Here we go. Cannes Lions begins… now.
In truth, I’m writing this early Sunday morning on a red-eye across the Atlantic, because at my age, sleep on a plane is a rumor. My loss is your gain... minus the typos, which I’m blaming on the woman snoring next to me like a chainsaw cutting a daisy.
I’m excited, eager, and already exhausted... and yet, let’s start off with a bang!
I’ve already started… bumping into first time Cannes attendee and journalist extraordinaire Marty Swant during the boarding process. And then Toby Daniels on the plane before we took off. He told me all about an AI agent he built named Doma, and I spent the first hour of my flight chatting with it. (It gave me some great B2B marketing insights and strategies for Genuin!)
Most marketing teams are optimizing the thing they should be replacing.
That’s the tension I’m carrying into Cannes this year. Because there isn’t one Cannes anymore. There are 8 different concurrent themes and subplots running at 10 different hotels, 15 different beach clubs, 60 different villas, 100 different restaurants, and one Palais.
Even the official program has split itself into four tracks... not counting the 20,000 “creators” with iPhones who didn’t get the badge and don’t need it.
Then there are those chasing the same word, agentic, and almost nobody can prove it does anything yet.
Even if you’re not going, or don’t work in one of the MANY industries this touches, there’s something in here for you, I promise.
So this is the preview. Predictions, themes, the overhyped, the overlooked, and a field guide for surviving the week. Plus, as always, something VERY personal at the end.
THE PROFESSIONAL: The Panels Are Selling Agentic. The Receipts Say Otherwise.
Here’s my one prediction that won’t age badly.
Agentic will be the word of the week. And almost nobody saying it will have one in production.
Let’s remember, this is a Festival of Creativity. Ok, now that I’ve stipulated that, we can move on.
Because it’s going to be on every stage. Every beach. Every panel title that couldn’t think of a second idea. But the IAB is still building the rulebook for agentic advertising... which is a polite way of saying the thing doesn’t exist at scale yet. You can’t standardize what nobody’s running.
A new report from 3C Ventures put it cleaner than I can. Agentic is the highest-impact, lowest-evidence claim in marketing. A media agency can’t claim a programmatic win without an audit trail. But it can claim “agentic AI” with nothing. We extended good faith before the credibility was earned.
So the line I’d draw: Agentic commerce is real. Agentic execution mostly isn’t.
When a shopper lands on your site from ChatGPT, they convert higher and spend more (Adobe’s data, not mine). That’s value flowing in. But when a coding agent runs your token bill into the ground and your CFO reaches for the lawnmower? That’s the same word, opposite direction. One’s a customer. One’s a bill.
Don’t let the panel title flatten the difference.
THE AGENCY RECKONING
Every holding company built a platform. Omni, Open, Marcel, STAGE, all of them. Strip the branding and you can’t tell the decks apart. AI-powered, end-to-end, transparent, open. The language converged into noise.
And I’m curious if anyone on stage will say this, but 76% of agencies are very confident in their delivery. 39% of clients are very satisfied. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a 37-point delusion.
Yet the question every CMO should ask, the one that’s hardest to get answered: is this platform fee replacing headcount, or adding to it?
If your agency can’t answer that in writing, that’s your answer.
THE FLATTENING
AI raised the floor. Average is now indefensible. Slop was the word of 2025... and in 2026 it’s just the internet.
Which is good news, weirdly?
When everyone has the same tool producing the same median output, the only moat (another word you’ll hear a LOT this week) left is taste. And taste is the one thing the machine doesn’t have. It has training data. Those aren’t the same.
The market already knows this. 60% of consumers say “AI” in your brand messaging is a turnoff. Enthusiasm for AI-generated content fell from 60% in 2023 to 26% last year. New York now requires you to disclose synthetic performers in ads.
Read THAT trend line. Your customers want you to use AI and shut up about it.
THE PART THAT STINGS
The flattening is coming for the bottom of the pyramid first.
Stanford’s early data shows employment for 22-to-25-year-olds in AI-exposed roles shrinking while everything else grows. Junior developers. Customer service. The entry-level seats.
The trap... Taste comes from repetition. Reps come from junior jobs. Automate the junior jobs and you starve the pipeline that makes the senior talent everyone says is irreplaceable.
We’re eating our own seed corn and calling it efficiency.
WHAT ACTUALLY WINS
Streamer/Creator IShowSpeed has 55 million subscribers and out-reached every brand and broadcaster with a single World Cup track. His take on why: “People are still going to want that human connection we were born with.”
