all made possible by conversations. Whether sparking these connections for our clients with fellow brands or notable talent, joining stages to share our secret sauce and inspire future work along the way, or absorbing the insights of the many big thinkers we cheered on, I was happily reminded throughout the week that human connection remains ever present and necessary.
As AI continues to evolve, it only amplifies the importance of those relationships. Technology is transforming how we create and work, but the conversations and shared curiosity that spark great ideas remain irreplaceable. Cannes was a reminder that the future isn't about choosing between human creativity and AI. It's about how the two can work together to unlock even bigger possibilities.
Brad Zeifman, Co-founder and Chief Expansion Officer, SHADOW
Even a literal heatwave in the south of France won’t keep CMOs and marketing execs from the big stages, panels, and private parties. My biggest takeaway from Cannes Lions 2026 was based on one word: resilience. I heard several times throughout the festival from brand marketers that they are unwavering in their commitments to unique storytelling and consumer engagement rather than superficial metrics. It’s incredibly exciting to hear that brands aren't backing down; instead, they are doubling down on community, creativity, and the physical experiences that bring people together, regardless of the climate.
Brian Vaughan, Executive Creative Director and Partner, SHADOW
If two Cannes ago marked AI as the novel new tech in advertising, and one Cannes ago explored (and even questioned) how exactly AI might marry with creativity, it felt like this Cannes was a broad validation of SHADOW’s philosophy: human-centered storytelling, cultural fluency, and big, bold creative risk-taking matter more than ever for brands to breakthrough, else you risk showing up like everyone else. The clearest use case for AI is accelerating everything around moments of creative breakthrough (the ideating, the iterating, the prototyping, etc.) so we arrive at those moments faster and more often. But the breakthroughs themselves, and their connection to culture, still have to come from people.
And, being at Cannes this year felt like a proof point, honestly. The happenstance run-ins and the density of creative people colliding in one place made those creative sparks feel more pronounced and exciting than any other time I’ve attended.”
Ed Starr, SVP Market & Business Development, Motive
“After several years away, returning to Cannes Lions 2026 felt like stepping back into a room full of energy and possibility. The scale, the ideas, and the sheer volume of activity made it one for the ages. Here are a few reflections from my time on the Croisette.”
Embracing the Beautiful Chaos
Plenty of people said it felt overwhelming this year — too many panels, too many activations, just too much. I saw the opposite. The intensity showed how vibrant and alive our industry remains. I felt fortunate to work in a field that can generate and sustain this level of excitement and connection.
The Rare Gift of People
What stands out most is how uncommon it is to have so many sharp, generous minds in one place at the same time. The real magic happened in the unplanned moments—running into colleagues and friends you haven’t seen in years and picking up right where you left off. Those conversations reminded me why we do this work.
Experiential Marketing at the Center
Brand activations continued to set the standard. The creativity, craft, and thoughtfulness poured into every experience was remarkable. In a world of screens and algorithms, these physical moments still deliver the strongest human connection—and they keep raising the bar for what’s possible.
AI: The Center of the Sandwich
My favorite line I overheard all week: “AI is the center of the sandwich, and the human element is the bread.” That perfectly captures where we are. This year the conversation moved beyond tools and experiments toward how we build integrated systems—pairing technology with human judgment, creativity, and measurement—so ideas deliver real, lasting impact at scale.
Sports as Cultural Glue
The power of sports was impossible to miss. Sport Beach was a constant hub, World Cup watch parties popped up everywhere, and the new dedicated LIONS Sport programming reflected how brands are embedding themselves in fan culture rather than just buying into events. Sports continues to bring people together in the most authentic ways.
A Few Personal Highlights
Some moments stood out for me:
Honorable Mentions
Yahoo Explorer’s Society and Microsoft Gardens both felt fresh and inventive. Swayable + Portrait Media Group’s takeover of a Steak ’n Shake showed real nerve and outside-the-box thinking. The Nikkei Tea House with the Financial Times offered a calm, distinctive way to show up and connect.
Cannes always comes down to the people. I’m grateful for the conversations and reconnections with so many talented colleagues and friends.
Already starting the 2027 countdown!
