As one of Canada’s Cannes Lions Ambassadors, Andrea Hunt, President and CEO of the Association of Canadian Advertisers, spent the week immersed in the conversations, ideas, and creativity that defined Cannes Lions 2026. Her biggest takeaway? Wow. Cannes 2026 was hot.
Hot and noisy. A full-on assault of messages, brands, and salesmanship. As a Cannes-first timer commented, it was a LOT. Big tech and AI talk was everywhere, as were creators and sport luminaries. But as for a dominant theme? That was less clear.
And yet, the whispers said the content was a little, well, ‘meh’. Meh? With all this talent, money, and possibility? How could the world’s greatest festival of creativity feel, at times…just adequate?
Perhaps Cannes 2026 didn’t lack for ideas – it just lacked for shock. This year, we heard a return to the fundamentals. Whether it was Ritson, Hagarty, Hurman, or Bain, we heard strategy matters, brand matters, craft matters, consistency matters. Creativity was reaffirmed as not ‘fairy dust’ but a product of human discipline and rigour that breeds ROI.
No, this is not as flashy as or the threat of industry annihilation with AI, but it’s the truth, and is infinitely more useful.
Across the week, luminaries like Fernando Machado and our own Aaron Starkman stressed similar essential points: weak, generic strategy fails a brand before work even begins – and beautiful creative is no longer a differentiator. Optimized, airbrushed content is everywhere, and in a world where everyone can produce more, faster, the competitive advantage is not production quality, it’s attention. This means creativity matters …more than ever before.
I take this as both a problem and an opportunity for advertisers. We have never been better equipped to target, measure, automate, distribute and optimize, but the evidence attests that real effectiveness has been declining for decades. Yikes! As an industry, we have built an astonishing machine for delivering content, but the vast majority of what we make goes unseen or is ignored. Andrew Tindall of System1 called it: “Naughty, naughty marketers”, he said. Harsh, but true. Marketing effectiveness has been under pressure for years, and we need to stop pretending the problem belongs to someone else.
Is it an agency problem? A media problem? A brand problem? Yes.
We are all complicit. The ecosystem rewards safety, dashboards, and certainty over distinctiveness, memorability, and meaning. It is much easier to defend work that is efficient but invisible and misrepresent activity for impact. Thankfully, while not the flashiest of themes, Cannes reminded us that the antidote has been here all along. Creativity.
Cannes proves over and over that creativity is not an indulgence of the biggest countries or biggest brands; it’s the domain of anyone and everyone. The best work doesn’t choose between effectiveness and imagination; it proves they are inseparable and together, unignorable. AXA’s “Three Words” proved how just three small words added to an insurance clause could help women escape domestic violence. Heineken’s “The Pub that Refused to Die” turned a local community story into a model for keeping community spaces alive.
Canada’s own proof point: adidas and TBWA\Canada’s “Supernova Adaptive,” conceived and produced a performance shoe inspired by and designed with the Down syndrome community.These ideas were not powerful for the weight of a media buy, nor were they loud just for the sake of it. They were specific, useful, and hard to ignore. They made people feel something.
Mercifully, we heard that this is still what humans do best. That said, Cannes 2026 didn’t reject AI. Chipotle’s CMO encapsulated it nicely with the idea of a “technology sandwich”: human intention, technological leverage, human judgment. We were encouraged to use the tools, but urged not to let the tools make the work smaller, flatter or more forgettable – Sameness easier to scale – and sameness is the antithesis of safe. It’s a waste.
Alongside the renewed case for creativity, there was another strong heartbeat to the week, brand.
2026 saw more CMO’s on the Crossitte than ever before. They didn’t own the beach or villas (who has the money!), but they were courted as rock stars. After years of short-termism, brands and brand building is having an undeniable moment. 3X Brand of the year, AmBev made the strong argument that brand spend is not discretionary – It’s a business system, a structural hedge and a source of future demand. Mental availability is indeed the difference between being chosen and being forgotten. – As Reddit & Fields reminded us, brands that have shown up consistently and coherently in the past are reaping the rewards now in both AI and human preference.
Overall, Cannes 2026 reassured the path forward is not to spend more, post more or produce more assets – the key is work that is clearer, braver, more useful, and willing earn its place in culture. The brands that mattered in Cannes did just that: AXA, adidas, Heineken, Heinz, IKEA, KitKat. KFC, and our own Kids Help Phone, among them. They didn’t just make ads, they created something people could understand, remember and talk about.
Finally, Kenny Mitchell, global CMO of Levi’s, on the Cannes learning stage, offered one of the week’s simplest and sharpest pieces of advice: Make no small plans. To me, it is this third idea that captures what Cannes does at its best. It reminds a very practical industry to dream bigger – not recklessly, not vaguely, but with ambition, discipline and enough belief in creativity to let an idea become more than a checked box.
So yes, Cannes 2026 was heat-soaked, over-programmed, and occasionally over the top. But it also reminded us that this is an extraordinary time for our industry, where creativity belongs at the centre, craft is back in fashion, and brand building is once again a boardroom priority.
Cannes looked different this year, but its message was familiar: dream bigger, push harder, and create work with substance. Because in the end, the ideas that make the biggest impact are the ones that deliver the greatest return.
Thank you, Cannes, our love affair continues.
