The Great Convergence: Five Trends That Defined Cannes Lions 2026
I recently returned from my annual pilgrimage to the Cannes Lions, an international gathering of advertising, media, digital technology leaders that has grown to become one of the year’s most important industry events.
This year, there was a noticeable shift in how brands, platforms, media companies, and technology providers are thinking about growth. The conversations felt less experimental and more operational. AI is now a tangible part of business that can be seen as both a threat and an opportunity. New forms of media are becoming mainstream revenue drivers for media companies including the creator economy and retail media. Sports is emerging as a core driver of growth and opportunity for media companies on streaming and other channels.
We weren’t talking about predictions for the future. Conversations focused on what is happening today and how to capture real opportunity now.
THE FIVE TRENDS
1. AI has moved from the keynote to the operating model.
If last year’s Cannes was about AI’s potential, this year was about AI’s output. The conversation has decisively shifted from what AI can do to how we redesign our business around it. Deployment is the new goal. Dreams need to become reality, with investment and training for core project that can yield measurable returns like time savings and better performance. The industry’s focus has sharpened around agentic AI automation and analytics, creative workflow automation, AI-powered media buying, end-to-end campaign optimization, and personalized creative at scale.
The focus on AI output doesn’t mean AI is tactical. At Cannes, the largest platforms in the room were showcasing it as a strategic uplevel, acting as the connective tissue running throughout the entire advertising lifecycle, from brief to buy to optimization. AI is now an “intelligence layer” or an “automation layer” or a “performance layer.” Execs who are still treating it as a talking point are already behind the ones treating it as a structural imperative.
2. The Creator Economy became core infrastructure
This year at Cannes, influencers were no longer discussed as an add-on to a social media strategy or a way to reach younger demographics on the cheap. At this year’s festival, creators were treated as a primary distribution channel in their own right, with serious conversations happening around creator commerce, creator-led product launches, long-term partnership models, and the idea of creators functioning as fully realized media companies. Consider the huge value of individual athletes, musicians and social media stars that attracts millions of fans. In many cases their audiences are bigger than prime time shows.
The festival itself reflected the change. Dedicated creator programming and networking carried a weight this year that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. The industry is now debating how to structure relationships with them at scale so that it becomes a core feature in their content lineup. Influencers are distinct from agencies. They are becoming another distinct layer of the media ecosystem, one that brands, platforms, and agencies are all scrambling to build sustainable models around.
3. Sport Is Advertising’s Biggest Growth Platform
With the World Cup in full swing, sports were impossible to ignore at this year’s Cannes. The tournament served as the beacon for a much larger conversation about the sports media opportunity for advertisers. Sport Beach once again drew some of the heaviest foot traffic on the Croisette, with programming built around themes like community as infrastructure for modern fandom, athletes as cultural architects, and the shifting economics of sports.
What made this year’s discussions different was the scope of what’s now on the table. Sponsorship is almost beside the point. The real conversation is about fandom and how streaming, second-screen engagement, live data, creator partnerships, retail experiences, and commerce all collapse into a single, continuous relationship with the fan. A Sport Beach panel noted that fans don’t follow brands, they follow people, and the fan journey now extends well beyond the final whistle. YouTube alone generates around 40 billion hours of sports-related watch time annually, with fans increasingly seeking behind-the-scenes access, creator perspectives, and athlete stories alongside live content.
As Scott Galloway put it on the ground in Cannes, sport has become “the cultural religion” and the core live viewing opportunity in a fragmented landscape. For companies operating across sports, media technology, and advertising, this is opening of a decade-long opportunity to build infrastructure around how fans actually live with sports, which is to say, constantly, across every screen and surface imaginable.
4. Retail Media keeps expanding beyond retail – Relationship Management (CRM)
Retail media has evolved into a full platform that is reshaping how media gets planned across every channel. At Cannes, the conversation reflected that shift. Commerce data is increasingly being treated as a planning input and an integral part of a media and marketing plan. The lines between advertising, media, commerce, and measurement are converging around the sale itself.
Ahead of the festival, Albertsons Media Collective and Procter & Gamble unveiled a branded entertainment model built on Albertsons’ shopper insights including episodic scripted content designed to move products through storytelling rather than traditional advertising formats. It’s a useful illustration of how customer data generates the creative brief and focuses the strategy.
For media executives, the implication is significant. The planning process is being reoriented around what customers actually do, not what audiences are assumed to want.
5. Creativity is becoming more valuable/not less.
Cannes is first and foremost a festival of advertising creativity. Creatives and brands made it clear this year that the more AI drives down the cost of content production, the more valuable original thinking becomes. When anyone can generate a campaign in minutes, the scarce resource becomes the uniqueness of the idea and the execution. The strongest discussions at this year’s festival focused on the elements that AI can’t replicate, and how to double down on it to connect with audiences and stand out.
Strategy, insight, taste, storytelling, cultural relevance all separate work that resonates from noise. They’re also the things that require a human being who understands context, has a point of view, and has spent time earning the cultural fluency to know what will land and why.
Technology creates efficiency, human creativity creates differentiation. In a market about to be flooded with AI-generated content, the brands and agencies that will stand out have the clearest thinking, the sharpest instincts, and the most compelling things to say. That’s always been true. AI just makes it more consequential.
Spoiler Alert: The biggest lesson from Cannes wasn’t AI. It wasn’t the creators. It wasn’t retail media. It was convergence.
Channels are merging, advertisers want to reach one audience everywhere. Companies want unified ideas, workflows and insights. While the actual business is fragmented with billions of audience touchpoints across hundreds if not thousands of different platforms, sites, apps and screens – the way we engage needs to feel seamless.
BIG BET
The future belongs to media companies that can combine AI-powered execution, creator-led authenticity, live-event engagement, and first-party data into a single commercial engine.
For those of us working at the intersection of media technology, sports, streaming, and advertising, that future is now. Media companies that embrace the data, technology and philosophy to bring those audience touchpoints together in a cohesive opportunity for advertisers will win.
The next battle isn’t between broadcasters and streamers, it’s between companies that own the advertising operating system and those that simply sell inventory.