This was my first Cannes Lions, and it was equal parts exciting and overwhelming. There was more content than anyone could possibly absorb, a surprising number of people to reconnect with, and a full calendar of meetings, panels, and partner time to navigate.
Because of that, my goal was not to chase everything. I found the most useful approach was to be selective, spend time on the conversations most worth learning from, and come back with a sharper point of view for my team and for my clients. I also was advised that the extreme heat was a real part of Cannes, I listened to the warnings and awoke early to jump in the water. 😊
THEMES OF THE WEEK
Creator: Creator is a foundational line item now, not a side tactic
AI + Operating Model: Agentic AI, still a workflow and governance problem
Creative + Performance: Optimization can’t fix weak ideas
Measurement: Attention quality, not just reach, is the new currency
Partners: Conversations to act on
A few themes kept surfacing all week. Brand building is back at the center of the conversation. Marketers are seeking more validated ways to build emotional connections with consumers. Creator is increasingly part of that story, not as a side tactic, but as a real part of how brands earn relevance and attention. Those were the areas that felt most important to focus on, and the panel highlights below distilled the clearest signal from a very noisy week.
1. AI has moved past pilot purgatory, but most organizations still haven't redesigned how they work around it: McKinsey found nearly 60% of marketers now use AI multiple times a week, yet only 10% have rebuilt their workflows to capture the value.
2. Creators showed up in force this year, over 500 at the festival, and the conversation moved past reach and follower counts into whether creator investment can hold up to the same measurement rigor as every other media line.
3. Attention quality is becoming its own metric. A 10% increase in consumer focus correlates with a 17% increase in spending, which is reshaping how media quality gets judged beyond reach or duration.
4. Stella Rising was part of the Indie Agency News activation on the ground, which put creator measurement, media accountability, and full-funnel planning squarely in the middle of the week's agenda.
5. Tatari: Dinner with the team, good catch-up and a chance to dig into where streaming and TV measurement is headed.
6. TikTok: Yacht happy hour, casual but useful, worth a follow-up conversation once the dust from the week settles.
7. Mediaocean + Guideline: Joined their yacht for a conversation spanning media operations and financial reconciliation—an area worth watching as budgets get more complex.
8. Lyft: La Guerite, good conversation on where out-of-home and rider media are headed.
9. YouTube: Breakthrough Brands dinner, a great room and a good chance to reconnect on creator programming.
PANEL DEEP-DIVES FROM CANNES LIONS 2026
Three panels worth the time.
My favorites moved past vendor narratives and hype into practical, evidence-grounded conversation.
Panel 1: Beyond the Click: How Agentic AI Is Rewriting Marketing Effectiveness and Industry Impact
Speakers: Tanuja Randery (AWS), LaShonda Anderson-Williams (Salesforce) · Moderated by Michael Schmidt (AWS)
The AI discussion at Cannes was at its best when it moved away from vague disruption language and got practical about how marketing organizations will actually work differently.
- Agentic AI Is A Workflow Issue Now, Not An Innovation Topic
- The framing has shifted from "agentic AI is coming" to "where does it create value today, what has to stay human-led, and what operating discipline does it require?"
- The Strongest Framing Was Human-Centered
- Agents can improve speed, personalization, and support—but people still own judgment, trust, and brand standards. That's the same "AI and humans, not AI or humans" line running through the rest of the festival.
- The Gap Isn't Technology. It's The Operating Model
- McKinsey's post-Cannes research found nearly 60% of marketers now use AI multiple times a week, but only 10% have actually redesigned their workflows to capture meaningful business impact from it. Adoption has outpaced transformation.
- The Bigger Implication Is Organizational
- Brands need to define what stays human-only, what becomes AI-assisted, and how performance will be judged—or AI stays stuck in pilot mode indefinitely.
Panel 2: Performance Marketing's Missing Variable: Rethinking Creative + Optimization
Speakers: Beverly Jackson (Zillow Group), Melody Lee (Mercedes-Benz), Victoria Sjardin (Mars), Liz Roche (Albertsons Media Collective) · Moderated by Nicole Guess (Perion)
This was one of the more useful performance conversations because it pointed back to something the market tends to forget: optimization can only do so much if the underlying creative is weak—and it came from operators across auto, CPG, and retail media, not a vendor pitch.
- Creative Should Be Treated As A Performance Variable
- Not just a brand layer sitting on top of media. The panel pushed back on the idea that creative and performance are separate budget conversations at all.
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Attention Quality And Effectiveness Are Becoming Tightly Linked
- This is where the panel's point connects to a broader finding from Cannes this year: a 10% increase in consumer focus correlates with a 17% increase in spending. That raises the value of stronger creative work in every channel, not just the flashy ones.
- Media, Measurement, and Creative Need A Tighter Loop
- The operational takeaway: optimization should improve strong ideas, not compensate for weak ones. That requires those three functions working from the same brief, not handing off in sequence.
Panel 3: Creator Calculus: Measuring Influence
Fireside chat between Danielle Moore, Head of Global Creator Solutions at Nielsen and me.
This one's a little different from the other two, as I was on stage for it, not in the audience. But it earns its spot here because it's the conversation I'd point clients to first. The crux dealt with: what it actually takes to hold creator investment to the same rigor as every other line in the plan.
- Creator Is Now A Foundational Line Item, Not An Experimental One
- IAB data puts creator ad spend growing roughly 4x faster than traditional media, with the market on pace toward the $40B+ range. That kind of velocity is why brands like Coke and Unilever moving social-first matters as a bellwether for everyone else.
- Vetting Has To Go Well Beyond Follower Count
- Real signal comes from four layers: genuine engagement (comments, saves, shares—not just likes), the right audience for the brand's actual segments, the behavior that audience takes (click, add-to-cart, dwell time), and whether the creator is pulling its weight for the rest of the plan, including search and retail media.
- Short-Term Metrics Miss The Long Tail
- Danielle shared an example of a wine brand that sponsored a blogging conference over a decade ago — attendees still cite that single experience as the reason they buy the brand today, more than a decade later. That's the case for folding creator data into MMM and brand lift alongside every other channel, instead of treating it as an unmeasured halo effect.
- Danielle shared an example of a wine brand that sponsored a blogging conference over a decade ago — attendees still cite that single experience as the reason they buy the brand today, more than a decade later. That's the case for folding creator data into MMM and brand lift alongside every other channel, instead of treating it as an unmeasured halo effect.
Creators Amplify A Strategy. They Don't Replace One
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The "our creative is weak, let's just hire a creator to fix it" instinct is a trap. Creators are incredible amplifiers of a strong brand, but they can't invent positioning or brand assets on a brand's behalf — and they tend to expose weak strategy faster than they cover for it.
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THE THROUGH-LINE
Taken together, these three panels clarified something useful about the week. AI is changing how work gets done, but it isn't replacing the need for judgment, taste, or strategy. Performance marketing is getting smarter, but creative quality still does a huge amount of the work. And creator is finally being asked to prove itself in the same terms as everything else in the plan—reach, incrementality, ROI—rather than living on its own island of vanity metrics.
All feel consistent with the broader signal coming out of Cannes this year: better systems matter, better data matters, but building brands still depends on strong ideas, real audience truth, and human judgment applied with discipline.
PEOPLE + PARTNERS
Panels aside, the best part of a first Cannes was the density of good people in one place. Some of the most useful conversations of the week happened off any stage, over dinner or on a boat, catching up with long-standing partners and relationships across the industry.
None of these were pitch meetings. They were the kind of relationship-building that's easy to undervalue and that ends up mattering more than any single panel—worth carving out real time for again next year.
COMMENTS