UnCANNED

Brian Morrissey captured it well. Cannes has entered its “private equity phase.” The 8,000-person beach activation, the 30-person villa dinner, the private investor breakfast were all happening at once, in different worlds that overlap far less than they used to. Registration-only events made the festival feel less democratic and overly programmed.

Total award entries fell from ~26,900 to ~20,050 under a new rule requiring CMO sign-off on all submissions. The festival also retired the Creative Company of the Year award because mega-mergers made benchmarking impossible.

PE firms and investment banks weren’t operating around the edges anymore. Solomon Partners was a first-time festival partner, running C-Level Exchanges on the beach. Conversations about acquisitions, succession planning, and founder liquidity were far more common than a few years ago.

One AI executive described the dominant anxiety as FOBO, fear of being obsolete. Backroom conversations increasingly focused on AI’s costs and dubious ROI. As Kara Swisher put it, “Everyone’s coming to the conclusion that they’re not really clear what efficacy this stuff has.”

Scott Galloway said it plainly. “AI takes everyone to the middle, and the middle is moderated. Creativity has never been more important.” Kara Swisher echoed it. “Everyone’s coming to the conclusion that they’re not really clear what efficacy this stuff has.”

Accenture bought creator agency Whalar ($600M+). Publicis bought Influential (~$500M). CAA and TPG launched a $250M creator fund. PMG quietly acquired Digital Voices. Different buyers, same thesis. Nobody was paying premium prices for the ability to make Instagram posts. They were paying for trusted networks and long-term creator relationships that can’t be replicated at speed.

Walmart acquired CTV ad platform Vibe.co in a 10-figure deal, bulking up its streaming offering to challenge Amazon. The move had much of Cannes buzzing about the convergence of retail and media.

An investor said it cleanly. The first wave rewarded creators. The second rewarded platforms. The third will reward whoever owns the infrastructure connecting the two.

Bose CMO Jim Mollica told Digiday he hasn’t used a creative AOR in four or five years. P&G’s Marc Pritchard described a modular set of “MVP” partners who “flow to the work.” Cheil’s CEO made it simple. “Things that will separate agencies are creativity and trust.”

The agencies that won the room didn’t show up with credentials decks. They showed up with tailored ideas already plugged into the client’s architecture. BrandTech and Gumshoe were noted by name for it.

CMOs increasingly show up with their own scripts and ideas already worked out, not a blank brief. The old agency posture, disappear for three weeks and come back with three options, doesn’t fit how clients want to work anymore.

The firms that generated the most interest owned something specific. A category, a market, a craft, a problem clients immediately associated with them. Generalists are finding life harder.

PMG’s $500K AI hackathon at the Miramar Beach space proved that the talent needed today is a rare overlap of marketing judgment and technical AI fluency. As one PMG leader put it, “The people they need now are different from the people they would have hired five years ago.”

Some holdcos were accused of “selling air,” leading with an AI platform as the future rather than what actually makes them different. One agency CEO, speaking on condition of anonymity, said most holdcos are “selling air” when it comes to their new tech.

The first decision is surprisingly simple. Are you building to sell, building to last, or building to become part of something bigger? All three are legitimate. The mistake is chasing all three at once.

The industry is simplifying itself. Mergers, AI, capital, changing client expectations are all pulling in the same direction. The traditional agency bundle is coming apart.

BCG surveyed 300 CMOs globally. 96% say AI is transforming marketing, but only ~33% have rebuilt workflows to capture the value. 90% of US agencies use GenAI. Only 50% use agentic AI for execution.

CMOs are typing their brand names into ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews and watching what comes back. Sometimes it’s wrong. Sometimes a competitor gets described in exactly the language they wish described them. And there’s no obvious lever to pull. Jellyfish released data showing YouTube creator content appearing in more than a quarter of AI-assistant answers.

An exec at a major platform put it bluntly. When someone gets a single answer back from an LLM, that answer was assembled from everywhere (SEO, PR, content, product) whether the company meant it to be or not. P&G’s Marc Pritchard made the same point from the main stage.

Havas and PRovoke panels noted that LLMs heavily index trade journalism and specialist vertical media for authoritative answers. Premium publishers were in an unusually good mood, since their negotiating power with AI firms is stronger than they imagined.

Brands are quietly being asked to write two versions of themselves. One persuasive to humans, one legible to machines. The keyword-dense content that used to win search rankings can read as noise to an LLM.

You cannot brief a model or a creator from chaos in five people’s heads. Most brands try to train an LLM on the chaos, brief from the chaos, then wonder why nothing feels right.