Melissa Rosenfield, Founder, IFP Communications
Comms Finally Got Invited To The Table, And It’s About Time
This was, by every account I heard, the first year this many comms people showed up to Cannes Lions at all, and as a comms person I found that fascinating, because with LLMs and AI changing how people search and discover brands, comms isn’t a function you can leave under-resourced anymore, it’s block and tackle for brand reputation now, one bad Reddit thread can become the thing an LLM tells someone about your brand, and I’ve been saying for months that earned media and channels like Substack are moving the needle on discovery in ways performance marketing can’t anymore, performance got too expensive and it stopped converting the way it used to, PR has been the redheaded stepchild of marketing for a long time and I watched that start to click for people in real time this week, there’s a lot more here and I’m writing the longer version of this next Thursday.
The Celebrities are the Vehicle, Not The Work
This isn’t a hot take and it isn’t about how hard anyone works, but it’s getting harder for me to sit through a celebrity telling a room of marketers and founders how to build something when their reality isn’t anywhere close to ours, no resentment, just reality, they have great people around them and that’s exactly why they were able to get to where they are, and I’d rather hear from the founder who bootstrapped it and is still figuring it out, or the marketer stretching a budget that’s way smaller than it should be and still winning awards anyway, that’s the story, not the person with a team built around them telling the room how they did it on their own.
A Lot Of Brands Showed Up To Spend Money and Disappear
The activations felt like fashion week met SXSW met Coachella, Cîroc’s athletic club is the clearest example, pickleball, tennis, great merch, I thought it was a genuinely cool experience, and I get it, Cîroc is a French vodka selling a lifestyle, of course they want to be the billboard for that, that part makes sense to me, but it’s a huge amount of money to spend on relevancy that might not actually have an ROI, and it’s not even about being away from the beach, they could have sponsored something on the beach with everyone else and probably gotten more visibility for it, being up in the chateau was a play for exclusivity, but underneath all of it I’m still not sure why Cîroc was at Cannes Lions at all, I get the instinct, give people a respite from the convention center, but disconnected is disconnected, and it made the whole thing feel more like a performance of showing up than a reason to be there, and then there’s the swag, I said no to almost everything and still ended up with enough left over that I set up a table at our house and gave it away, jewelry, tote bags, towels, bags, an insane amount of stuff for one week, there has to be a better way to do this.
Avery Akkineni, Chief Marketing Officer, VaynerX
Winning in this landscape means brands must move beyond outdated tactics and focus on showing up where conversations are actually happening. The creator economy has evolved from a marketing channel into core brand infrastructure, influencing culture and shaping how brands are discovered. We’re seeing a critical shift where consumers are increasingly turning to AI to discover and evaluate brands. The ones that will stand out are those creating the strongest signals across cultures: driven by both AI and analog experiences. We introduced the “barbell of relevance” at Cannes this year, a new strategy we’re implementing that will help brands earn relevance through creators, communities, and meaningful participation in the conversations that shape consumer decisions. This will be the next era of brand building.
Cosette Chaput, CEO & Co-Founder, Always Alpha
It was clear walking away from Cannes this year that the biggest takeaway is this: the power has shifted to creators, and the most powerful creators in the world are athletes. Here's why - they don't have audiences, they have fandoms. An audience watches. A fandom shows up, every time, no matter what. That's the whole game.
Female athletes are especially gifted at this. They build trust through real stories - the parts of their lives they choose to share far beyond the field of play and the accompanying honesty behind the highlight reel. That kind of relatability and vulnerability can't be manufactured. It's earned, one true moment at a time, and it's why their fandoms run as deep as they do.
Sport is also the one thing left that can unite the entire world at once, and we're watching it happen right now with the Men's World Cup. Nothing else puts hundreds of millions of people in front of the same moment, rooting for the same outcome, together, live making sports the most AI-proof magic we have left. No algorithm can fake the thrill of watching something happen with no idea how it ends. That's irreplaceable - and it's exactly why people keep showing up.
This is only the beginning. The Men's World Cup is still underway, the Women's World Cup arrives next summer, and LA28 follows two summers after that. Every one of those moments compounds the value of the athletes carrying this fandom forward - and female athletes are proving they generate 2.8x higher purchase intent than lifestyle influencers doing it.
