Coverage from Cannes 2026: Part 1

Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity 2026 opened with a question that refused to go away all week: as AI becomes more capable, what becomes more valuable about being human?

With more than 1,400 events happening across the week in Cannes, from the main stages of the Palais to the beaches, cabanas and rooftops along the Croisette, no one person can cover it all. So we divide and conquer. This year our Cannes Correspondents, a team of 14 brand builders, founders, CMOs and Board Members from across our global community, were on the ground all week, each following different sessions, stages and conversations and bringing the best of it back to our Members.

Here is what they saw across the first two days. You can meet the full Correspondents team at the end of this piece.

Day One: Chinese brands, boring strategies and the decision layer in between

The week began on the Rotonde Stage, where The Marketing Society Singapore Board Member Siew Ting Foo opened Cannes with one of the most talked about sessions of the festival. Joined by Sir Martin Sorrell and BYD's Stella Li, she reframed how the world should think about Chinese brands: not as low cost exporters chasing volume, but as a new generation of culturally rooted, globally ambitious businesses building meaning at remarkable speed.

Three ideas stood out. Chinese brands are now exporting meaning, not just products, with brands like Labubu and Chagee going global without diluting their cultural identity. Localisation is the non-negotiable price of global ambition, with BYD manufacturing in Hungary, building in Brazil and briefing every market team to translate its technology into local language and local culture. And tariffs have accelerated rather than slowed expansion, deepening Chinese investment across Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. Siew Ting's closing formula deserves to be pinned above every marketer's desk: lead with soul, connect with culture, measure with science.

Elsewhere, our Correspondents noticed that the most interesting conversations on Day One were not about what works, but why so many organisations struggle to do it. Alex O'Rourke heard the same principles championed by WARC, Byron Sharp, Mark Ritson, AB InBev and Kimberly-Clark alike: consistency, creativity, distinctive assets, emotional connection and long term thinking. The line that stayed with her came from McDonald's CMO: "We created a boring strategy and executed it brilliantly."

Adele Ghantous and Ebru Tuygun found a similar thread in sessions on the CMO role. For all the talk of AI, automation and operating models, the biggest challenges leaders named were proving marketing's value, leading through change and helping people navigate uncertainty. The qualities they kept returning to were not technical at all: empathy, confidence building and humanity.

And Tim Hulbert raised the question that would echo across the week. As consumers increasingly turn to AI tools for recommendations, marketers may need to think less about audiences and more about the decision-making layer in between. Should we be tracking agents as well as people?

Monday dispatch Cannes Lions 2026

From David Pugh-Jones, CMO, Corpora.ai / Founding Exec and Trustee of the charity, Neurodiversity in Business

A conversation I can't stop thinking about, overheard over a bottle of rosé that probably cost more than my first car, was someone saying this feels like the biggest turning point they've seen in how technology, creativity, and media blend into something actually worth selling, and, more importantly, worth believing in. I wasn't even in a panel at the time. I was hunting shade before turning into a pool of goo at 35 degrees. Sometimes the best thinking at Cannes happens between the air-conditioned rooms, not inside them.

Most overrated Cannes trend: Friction-free experiences. Every brand on the Croisette is promising seamless, AI-powered everything, and yet I spent my morning doom-scrolling through an inbox of QR codes, trying to work out which one would get me past which security cordon. We can personalise ads at the individual level, but we can't consolidate ten event passes into one app. The gap between the vision and the vibe is real, and honestly, it's the session someone should actually run. Operational UX for live events. The "why does this require multiple apps, two screenshots with ID and a quiet moment of self-belief" masterclass. 

One thing I'm taking home Cannes is where careers are made. Not just announced but actually forged. You can feel it in the air alongside the factor 50. People traversing between companies, reuniting with old peers, meeting the teams they didn't know they needed yet. The energy on the Croisette isn't just about the work on the stages, it's about what gets decided over that overpriced rosé and a wilting salad. That's always been the real Cannes. And it's absolutely still here.

What the Croisette is really talking about - The buzz for the week ahead is genuine technology and human creativity converging into something with real commercial and cultural weight. That conversation is happening everywhere, and it's an exciting one to be part of.

There's one quieter note though. As a Founding Exec and Trustee of Neurodiversity in Business, I notice when things that matter go undiscussed. DEI and sustainability feel conspicuously absent this year - not debated, just missing from the agenda. I hope I’m shown otherwise. An exec who didn't want to be named said it plainly: “nobody's talking about it - it’s as if it never even happened”. The optimist in me hopes that's because the industry has moved from conversation to action. The realist in me thinks we should keep asking the question until it returns to the global agenda.