There’s always a lot to take away from the Cannes Lions festival. Inspiration, contacts, Lions… and the occasional sentence that keeps echoing long after the festival ends.
Here are a few things we noted. The ones you’re not seeing online (yet). Or at least, not often, and definitely not like this.
- Artificial Intelligence. Let’s get it out of the way.
Was AI discussed at this year’s Cannes Lions? Yes. Was it mentioned in almost every session? Probably. Definitely in every one we attended.
Honestly, this frequency is more than justified. Humanity has never encountered a technology this revolutionary. But do you really need another article debating whether AI will take our jobs? Of course not.
That’s why we bring good news: on the Cannes Lions stages, AI is no longer portrayed as a novelty, a threat, or a sensation. It’s simply a tool.
“Treat AI as an assistant, not as a replacement” became the collective advice, repeated in various forms across almost every session. The industry leaders, from Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer at P&G, to Tor Myhren, VP of Marketing Communications at Apple, were all in agreement: At the heart of building brands is, and remains, humanity.
And just when I thought everyone had agreed on this unified perspective, Sir John Hegarty took the stage. And shared what I (we) love most: a different way of looking at the topic.
In his session titled “Adapt or Die: Why Giants Can’t Dance” Hegarty didn’t talk just about artificial intelligence. He talked about time. And not as a resource, but as a force shaping the industry.
According to him, time is no longer something we spend, it’s become inertia. The kind that suffocates large systems, fills them with procedures, and erases what once made them great: the idea.
“Big companies have become operational, not inspirational” he said, adding that while AI may have accelerated processes, it also exposed a deeper truth: that no one has time to think anymore. Sounds paradoxical? Yes, and that’s the point.
Hegarty doesn’t deny AI’s potential. On the contrary, he sees it as a power that democratizes creativity.
If everyone has access to the same tools, knowledge, and skills, what separates the best from the rest? Creative compass. The idea. The vision.
That’s why, he says, it’s not time to move forward. It’s time to go back to the future. To return to the brand’s foundation, to the idea, to the purpose. To what once made us exciting, distinctive, human.
- Brand Purpose 2.0
“It’s time to redefine the concept of purpose” – another takeaway we wrote down. This thought was shared by Richard Edelman during a panel on purpose and responsibility titled “Purpose Today: Reset or Upgrade?” Discussing the changing role that brands have (or should have) in society, Edelman emphasized that people today are exhausted by everything happening in the world: political polarization, economic uncertainty, constant crises, and the speed of change. This, he says, has led to a significant shift in the concept of purpose.
“Purpose isn’t dead, it’s just different. It’s shifted from ‘we’ to ‘me.’”
What does that mean? People now care less about broad, collective-good messages, and more about personal value. “Make me feel good. Make me feel stable. Make me feel safe. Give me hope for the future.” That, Edelman argues, is the new task for brands.
- The Era of Creators or Creator > Influencer
Perhaps the clearest indicator of how content creators have become an inseparable part of the marketing ecosystem isn’t just the number of panels dedicated to them, but the fact that this year’s Cannes Lions rebranded the “Social & Influencer Lions” category to “Social & Creator Lions”, symbolically and substantively shifting creators from an add-on to the core of strategy.
The platforms that host them demonstrated this clearly: Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Spotify – each had its own experience zone that felt less like supplementary content and more like the heart of the action. From space design to speaker quality, it’s clear that the question is no longer whether brands should invest in creators (if anyone’s still asking that), but how to do it meaningfully.
One insight in that direction came from TikTok, which announced the results of a major research project in Cannes that will soon be publicly available. But they’ve already shared a few key insights into what they’re calling the “whitepaper on modern content.”
Lesson one: distinctive entertainment. The era of generic “entertainment” is over. If your content is entertaining but has no connection to the brand behind it, it won’t work in the long run. Content must be native to the platform, engaging and recognizable.
Speaking of platform nativeness, during TikTok’s session, they offered a definition that strays from typical thinking.
Being “native” doesn’t mean filming in your kitchen with a phone, using bad lighting, or pretending to be spontaneous. It means being entertaining. Authentic in form, but also relevant in the feeling it leaves behind. Because people open this app looking for fun. As they summed it up beautifully: “You check social media. But you watch TikTok.”
Finally, perhaps the most important takeaway: format doesn’t matter – content is everything.
In a world where every platform is technically available to everyone, the only real currency is, and remains, attention. And do what you will with that.
