MSQ's Big Cannes Lions 2026 Review

As the industry starts to reflect on Cannes properly – beyond the first-day-back LinkedIn posts and tagging friends in pictures of beach parties and branded yachts – we thought we’d bring together a true group view of LIONS learnings. Because in reality, Cannes Lions is many different festivals in one – whether you’re in the Palais listening to talks, immersing yourself in the work that’s winning awards, exploring the beach activations or heading to panels on the fringe, you can do Cannes your own way and experience a very different week to someone else’s.  

Luckily, we had all bases covered across MSQ. So, whether it’s sharing learnings from Le Club MSQ, a slot on the main festival programme, takes from the B2B summit or observations from how Cannes is showcasing itself to the industry, we hope you’ll find some useful insight below to take with you from the festival and into the future… 

On AI (well, we had to start there)…

Hosting ‘Momentum Made’ at Le Club MSQ, it was clear that whilst the tools were the advantage twelve months ago - they aren't any more. They're table stakes. Every CMO now has access to the same AI. The brands pulling ahead aren't running better tools, they're running different organisations. The advantage has moved into the org chart.
– Jo Lyall, Executive Chair, Media, MSQ

In a number of conversations I had during the week I was asked about safety and which AI model or provider to back. I found that interesting because, fundamentally, I think that's the wrong question. Betting on a single model is shaky ground - everyone rents the same models, and the one you swear by today can get rug-pulled tomorrow. You bet on context. Your data, your brand, your judgement. Rent the model, own the context. That's one of the few moats left.
– Fergus Dyer-Smith, Chief Product Officer, MSQ

I was asked to join a panel with Rezolve on Agentic AI, and the most relevant takeaway for me – and which resonates strongly across MSQ – is that when you search for a brand, product or service in an LLM, only 20-30% of the weighting of the result is placed on the information that comes from assets (e.g, a website) that the brand itself controls. 

The other 70-80% comes from 3rd party sources such as reviews, forums, other platforms of domain authority etc. Which means that marketers have to work hard to ensure that everything across the whole brand, comms, marketing and tech piece (whether you own the platform or not) is consistent, recent and relevant – otherwise old information and mixed messages turn up in the LLM/AI. A big challenge!
– Ben Rudman, Executive Director, MSQ

There were of course a few AI quotes that caught my attention throughout the week – Dara Treseder, CMO of Autodesk, told the audience to avoid using AI to automate an existing process, instead reimagine the entire process to deliver the business outcomes you are looking for… otherwise you are just speeding up ineffectiveness. 

And Chris Duffery, Adobe’s Head of AI & Agentic Systems, added that the temptation is to just focus automation on places where you currently do repetitive tasks frequently – but really you should spend more time turbocharging the things that make you different and special, not just removing the friction.
– Daniel Binns, Global CEO, Elmwood

On Business Transformation…

The most telling thing about our panel ‘Growth in Transformative Times’ was what didn’t come up. Three days into a Cannes where AI dominated almost every stage and activation, three senior growth leaders - from Haleon, HSBC and Unilever - spent the best part of an hour discussing how to build and grow brands without anyone mentioning it. 

Growth in transformative times, it turns out, is still about the fundamentals: clarity about who you are and who you're for, relevance, genuine closeness to consumers, and the nerve to lead through uncertainty. AI can help accelerate it, but it replaces none of it.