The 21-year-old streamer and the holding-company CTO agree on the one thing that matters.
Humans in the lead. Quality at the center.
Everything else is a panel title.
THE PRACTICAL: Your Field Guide for the Week
I’m not going to tell you what to pack because, well, it’s too late now!
So the real practical wisdom here is that you won’t see everything. Stop trying.
That’s the whole game. There’s no single Cannes, remember? Creators go one way, adtech another, big platforms yet another, and the brand marketers that people think are so valuable and worth chasing...? Yeah, they’re all hidden away in between their panels.
So the worst thing you can do is build a calendar so tight there’s no room for the moment that actually matters. Plan the anchors. Protect the gaps. The best thing that happens all week is usually the thing that wasn’t on the schedule.
But whether you’re hosting, hustling, or hiding, it’s good to keep some essentials with you at all times:
TREAT YOUR BODY KINDLY
Easy to say as someone who doesn’t drink, but this is a marathon disguised as a sprint. Pace yourself.
Do NOT break in new shoes. You’ll regret it by Tuesday. Sneakers by day, every day. Sneakers are acceptable at night too, France has made its peace with this.
When the blisters hit, and they will, go straight to a French pharmacy. Compeed is your best friend. While you’re there, you can also find great products at discounted prices... because France... Bioderma, Nuxe, La Roche-Posay. Worth the suitcase space.
Carry a small bag. Man or woman, doesn’t matter, the man-bag is thriving on the Croisette. In it: sunscreen, a phone battery or two, water, deodorant, band-aids, whatever gets you through 14 hours away from your room. Electrolytes if you’re smart. A mini fan if you’re a genius.
TREAT YOUR SCHEDULE KINDLY
First-timers and 10-timers: Walk from the Palais to the Croisette the day you land. Get your bearings before you need them. Some things are the same, some are different every year.
Keep your head up on the Croisette. It may be the only time all week you run into the person you’ve been meaning to see since Monday. The street is the meeting.
If someone invites you to a boat, just make sure it’s not leaving. NEVER GET ON A BOAT THAT LEAVES. We’re there for 96 hours. Every one of them counts.
And find a regular. Every good Cannes I’ve had ran through someone who already knew the rhythm of the place. Make them your guide. Buy them a drink.
WORLD CUP SCHEDULES
Well this is new. For the first time in a while, the tournament and the festival are overlapping, and the time zones are not working in our favor. Matches landing late Cannes time means the watch party is the after-party. Find the bar with the screen. That communal 3am moment, no agenda, no badge, just a room full of strangers reacting to the same thing... that’s more “fandom” than any panel selling it upstairs.
YOUR ATTITUDE
Oh, two more tips here:
Don’t bitch. There are so so many people who’d love to be here in a heartbeat. Some of them emailed me last week asking how to get in. One booked on Thursday (way to go, Marty!)
And do make time for the creative. It’s why we’re all here, even if it’s not your agenda. You don’t need to be in the Palais to hear what people are seeing, making, and sharing. Treat the Creatives you see like the real celebs. It takes nothing.
Pace yourself. Drink water. Say yes.
And whatever you do... don’t go all out on your first night. It’s a marathon AND a sprint.
THE PERSONAL: What To Do With the Gap
So here’s the thing nobody warns you about.
It’s not the packed days that get you. It’s the gaps. Once or twice a day, somewhere between the thing you just left and the thing you’re walking toward, you end up with 30 free minutes. Sometimes 60.
Do you go back to your room? Grab food?
Or do you just... stand there. Phone out. Thumb hovering. Not sure whether to answer email, scroll, rest, or sprint across the Croisette to catch someone before they vanish into a villa.
I’ve started to notice how much that small moment unsettles me.
30 open minutes and my first instinct is to fill them. Optimize them. Turn them into something. Which is funny, because that’s the exact thing I spent the whole first section of this newsletter warning you about. We optimize the thing we should be protecting. I do it to my calendar. I do it to my inbox. And apparently I do it to the only unscheduled half hour I get all day.
The gap isn’t the problem. My relationship to the gap is the problem.
And I don’t think it’s just me.
Look at who’s hungry right now. The junior folks emailing me last week asking how to get into our Happy Hour. Or the kids who flew thousands of miles and camped out sixteen hours to audition for a streamer’s bootcamp IN CANNES.
