At Cannes Lions, Everything is a Billboard

Five things I learned on my first trip, before the jet lag wins

The Takeover Is The Point

Every surface is a billboard; it starts before you even land.

United had gift bags waiting on the seats of their Cannes direct flight; Delta only runs two direct flights a day during the week, and even they made a point of talking up Cannes Lions onboard, though I was surprised they didn’t have a bigger footprint at the festival given that. And then you get off the plane and the airport itself is wallpapered, and once you’re in the city it just keeps going, brands attending Cannes Lions don’t only buy up the billboards that are already there, they put new ones up on top of what’s already there, on top of what normally lives there the other fifty one weeks of the year, even the water wasn’t safe from it, Uber was launching their boats with an ice cream bar floating on one of them, and every boat out there had banners and flags and signage of its own, the companies running the yachts wanted you to know whose yacht it was, there was a literal jumbotron in front of the Carlton, Netflix had the rooftop, LinkedIn was right outside the Carlton too, Adobe took over Le Barrière Majestic just to the left of it, the Martinez had Female Quotient set up right in the entrance, Disney had taken over places I’d walked past two or three times before I even clocked whose they were, and it’s not Gucci and Dior like you’d expect walking around the south of France, it’s ad tech and platforms stacked on top of each other for one week and then gone.

Love this map, but look at all the logos!

The Work Is Still The Most Important Part And Was Nowhere

The night I landed, we had friends over, rosé open, the World Cup match on in the background, Germany against Côte d’Ivoire, and in my living room were three CMOs and a chief of staff, the exact people you’d want to catch on a panel, and I had them on the couch with me. What they all said they were most excited for wasn’t any of the parties and events; it was walking through the work, hearing the brief, and then hearing from the person who made it or the person who judged it. That’s the part everyone in that room said was the most interesting part of the whole week, and that’s exactly the part I almost never heard anyone actually talking about once the week got going. Cannes Lions is still where the most creative, high-level people in this industry go to get inspired, which is why I went too. For me, it wasn’t just about networking or finding new clients, though both of those are excellent outcomes; it was about raising the bar on my own creativity and thinking, and that’s the part of the week I had to go looking for instead of it just being everywhere.

Cannes Queen Lindsey Slaby from Sunday Dinner saying what everyone was thinking at the Brand Innovators panel

Comms Finally Got Invited To The Table, And It’s About Time

This was, by every account I heard, the first year this many comms people showed up to Cannes Lions at all, and as a comms person I found that fascinating, because with LLMs and AI changing how people search and discover brands, comms isn’t a function you can leave under-resourced anymore, it’s block and tackle for brand reputation now, one bad Reddit thread can become the thing an LLM tells someone about your brand, and I’ve been saying for months that earned media and channels like Substack are moving the needle on discovery in ways performance marketing can’t anymore, performance got too expensive and it stopped converting the way it used to, PR has been the redheaded stepchild of marketing for a long time and I watched that start to click for people in real time this week, there’s a lot more here and I’m writing the longer version of this next Thursday.

The Celebrities are the Vehicle, Not The Work

This isn’t a hot take and it isn’t about how hard anyone works, but it’s getting harder for me to sit through a celebrity telling a room of marketers and founders how to build something when their reality isn’t anywhere close to ours, no resentment, just reality, they have great people around them and that’s exactly why they were able to get to where they are, and I’d rather hear from the founder who bootstrapped it and is still figuring it out, or the marketer stretching a budget that’s way smaller than it should be and still winning awards anyway, that’s the story, not the person with a team built around them telling the room how they did it on their own.

A Lot Of Brands Showed Up To Spend Money and Disappear

The activations felt like fashion week met SXSW met Coachella, Cîroc’s athletic club is the clearest example, pickleball, tennis, great merch, I thought it was a genuinely cool experience, and I get it, Cîroc is a French vodka selling a lifestyle, of course they want to be the billboard for that, that part makes sense to me, but it’s a huge amount of money to spend on relevancy that might not actually have an ROI, and it’s not even about being away from the beach, they could have sponsored something on the beach with everyone else and probably gotten more visibility for it, being up in the chateau was a play for exclusivity, but underneath all of it I’m still not sure why Cîroc was at Cannes Lions at all, I get the instinct, give people a respite from the convention center, but disconnected is disconnected, and it made the whole thing feel more like a performance of showing up than a reason to be there, and then there’s the swag, I said no to almost everything and still ended up with enough left over that I set up a table at our house and gave it away, jewelry, tote bags, towels, bags, an insane amount of stuff for one week, there has to be a better way to do this.

Even in 100+ F heat, Ciroc got folks to play pickleball, I happily sat in the shade and drank frozen lemonade

The Fine Print

The truth is, I had an incredible first Cannes Lions. The conversations that mattered most to me happened off schedule, in private houses, over rosé, not in any session I’d registered for, and I know that kind of access isn’t something everyone gets in their first year. I made it a point to go and do and see as much as I could, and the only thing I’d change is that I wish I’d stayed longer.