What We're Taking to Cannes Lions 2026 And What We're Hoping to Bring Back
The Conversation Has Already Shifted. We Want To Know If The Industry Has Caught Up.
For years, Cannes was the place where “great advertising” was celebrated, and the question was aesthetic and executional: did this move people? Was the craft there? Did it deserve a Lion?
That question hasn’t gone away, but it’s no longer the only one. This year, Cannes is handing out a new award: the Creative Brand Lion, which recognises not just great campaigns but great creative capability, the systems, cultures, and organisational thinking that produce consistently excellent work over time.
That’s a significant shift, and it means the industry is starting to ask: what makes creative valuable across the whole business, not just on a single brief? We think that’s the right question, and we want to see who’s actually answering it.
The Questions We’re Taking With Us
- Are Agencies Still Treating Them Like A Channel?
Creator passes are the fastest-selling ticket at Cannes 2026, outselling traditional agency registrations, The LIONS Creators programme has doubled in size, and the message from the festival itself is clear: this is no longer a fringe conversation.
But there’s a gap between what the industry says about creators and how it actually works with them. Most brand briefs still treat creator content as distribution, a way to reach an audience rather than a genuine creative partnership. The best creator work we’ve seen this year looks nothing like that, and it starts with the creator’s world, not the brand’s message.
We want to know who at Cannes has genuinely figured this out, and what it takes structurally to make it work at scale.
- Where Does Social Stop Being A Channel And Start Being The Brief?
The Social & Creator Lions exist because platform-native creativity is its own discipline. The format is the idea, the comment section is the medium, and the algorithm is the collaborator,
but most agencies still treat social as execution, the last stop on a production line that started with a TV idea. We think that’s backwards, so the next question we’re taking to Cannes is: what does it look like when social thinking shapes the brief from the start, not just the cut-down?
- What does Real Creative Integration In Gaming Actually Look Like?
Gaming has a dedicated stage at Cannes this year, with esports and interactive on the agenda. And yet most brand work in gaming still looks like sponsorship with a controller in the shot, a logo on a jersey, and a pre-roll before a stream.
The cultural engagement possible inside gaming, through communities, fandoms, in-world experiences, and collaborative play, is almost entirely untapped by mainstream brand strategy. We’re curious whether anyone at Cannes is doing work that proves otherwise, or whether gaming is still being treated as a media buy with better demographics.
- What Does AI Craft Actually Look Like, And Who Gets To Decide?
Cannes 2026 feels like the year the industry stops being impressed by AI and starts being selective about it. The early wave of “we used AI to do X” is over, and the next question is whether AI-touched work is genuinely artful, strategically smart, or just technically novel.
We’re watching to see if AI created campaigns count as what Cannes defines as creativity.
- How Do You Measure Creative Courage Without Killing It?
Effectiveness is all over the Cannes 2026 agenda, and rightly so. Creative that doesn’t work for a business isn’t really doing its job, but effectiveness frameworks have a habit of punishing the things that make work interesting: unfamiliarity, risk, the decision to do something the data doesn’t fully support yet.
The tension between proof and courage is one of the oldest arguments in the industry. We want to know if anyone is resolving it, or whether we’re all still just pretending it doesn’t exist.
Here’s What We’re Hoping To Bring Back
Cannes is where the best creative minds in the world end up in the same room, and that’s something we genuinely look forward to every year.
The conversations that happen between sessions, over dinner, on the beach, that’s where the real thinking gets done. What we want to bring back is momentum, and proof that the industry is following suit in the way we’re thinking about social, gaming, and creator work, as proper creative disciplines, not afterthoughts, is where the industry’s best are headed.
We’ll report back. See you on the Croisette.
We’ll be at Cannes Lions 2026, get in touch or send us a DM to set up a chat!