March 20, 2026
Say "Cannes" to most people and they picture red carpets, film premieres, and movie stars ascending the famous steps of the Palais des Festivals. But say "Cannes" to anyone who has spent a career in the advertising, marketing, or technology industry, and a very different image comes to mind — one that is equally glamorous, equally intoxicating, and in many ways more consequential for the direction of global business.
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is where the advertising world goes to get inspired, do deals, and argue about the future. It is an event unlike any other in the industry's calendar. Meetings happen over coffee and croissants in the early morning hours, over glasses of rosé as the Mediterranean sun climbs high, in beach cabanas and on docked yachts, in the grand halls of the Palais and along the famous Croisette. Million-dollar villas host billion-dollar conversations. The Carlton Terrace, the Gutter Bar, and dozens of hotel lobbies serve as impromptu boardrooms where some of the most important relationships in marketing get made and maintained.
The week-long festival draws more than 11,000 attendees from all over the world — agency executives, brand-side CMOs, technology leaders, young creatives, and students who make the pilgrimage to this corner of the French Riviera to observe what the industry's best are doing, thinking, and building. It is simultaneously a celebration, a business conference, an awards show, and a philosophical debate about the nature of creativity itself. And for anyone serious about understanding where advertising, technology, and consumer culture are heading, it is an essential experience.
Matt Britton, CEO of Suzy, the consumer intelligence platform serving hundreds of Fortune 500 clients, has spent decades at the intersection of consumer culture and creative strategy. His first trip to Cannes produced a set of observations that remain as relevant today as when they were first made — and in many ways have only grown more prescient as the advertising industry has been radically reshaped by digital technology, data, and most recently artificial intelligence.
When Britton attended Cannes Lions early in his career as CEO of MRY, a Publicis agency he helped build into one of the defining digital-first creative shops of its era, he put it plainly: "The whole industry is moving away from being an art to a science. I want to be part of the shift. The way we work as an agency is, there's not a good idea, only good results."
That framing — results over ideas, science over art — was ahead of its time in an industry that had historically treated creative instinct as its primary currency. But Britton's perspective captured something real that was already reshaping the Croisette. The types of attendees at Cannes were changing. What had long been the exclusive domain of agency executives and their after-hours networking was evolving into something broader and more complex.
CMOs from blue-chip companies like Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola were becoming fixtures at the festival, sitting alongside the creative directors and account managers who had always defined Cannes culture. Technology companies — Facebook, Google, Twitter, Spotify — were not just sponsors but active participants in shaping the intellectual agenda of the week. The conversations that mattered most were no longer just about which campaign deserved a Lion. They were about how the entire machinery of advertising was being rebuilt from the ground up.
That shift has only accelerated in the years since. By 2024, the transformation Britton had anticipated was essentially complete. As one industry observer noted at that year's festival, AI had moved from being a topic of excited speculation to being treated as an underlying operating system for the business. The question was no longer whether AI would transform advertising. It was how fast, and what would survive the transition intact.
Even as Cannes Lions has evolved into something closer to a technology conference than a traditional creative awards show, one constant has persisted. As Britton observed when reflecting on the festival's core DNA: "What's remained constant is that you don't win at Cannes unless you have an idea." But the definition of what constitutes a winning idea has expanded dramatically — and continues to evolve.
In the early days of the festival, a great idea meant a great piece of film, a brilliant print campaign, a piece of outdoor advertising that made the world stop and look. Today, a great idea might be a data infrastructure that enables genuine personalization at scale. It might be a platform partnership that creates a new kind of consumer experience. It might be an AI-powered creative sprint that produces better results in thirty minutes than a traditional agency process produces in thirty days.
Britton's definition — that a great idea means "bringing two unexpected things together" — has proven remarkably durable. The most celebrated work at recent Cannes Lions has consistently been work that fused elements that previously seemed incompatible: humanity and technology, performance marketing and brand building, entertainment and utility. The Michael CeraVe campaign, which turned a Reddit joke about the phonetic similarity between actor Michael Cera and the skincare brand into a viral social phenomenon, is exactly the kind of unexpected collision Britton was describing. It won a Grand Prix in the Social & Influencer category and demonstrated that surprise and resonance, not production values or media budgets, remain the real currency of creative effectiveness.
