The nights here celebrate what was. The days debate what’s coming. Somewhere in between, the future of marketing is getting written.
Day three. Cannes Lions 2026. I started the morning the way many people here probably did — overwhelmed by the schedule. Before I even landed in Cannes, I’d used Copilot 365 to sort through my emails and pull out every invite and registered session. Then I asked Claude to scan the festival programme and build me a personalised calendar around the themes I wanted to follow. Both generated daily schedules, complete with reminders.
In a small way, AI got to Cannes before I did. And once I arrived, AI seemed to be everywhere. Not just as a topic, but as a presence. On screens. In session titles. In conversations. In the nervous energy of an industry that knows something fundamental is changing.
But what stayed with me this morning wasn’t AI. It was a walk. Heading towards the Palais, I found myself looking left at the beach and all the banners on the hotels on the right side. What I saw wasn’t a coastline. It was a map of the industry’s new power structure. Spotify Beach. Google Beach. Meta Beach. Pinterest Manifestival. Reddit. Microsoft. TikTok. Amazon. Salesforce. Canva. Creator platforms. AI start-ups. Ad-tech companies I had never heard of before.
At one point I stopped and thought: is this still a creativity festival, or a technology conference with a very good dress code? And when did this happen? Gradually, then all at once, the beach became as important as the Palais. Which led me to a thought: There are, I’ve decided, two Cannes happening simultaneously this week. Like two operating systems running on the same device.
The first Cannes belongs to the mornings and the day. It lives on the beaches, in the cabanas, across the seafront stages. It is loud and future-facing and slightly breathless. The conversations are about AI, the creator economy, where platforms are going, what consumers want next, how marketing gets built from here. The companies driving these conversations aren’t primarily here to win awards. They’re here to recruit, to launch, to influence, to be seen as the people defining what comes next.
The second Cannes belongs to the evenings and the night. It moves inside, into the Palais, onto the main stages where Lions are handed out and the room fills with the particular electricity of an industry celebrating itself. This is the Cannes we have grown up knowing. The Cannes that borrows from the film award nights. Shortlists. Standing ovations. The question everyone is really asking: what was the best work we made this year? We love that Cannes.
But increasingly, Cannes also resembles CES (Consumer Electronics Show), Mobile World Congress or Google I/O — gatherings focussed not on who was best, but on what’s next. What’s interesting is that while Cannes spends its days discussing the future, we still evaluate it largely through the lens of the night.
Back home, the conversation quickly becomes about the medal table. How many Lions? How does it compare with last year? I understand why. Awards are visible. For a market still asserting its creative ambition globally, they matter. But sitting here, watching the daytime Cannes unfold, I can’t help thinking that the scoreboard measures only one of the two festivals happening this week.
If Cannes is now more than an awards show, then measuring India’s presence only through Lions won is like reviewing a film festival purely through box-office numbers. Accurate, but incomplete. The bigger questions are these: Are Indian leaders helping shape the industry’s direction? Are Indian companies visible in conversations about the future? Is Indian thinking part of what comes next? Those questions don’t fit neatly into a rankings table. But they’re increasingly the ones that matter.