Day 1 at Cannes Lions, and the heat is very much on, in every sense.
35°C on the Croissette. Highest health warnings issued.
Entries are down (25%!).
Because scrutiny is up.
And quality has followed, which is great news.
The headline is ‘Brands, AI and Independents drive Cannes Lions 2026.’
The literal front page of the Cannes Daily.
I’m here on the new Challenger Pass, designed for independently owned agencies to access the full experience.
This is significant; independents now make up almost a third of all entries, and there are more indie agency jury presidents than ever.
There are the inevitable discussions about AI.
But the human insights are, reassuringly, the most compelling. And perhaps, worrying.
Lots of interesting factoids in the sessions here at Cannes.
We’re entering the ‘age of atomisation’.
Singular living, with less human contact.
1 in 5 homes inhabited by a single person.
Seeking company on their own terms.
And 42% of us apparently engage daily with an AI companion.
10% are in a relationship with a chatbot.
People aren’t peopling
As author James Muldoon put it, when Silicon Valley tells us the solution to social disconnection is to talk to more machines, we should be sceptical.
A throw away quote really stuck with me.
‘You can’t eat dinner with a hammer.’
AI is a tool. A powerful one.
But it’s still a tool. And it needs to be used in the right way.
The most interesting work at Cannes I’m seeing sits at the intersection of human-led creativity and AI capability.
Work neither could produce alone.
Like RGA’s ‘Second Team Machine’ for Foxtel, American viewers pick a football team for the World Cup. Maybe it’s random, maybe it’s because someone they know is from there. Either way, they’re fresh. Then the machine builds a bespoke journey. Team history in the voice of actual fans, chants, the rituals that separate casual interest from fandom. A personalised onboarding into culture.
The generative layer makes it possible at scale.
But here’s what matters, someone had to understand fandom deeply enough to know what a newcomer actually needs.
Not AI doing creative work.
AI letting creative teams scale insight.
That’s the brief worth chasing.
🦁