Adobe positioned itself as the “agentic infrastructure layer” with CX Enterprise co-innovations across Accenture, Omnicom, Stagwell, and WPP. PMG turned the former WPP beach space into an “AI & Tech Sandbox.”

OpenAI made its Cannes debut. Criteo passed 2,000 brands on ChatGPT ads. Amazon touted Alexa+ Agentic Ads. The agentic advertising era has officially started.

After Zuckerberg’s comments about AI fully creating and targeting ads by the end of 2026, Meta wasn’t a dominant festival presence. The cautionary tale making the rounds was REI getting roasted after Meta’s AI ad tool auto-enrolled it in a feature that gave a bike two sets of handlebars.

One executive showed a demo of AI agents joining group chats, trained on a brand’s data and answering in a brand-appropriate format, much like a visual identity that persists everywhere.

CMOs are stuck on the “how.” How to build an AI stack, how to train teams, how to know if principal trading is quietly bleeding their media budget. As MediaLink’s Donna Sharp noted, all that time on the how keeps them from the one question that actually matters. What are they building toward?

Baseline competence is becoming universal and worth very little. When perfect targeting, optimized creative, and clean execution are available to everyone, the capability stops being a differentiator.

Stagwell’s Sport Beach was massive. Galloway called sport “really the cultural religion now.” World Cup ratings set records. Sports are the last bastion of appointment viewing in a fragmented landscape.

The structure is shifting from “creator promotes product” to “creator and brand build something together.” The creators on the ground were specific about one practical failure. Most ads still try to sell before they’ve earned the first three seconds.

Adidas Originals won two Entertainment Grands Prix (Film and Music) for “Original Forever,” a three-minute film set to a new arrangement of Oasis’s Live Forever to mark the 2025 reunion tour. It wasn’t an ad. It was co-built IP.

Podcasting is shedding its audio-only reputation. UTA built its own podcast studio at Cannes for the first time, with ~70 creator clients on the ground. The focus is on the concept, not the delivery vehicle.

Mother London won the Film Grand Prix for Anthropic’s Claude with two darkly comic Super Bowl films positioning Claude as an AI that pledges not to run commercial messages on its tools. The jury president called it “an ad about where ads shouldn’t exist. An AI making fun of AI. Corporate aikido.”

Rethink named Independent Network of the Year. LePub Milan named Agency of the Year. Rethink Toronto named Independent Agency of the Year. Isle of Any NY won Film Craft Grand Prix. Motion Sickness Auckland won the Good track. Mother London won the Film Grand Prix.

Kenya earned its first-ever Grand Prix for “Paid Sick Leave for Cows” by The Partnership Agency Nairobi. Greece won its first for Wikifarmer’s “The Wedding Rice” by McCann Athens, which tackled rice waste at Greek weddings while supporting struggling farmers.

Artplan São Paulo won the Glass Grand Prix for “Nigrum Corpus,” a multimodal medical textbook that treats racism as a disease. It was adopted by Brazil’s highest medical authority and endorsed by the WHO.

McCann Paris won the PR Grand Prix for “The Bread Exam” for Spinney’s Flour and The Lebanese Breast Cancer Foundation, using bread-making to teach women breast self-examination.

Uncommon Creative Studio won the Health & Wellness Grand Prix for The Ordinary’s “The Periodic Fable,” a campaign calling out the spurious scientific claims that pour out of the beauty industry.

Gut won the Outdoor Grand Prix for Mercado Livre’s “Field Barcode,” which placed scannable patterns onto Brazilian football pitches that fans could photograph for discounts.

Rethink won the Print Grand Prix for Heinz’s “Look Familiar?,” which showed how French-fry packaging echoes the Heinz ketchup keystone logo.

Rainbow Lobster Mexico City won for “600K Network” for Comando Con Venezuela, turning a simple QR code into a decentralized electoral verification system and 600,000+ citizens into a verification network during the 2024 Venezuelan elections.

Ogilvy was named Network of the Year, followed by VML and TBWA Worldwide. LePub Milan was Agency of the Year. Apple was named In-house Agency of the Year, followed by Google Creative Lab and L’Oréal New York.

The work that won this year all required someone in the building to say yes to something uncomfortable. The Ordinary calling out beauty-industry lies. Adidas making a music video instead of an announcement.

There is still a relatively small group of people who comfortably move across talent, technology, media, brands, sports, entertainment, and private equity. They know each other. They trust each other. Many of the biggest opportunities still begin with those relationships.