Who’s definitely NOT here: the 22-year-olds watching the entry-level rung quietly disappear while everyone tells them AI is a gift. They’re not filling every minute because they’re anxious by nature. They’re filling every minute because the pipeline feels like it’s narrowing, and standing still feels like falling behind.
I get it. I was that hungry once. Some mornings I still am.
But here’s what I’ve actually learned, the thing I’d tell any of them if they cornered me in one of these gaps:
The gap is where the real stuff happens.
Not the panel. Not the keynote. Not the perfectly optimized calendar.
But the conversation you didn’t plan. The person you almost didn’t stop for. The idea that only showed up because you let yourself be bored for 90 seconds instead of reaching for your phone.
I fell in love with this industry, and with Cannes specifically, in the gaps.
The late drink with someone I’d just met. The late-night yacht singalong. The wrong turn that led to the right room. Storming Yahoo beach from a dinghy at 3am like it’s D-Day.
Dance-offs with Wyclef. Last-night dinners. Making friends for life.
The version of myself that felt, for a minute, like I belonged somewhere I had no business being.
None of those are in the agenda. This whole place is a second chance to feel like the most interesting version of yourself. The you that got picked. The you that got in.
And you don’t find that version of yourself in a back-to-back schedule.
You find it in the part you didn’t plan.
So this is what I’m ACTUALLY working on this week:
Not the crazy, color-coded calendar jenga. That’s all set.
Not FOMO. I’m too old for that.
Not the inbox. That stuff can wait.
Not seeing all 8 panels at once, which I’ve now made very clear is impossible.
I’m working on the gap. Letting it BE a gap. Letting it BE uncomfortable. Letting it stay empty long enough that something real can fall into it.
Which is, I realize, exactly what I’m doing right now. Crap, it’s 4am over the Atlantic. The woman next to me is STILL snoring FML.
I have no wifi, no calls, no calendar, nothing to optimize. Just a few hundred minutes I can’t fill with anything but this. Another gap.
Because those gaps are the part you’ll write back about. They always are. The personal stuff, never the predictions.
That’s the tell, isn’t it? The thing that connects is never the thing I optimized. It’s the thing I let happen.
See you in the gaps.
THE POLITICAL: The World Is Watching, and It’s Not Sure It Likes Us
People outside our industry always ask me why I fly 4000 miles to see people I can see in NYC.
But it’s not just New Yorkers, or even Americans. This is an international festival. The world is in the room.
And right now the world is rethinking who’s actually winning, at least in the AI race.
A new poll from Public First surveyed 18,000 people across 15 countries on who leads in AI.
In 11 of them, perception has tilted toward China over the US. France, the UK, Canada now see China as the frontrunner. Germany was the least convinced America is ahead. Americans still back themselves, 51% to 24%. Our closest allies have already changed their minds.
Sit with that. The country that built the dominant models is losing the story about them.
It gets stranger at home.
Even as Americans insist we’re winning, we’re souring on the prize. U.S. positive sentiment about AI dropped from 39% to 31% over the past two years. 70% oppose a data center going up near them. Pew has half the country more worried than excited, with the top fear being what AI does to creativity. Read that again. The thing people are most afraid of losing is the exact thing this whole festival exists to celebrate.
Meanwhile in China, fewer than 10% worry AI will take their job. Confidence is a story too.
Right now they’re telling a better one.
And the regulators aren’t waiting for the festival to end.
42 state attorneys general just subpoenaed OpenAI over its advertising practices, data handling, treatment of minors, and model sycophancy. That’s not a think piece. That’s a legal demand, days before the company’s expected public listing.
New York went further. As of last week, any ad running in the state using a synthetic performer, an AI-generated face you might mistake for a real person, has to say so.
Lead, background, even an AI hand model... $1000 for the first violation, $5K for the next.
New York moved first. Everyone expects more states to follow.
Notice what ties these together.
Consumers don’t fully trust AI.
Regulators are circling it. And the public’s loudest fear is that it flattens the human creativity they actually value. Same conclusion the whole industry keeps arriving at from every other direction.
The machine is not the moat (crap, I wrote it again).
Trust is. And trust is the one thing you can’t generate, can’t optimize, and can’t fake your way into.
There’s a version of this week that’s all hype, all agentic, all gold-foil future.
And there’s a quieter signal underneath it, from voters, from allies, from the law itself.
Use the tools. Earn the trust. And do not confuse showing up in the answer with anyone believing it.
See you all soon.
*AI Disclosure: 100% of this was written by me, a human with only light edits and typo corrections from Grammarly. The images are mostly AI-generated using Nano Banana.