Renault's double Grand Prix winner "Cars to Work" — a program that helped employees without vehicles access employment opportunities — similarly demonstrated that the most powerful ideas operate at the intersection of genuine human need and brand relevance. As one jury chair noted, the work was impressive because it solved a real problem while simultaneously building commercial value.
These are not accidents. They reflect a deeper truth about what Cannes rewards and what the market actually responds to: ideas that earn their place in culture by doing something real.
For the past several years, artificial intelligence has dominated the Cannes Lions agenda in ways that mirror its dominance of every other business conversation happening globally. But the nature of that conversation has shifted considerably, and the shift is instructive.
In the early wave of AI enthusiasm that swept through the industry, the conversations at Cannes were largely about potential. What might generative AI mean for creative production? Could it replace certain categories of work? Would it democratize creativity or devalue it? The tone was speculative, sometimes breathless, occasionally panicked.
By 2024, those conversations had matured into something more grounded and more useful. Marketers had moved from ideating about AI applications into actually deploying initial use cases, focusing on areas where AI could create efficiencies without putting creative quality at risk. The C-suite consensus, as captured across multiple sessions, was that efficiency was the most immediately actionable AI opportunity. Time savings, faster iteration, the ability to repurpose and resize assets — these were the things brand leaders were actually measuring and reporting on.
At Cannes Lions 2025, the conversation took another step forward. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman argued that as AI capabilities become universally available, human judgment becomes more valuable rather than less. "AI capabilities are going to be commodities," he told a packed Debussy Theatre. "Creativity, grit, hustle, resilience, risk taking — these are the qualities that will make the difference." The implications for the advertising industry are significant: the creative function is not being automated away. It is being elevated, because the things that AI cannot replicate — genuine human insight, emotional truth, cultural intuition — are increasingly the primary differentiators.
Meta introduced eleven new generative AI advertising features at Cannes Lions 2025, including tools that allow marketers to convert product images into polished video ads without production teams. The company reported that its AI-powered Advantage+ campaigns deliver measurable improvements in return on ad spend. These are not theoretical capabilities — they are production tools that brands are deploying at scale right now.
And yet, even amid all this technological momentum, some of the most resonant voices at Cannes have been the ones urging restraint and perspective. P&G's Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard put it plainly: even with all the technology available, "the answer will not be found in the data or the algorithms. The answer is in the idea, which comes from the heart and the soul." Musician James Blake, speaking at the festival, warned against the risk of short-circuiting the learning process by reaching for technology before mastering craft.
These are not anti-technology arguments. They are pro-humanity arguments made within a deeply technology-saturated context. And they capture something important about what Cannes Lions, at its best, has always stood for.
One of the most significant evolutions at Cannes Lions over the past decade has been the shifting balance of power among its attendees. The festival has always attracted agency talent — account teams, creative directors, producers, strategists. But the growing presence of brand-side marketing leaders, and more recently technology executives, has fundamentally altered the dynamics of every conversation that happens on the Croisette.
When Britton sat down with a group of CMOs during his first Cannes — including executives from Coca-Cola, Adobe, Visa, and Facebook — the conversations reflected an industry at a pivot point. These were leaders who were simultaneously trying to honor the creative traditions that had built their brands while embracing the data-driven, technology-enabled approaches that were clearly the future. The tension between those two imperatives — creativity and accountability, art and science — was palpable then and has never fully resolved.
If anything, the arrival of AI as a mainstream business capability has made that tension more acute. The creative community worries, with some justification, that the relentless push for efficiency and measurability will erode the conditions that allow genuinely original work to emerge. The technology community argues, also with some justification, that AI tools liberate creative talent from the tedious and repetitive aspects of production work, leaving more bandwidth for the thinking that actually matters.
What both sides recognize, when they're being honest, is that the category of "advertising" has expanded far beyond its original boundaries. The festival reflects this. As one agency CEO observed at Cannes Lions 2024, the ad tech presence has grown to the point where the festival has been compared to a Consumer Electronics Show by the Mediterranean — a description that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.