I particularly loved the point made that breakthrough work comes from consumer closeness, bold creativity, and scalable desire. The most brilliantly consistent brands are led by visionary leaders who inspire everyday, who stay close to the ground, who challenge their organisations to think differently and give their teams the tools to operate in a new era of marketing. More of this please.
– Eleanor Lloyd-Malcolm, Managing Partner & Chief Growth Officer, Forge

On our own Elmwood panel – Built to Last, Built for Now – much was talked about the challenge the industry has in bringing on the next generation of marcomm leaders, in a world where organizational structures are becoming so top heavy. AI doesn’t create discernment, that comes with human experience, so when the current crop of senior folks retires to the golf course, where will all the replacements come from in such an inverted pyramid structure? No one is teaching and growing enough young talent, and that needs to be addressed.
– Daniel Binns, Global CEO, Elmwood

On Creativity… 

It was an honour to be asked to speak as part of the main Cannes Lions programme, and to be joined on stage by ythe world record holding freediver, Kateryna Sadurska. We discussed the importance of creative depth in a world where too many brands are drifting into shallow waters. If we want to create culturally enduring ideas, we must treat depth as a discipline, fighting through the lure of ‘good enough’.

To do that, we can learn a lot from Kateryna’s preparation for a dive, where she decides early on the depth she’s aiming for (so much of the discipline is about intention), and ensures she comes fresh to the line, tuning out the external world. That’s something to remember the next time you feel like you’re compromising creativity for volume and efficiency.
– Nat Moores, Brand Futures Director, Smarts

It was also fascinating to hear from Kateryna Sadurska at the Ritualicious lunch we hosted at Le Club MSQ with The Marketing Society. She explained how she could deliver results she herself might not think possible, by pitching this as a mental challenge as much as, if not more, than a physical one. She told us ‘When imagining breaking a boundary or record, I had to train myself to consider “Not what I can do, more what I will allow myself to think about what I could do.” The creative parallels are inspiring.
– Bart Michel, Executive Director, MSQ

On Media…

I was struck by a point made at a panel on Creative Intelligence with Winterberry, Adobe and Vodmob – creative is responsible for around 60% of campaign effectiveness, and it's still the part we're worst at measuring. The industry spent fifteen years building measurement infrastructure around the media side because it was easier to count. Creative intelligence is finally catching up and the real shift is understanding why people engage, not just whether they did.
– Jo Lyall, Executive Chair, Media, MSQ

I was delighted to join the panel for The Network One’s Indie Forum, where we tackled a big question: Earned Media: Dead or Alive? Alongside the overwhelming agreement that earned isn’t only alive, it now sits at the heart of everything from social sharing to community engagement (and has an increasing importance to how a brand shows up within LLMs), I enjoyed hearing from fellow panellists how important earned can be in internal comms. 

It’s something we’ve seen ourselves with our award-winning Asda ‘Red Baskets’ campaign, where Asda staff commented on how seeing the idea earn attention and generate in-store buzz made them feel an increased affinity with their employer.
– Kerri Young, Business Director, Smarts

At Adweek House, the retail media conversation opened with a blunt admission: brands have more data than ever and are genuinely struggling with what to do with it. Data is the lifeblood of the work, with metadata increasingly sitting at the forefront of it, but volume alone isn’t a plan. In-store touchpoints are still maturing from analogue to digital, a shift that takes real capital investment, while the velocity of new signals is what actually lets a brand read them into a purposeful pattern, not just a bigger dataset. The room’s answer was to define the outcome and the level of data needed end-to-end before chasing more of it, and to connect that data explicitly to what the brand is trying to achieve, with KPIs and alignment doing the real work.
– Jessica Quiroga, Head of Marketing, Americas, MSQ DX

On B2B…

The temptation with AI is to automate content creation to make it fast, efficient and high volume. But left to its own devices this will mean tonnes of content that is nothing more than ’noise’, commonly referred to as ’slop’. 

What B2B marketers have come to realise, as I discussed at the B2B Summit, efficiency is not insight. Output is not meaning. And scale is no substitute for bravery.

Now more than ever we need brave CMOs partnered with agencies who are masters of storytelling, together using data in smart ways for insight and targeting to conquer the ’slop’ and put AI to use in truly effective ways.
– Tom Stein, Founder and Chief Brand Officer, Stein

On Agency Value…

In Beyond Billable, we had a fascinating panel on client-agency value, productivity, procurement and what comes after the timesheet. We know that, with the inevitability of creative and media coming back together, brands are going to need to embrace AI to cope with the requirement for volume, personalisation and relevance. So, adopting new ways of contracting with agencies to make this possible isn’t going to be optional. And, critically, it is going to happen far more quickly than many seem to appreciate. 

