The Cannes We're Actually Hoping For

Everyone already knows what's on the agenda. Here's the argument we want to hear on the Croisette this year, and the one we're dreading.

There's a version of Cannes Lions 2026 that writes itself, and most of the blogs you'll read this week have already written it. AB InBev opens the festival on Monday morning and collects its third Creative Marketer of the Year. Someone on a main stage says AI changes everything. Someone on the next stage says creators are the future. The room nods, the rosé goes down, and everyone flies home with a tote bag and a slightly heavier content calendar.

We'd like a different week.

Not because the headlines are wrong. AB InBev earned the opener. Thirty-seven Lions last year, the first company ever to take the top marketer honour three times, and a CMO in Marcel Marcondes who says the quiet part out loud: "Creativity is always in service to driving growth." That's the most honest sentence anyone will say all week, and half the room will quietly flinch at it.

The problem isn't the agenda. It's that the agenda has two big ideas on a collision course, and Cannes has a habit of letting them politely coexist instead of fight. We're hoping for the fight.

Two definitions of creativity, about to share a stage

Look at what Cannes itself changed this year and the tension is hard to miss.

On one side, the new Creative Brand Lion. It doesn't reward a campaign. It rewards the machine behind the campaigns: the systems, the culture, the internal plumbing that makes good work repeatable. Simon Cook framed the shift as a move from celebrating outputs to celebrating the inputs that make breakthroughs possible. Marcondes is chairing the inaugural jury. This is creativity as infrastructure. Creativity you can put on an org chart and a balance sheet.

On the other side, the Social & Creator Lions, renamed from Social & Influencer back in 2025, with creator-specific categories and a dedicated LIONS Creators track on the Croisette. This is creativity as autonomy. One person, an audience that trusts them, often no brief and no approval chain in sight. It looks nothing like an operating system. It can't really be put on an org chart, and that's the entire point.

So here's what we hope happens. We hope someone on a stage admits these two ideas are in tension, not harmony. Infrastructure wants control, predictability, repeatability. Creators run on the opposite. The brands that win the next five years won't be the ones that pick a side. They'll be the ones honest enough to admit they're running two different operating models at once, and mature enough not to crush the second one with the habits of the first.

The AI panel we're tired of, and the one we want

You will not lack for AI conversation this week. The festival added AI Craft subcategories across its craft Lions, built in AI-assisted verification for entries, and you can bet a good share of those 500-plus speakers will work the word into their first ninety seconds.

Most of it will be the panel we've all seen. Will AI replace creatives. How many people can we cut. Look how fast it makes the deck.

The conversation we actually want is narrower and far more useful: what is the part AI genuinely cannot do, and are we protecting it or quietly outsourcing it?

Cannes gave a small tell with how it defined those new AI Craft categories. The work has to show human craft and intent, with AI in service of the idea rather than standing in for it. Good. We'd like to hear a CMO say the same thing about their own org and mean it. Use the machine for the 44% of paid creative that creators and AI can now churn out at volume. Guard the judgment, the taste, and the relationships like they're the only thing on the table that money can't replace.

Because they are.

Creators are not a cheaper media buy. Please stop treating them like one.

This is the conversation we're most afraid of getting wrong, because the numbers make it so tempting to get wrong.

The money is moving, fast. CreatorIQ's latest State of Creator Marketing report has average creator budgets up 171% year over year, with nearly two-thirds of that new spend pulled straight out of traditional paid media. Enterprises now run between $5.6 and $8.1 million a year through creators. The brands getting the most back, the ones clearing at least double their investment, now put more than half their entire marketing budget there.

Read that as a CMO and the instinct is obvious. Creators outperform paid media, so move the paid media playbook onto creators. Standardise it, scale it, run it on the same dashboards as paid search.

That instinct is how you kill the thing you just bought.

A creator works because an audience decided, on their own time, to trust them. You cannot brief that into existence and you cannot bulk-buy it. The moment a creator partnership starts behaving like a programmatic line item, the audience smells it, and the only asset that mattered evaporates. You can buy reach. You cannot buy belonging. The brands that learn the difference at Cannes this week will be the ones still winning when the budget reallocation stops being a novelty and starts being a competence.

What we hope someone is brave enough to say

Here's the line we're hoping to hear from a main stage, ideally before Wednesday.

For seventy years this industry has been very good at measuring the work. Lions won, demand driven, growth attributed. In 2026, with the Creative Brand Lion asking about inputs and the Social & Creator Lions asking about people, the harder question is finally on the table: are we measuring whether a brand actually belongs anywhere, or just how loudly it can advertise into a room it was never invited to?

That question doesn't have a clean dashboard. It won't compress into a ROAS figure by Friday. It's the one that actually decides who's still standing in five years, and it's the most human question in the building.

Cannes is the rare week with the right people in one place and enough quiet to think a real thought. Five days, thirteen thousand decision-makers, no standing Tuesday meeting to run back to. That's a lot of expensive rosé to spend agreeing with each other.

We're hoping for an argument instead. See you on the Croisette.