For Suzy, the consumer intelligence platform Britton now leads, this evolution represents both a validation and an opportunity. The core thesis of the business — that Fortune 500 brands need faster, more reliable access to consumer insight in order to make better decisions — has never been more relevant than in an environment where speed, personalization, and cultural responsiveness are the primary competitive differentiators. When brand leaders gather at Cannes to debate the future of creativity, the underlying question is always the same: how do we know what our consumers actually want, feel, and believe? That question is what Suzy is built to answer.
There is something about Cannes itself — the physical environment, the seductive pace, the combination of professional intensity and Mediterranean indulgence — that produces a particular kind of thinking. Away from the pressure of day-to-day operations, with the best minds in the business gathered in one place, ideas move differently. Connections form across organizational boundaries that would never happen back home. Perspectives get challenged in ways that are uncomfortable and productive.
Britton captured this dynamic in his original reflections on the festival: "Meetings happen over coffee and croissants, over glasses of rosé, in beach cabanas, on docked yachts." The informality is not incidental. It is strategic. The best conversations at Cannes happen when people have let their guard down, when they are genuinely curious rather than defensively positioned, when they are open to having their assumptions overturned.
The lesson that consistently emerges from Cannes Lions — whether you're hearing it from a Grand Prix jury, a technology keynote speaker, or a CMO in a rooftop conversation — is that the advertising industry's most durable competitive advantage is the ability to understand human beings and create things that genuinely connect with them. Technology changes the tools. Data changes the evidence base. AI changes the production process. But the fundamental work remains human.
That insight is what Cannes has been teaching the advertising world for decades. It is why the festival remains essential even as the industry it serves has been transformed beyond recognition. And it is why the rosé keeps flowing and the conversations keep going long past midnight — because when you put the world's most creative and ambitious professionals in one of the most beautiful places on earth and give them permission to think freely, something always happens that was worth the trip.
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the advertising and marketing industry's premier global event, held annually in Cannes, France. The week-long festival combines an awards program recognizing excellence in creative work across dozens of categories with an extensive program of keynote presentations, panel discussions, and networking events. It draws more than 11,000 attendees from across the globe, including agency executives, brand-side CMOs, technology leaders, and students pursuing careers in creative industries.
Cannes Lions has evolved significantly from its origins as primarily an advertising awards show into something closer to a global technology and business conference. The presence of major technology companies — from Google and Meta to Microsoft and Spotify — has grown substantially, as has the attendance of senior brand-side executives including CMOs from Fortune 500 companies. Artificial intelligence has dominated the agenda for the past several years, with conversations shifting from early speculation about AI's potential to practical discussions about deployment, ROI measurement, and the balance between AI-powered efficiency and genuine creative originality.
Despite — and in many ways because of — the radical technological transformation of the advertising industry, Cannes Lions remains essential because it provides a context for asking the questions that cannot be answered by data alone. How do you build a brand in a fragmented media environment? What is the relationship between creative quality and business performance? How do you maintain genuine human connection with consumers while deploying AI at scale? These are not algorithm problems. They are human and strategic problems that benefit from the kind of open, cross-organizational dialogue that Cannes uniquely enables.
The most consistent lesson from Cannes Lions is that the brands winning in the marketplace share a common orientation: they treat creativity and data as complementary rather than competing assets, they invest in genuine consumer understanding rather than relying on assumptions, and they are willing to take creative risks grounded in real human insight. The technology tools change. The AI capabilities expand. But the fundamental competitive advantage in marketing remains the ability to understand what people actually want and create something that genuinely resonates.
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has been predicting the advertising industry's future for more than seven decades. The questions it asks — about creativity, technology, human connection, and commercial effectiveness — are the same questions that every brand leader, agency executive, and marketing professional is navigating every day.
Matt Britton has spent his career at the leading edge of those questions, first building one of the defining digital agencies of the social media era at MRY, and now leading Suzy's mission to give Fortune 500 brands the real-time consumer intelligence they need to make smarter decisions faster. The through line across those experiences is a belief that the best business outcomes follow from the best human understanding — and that the relentless pursuit of that understanding is what separates the brands that endure from the ones that don't.
The rosé is just the backdrop. The ideas are the point.
To hear more conversations at the intersection of creativity, consumer culture, and business strategy, explore The Speed of Culture podcast with Matt Britton. And for a deeper framework for navigating the AI era, Matt's nationally bestselling book Generation AI provides the strategic roadmap that marketing and business leaders are turning to as they chart their path forward.