I believe that the smart agencies are taking new pricing options to their clients, not waiting for the clients to come to them. We have the opportunity to educate people that overall costs are not going down, but value can go up. Brands should not expect to pay less money for their deliverables, because they need to contribute to the technology and training investments being made by agencies. But they can expect to get more outputs as result, and we should certainly anticipate better outcomes too, even if the pricing model can't directly link to those outcomes due to the attribution challenges most brands face.
– Kate Howe, Executive Director, MSQ

From a Big Spaceship perspective, as a business we’ve always sat at the edge of what is next, and right now that edge is a hybrid between creative, technology, and innovation. That shift showed up directly in our own week where we carved out intentional time to sit with founders through UTA and 3CV across creator platforms and new tools built to change how agencies and brands work. It was clear that the agencies that figure out how to utilize these new capabilities early are the ones that end up building breakthrough work.
– Taryn Crouthers, CEO, Big Spaceship

On DEI…

The standing-room-only crowd at the Empower Cafe panel said more than anything we did on stage. We were there to talk about "The Fine Print," our campaign for Plan International, the charity dedicated to raising awareness of and championing girls' rights around the world, at a moment when DEI is quietly being stripped from agendas. A packed room and a queue of questions afterwards told a different story: the appetite for work that takes gender inequality seriously hasn't gone anywhere. 

The campaign sits on a brutal insight, most women alive today won't see gender equality in their lifetime and watching that land with a room full of strangers was a reminder this isn't a niche conversation. The industry's commitment may be wavering, the audience's isn't. That's the gap we need to keep closing.
– Helen James, Chief Executive, The Gate

On Leadership…

The Black Joy Brunch was full of great insight. Amongst my favourite quotes? “We must have clarity in organizational goals and experimentation to test those hypotheses"… and “Listening (to customer sentiment) can be a force multiplier, if you’re built to move fast and iterate." Refreshing to hear. Huge food for thought.
– Elliott Brown, VP, Growth, MSQ DX Americas

Alongside their amazing Palais talk, I was hugely inspired by Kateryna Sadurska and Nat Moores’ fireside chat at the Empower Café, where they explored a new generation of role models. As audiences are drawn to stories grounded in resilience, purpose and possibility, female figures like Kateryna are redefining what ambition, courage and high performance looks like. 

Yet, when asked to identify her own role models, Kateryna discussed a visit to see an older family member and her friends, who may not have achieved ‘something extraordinary’ in the traditional sense, but were completely comfortable with who they are and their own purpose and attitude to life. That, Kateryna said, is harder to achieve and what she admires most.
– Leanne Scott, Chief Growth Officer, Smarts

On the evolution of Cannes…

I attended a fascinating APAC Roundtable with the Advertising Association, featuring brilliant brands and agencies from China, Singapore, Thailand, India, Mongolia and more. The conversation inevitably turned to the purpose of Cannes, and I thought this point was really powerful: “Cannes as beacon of creativity can become even more relevant globally the more it represents and reflects the ever growing demographic and technological power of Asia in its awards, its thought leadership and its presence.”
– Stephen Maher, Vice Chair, MSQ

What also interested me at Cannes is that capital is flowing into the industry. A heavy banker presence at the festival this year reads as a signal that investors see real opportunity in advertising, AI, and media, not retreat. It was not just a feeling on the ground either. Solomon Partners became the first investment bank to sign on as an official Cannes Lions festival partner this year, and firms like Shamrock Capital and Providence Equity Partners had partners speaking on stage in the festival.
– Taryn Crouthers, CEO, Big Spaceship