JUNE 2026 | WAS IT WORTH IT? OUR BIGGEST CANNES TAKEAWAYS

Cannes was chaotic as advertised. A Tasmanian Devil’s whirlwind of panels and events, handshakes and rosé glasses.

But now, a month after our Cannes comedown, with the overwhelm finally fizzling out, we find our impressions dominated by a few distinct snapshots. A few key soundbites that stuck with us and have permeated into weekly meetings and client decks.

Through all the noise, here’s what continues to echo: 

When you play the long game, it lets your audience play their short game.

We are the ones who get bored with our creative. We sit with it for months, from inception to launch and beyond.

But consistency isn’t boring for our viewers. Because, as Mark Ritson and Byron Sharp noted, “we spend 3 months perseverating [while] people spend 3 seconds with your ad.”

How to best incentivize conversion in those 3 seconds? Consistency. We need consistency because in that brief window of time, people gravitate towards the familiar and memorable.

But we can’t build familiarity if we keep opting for short-term tactics that aim for quick spikes in reach at the expense of long-term profits. With this in mind, Ashley Neel pointed out that the industry finally seems to be shifting from “efficiency back to effectiveness” – prioritizing creative excellence over noise.

So that should be our goal: Distinct, consistent creative – leading to memorable, sustained reach. 

This accounts for the 95/5 rule, which stipulates that only 5% of our audience consists of active buyers today; for the other latent 95%, we just need to cement our mental share. But we can’t cement anything if short-term wins are our focus.

Knowing what you want is great. Knowing what your audience wants is key.

As Sir John Hegarty said, “we've perfected the art of stalking versus inspiring. We're focused on promotion instead of persuasion."

More bluntly, he said it’s time to “stop stalking [and] start entertaining.”

Otherwise, we’re just giving our audiences what we want them to want. Not what they really want. And more than anything else, people engage with that which entertains them. It may sound simple, but humor, Hegarty pleaded, has always been our most creatively effective tool. Consistent humor can build that desired memorability.

So take off the media planner hat and put on your storyteller hat to ask: What would you genuinely want to engage with? Follow that rabbit hole.

That said… a flip side to this coin is that our understanding of what mainstream audiences actually value may be ways away from reality. 

Mark Penn and Craig Bommers hammered home this point by spotlighting two recent brand cases. The first: Sydney Sweeney’s infamous partnership with American Eagle (which caught fire for its polarizing “Jeans / Genes” wordplay). The second: Gillette's award-winning “The Best Men Can Be” campaign (nobly fighting against toxic masculinity).

Despite what LinkedIn reactions and Reddit chatter may lead you to believe, American Eagle spiked in sales and valuation following the Sweeney controversy while Gillette lost an estimated $8 billion in sales during their campaign.

Hence the cautious takeaway: Give your audience what they want… but make sure you know what they really want, not just what our insider industry wants.

Does anyone know what to do with the AI elephant in the room? Well…

For the most part, the expected AI discourse took a positive, empowering spin. As highlighted by the Forrester panel which said:“AI isn’t creative. You are.”After all, AI is trained to deliver middle-of-the-road output, not think outside the algorithm. It regresses to the mean, and it lacks creative taste.

We can’t count the number of times we heard some version of “it’s a productivity tool; not a creative end-all be-all.” Which feels true, at least to the moment, but this feels limited. And that’s the unfortunate takeaway here:The AI conversation felt like a drain-circling collection of platitudes, accurately conveying the current truth, but failing to go deeper or broader. Very few AI panels looked at the past or future with any conviction to make a statement more profound than “it looks like we’ll be fine” or “AI will augment, not replace creativity.” Projections of what the AI behemoth will mean for us in even just three years time were vague at best, naive at worst.

It’s not hard to imagine that the AI talk at Cannes 2029 will make this year’s panels feel entirely obsolete.

Our favorite campaign: Polaroid’s Camera for an Analog Life.

For one, their central strategic reframe felt truly eye-opening. Rather than ask “how do we make instant cameras appealing to Gen Z” (which sounds sensible), they took five steps back, splashed their faces with cold water, and instead asked, “why should Polaroid exist at all in an AI era.”Why should their product even exist?

A bold question. But one whose answer makes their creative strategy unassailable: They don’t need to go over-the-top fighting AI or digital. Their mere existence is enough of a rebellion. And while that “anti” messaging still exists, the core of their campaign is pro-human.

Existing on purpose, as a distinctly human, analog experience – that’s the key to their current creative and why it works so well. There are a million ways to put down AI, but none of them are as interesting as why value analog.

And crucially, Polaroid checked all the boxes outlined above: They committed to distinctive creative with consistent assets that are undeniably entertaining, provocative, and true-to-audience. 

The final word: So was it worth it?

That’s the question we kept facing upon our return, and the answer is an unsurprising yes.

But not “yes” because it taught us anything downright revolutionary. “Yes” because it forced us to look in the mirror and recognize the gap between what we know we should be doing and what we actually are doing.

Cannes forced us to reckon with the times we mistakenly convince ourselves the audience will care as much as we do. Cannes forced us to ask, uncomfortably, “are we entertaining… or are we stalking?” Cannes forced us to rethink the questions we have and haven’t been asking internally.

For that honest look in the mirror, Cannes has been a blessing. Now it’s on us to carry that blessing into what we do next.