5 Cannes Lions Takeaways Every Founder Should Know

Creators, AI, and how shifting consumer behavior is rewriting marketing rules.

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I’ve spent the last three decades building companies in e-commerce, fintech, and now AI and video. During that time, I’ve attended more conferences than I can count. Yet somehow, until this year, I had never made it to Cannes Lions.

People told me it was the advertising industry’s biggest annual gathering. That’s true. But after spending a week there, it struck me that Cannes has become something much bigger. It’s one of the best places to understand where business, technology, media, and consumer behavior are heading next.

This year, one message came through loud and clear: Marketing is being reinvented in real time. Here are my biggest takeaways from my first Cannes.

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1. Creators aren’t part of the media industry anymore—they are the media industry

As someone who spends most of his time in the creator economy, I expected creators to have a visible presence at Cannes. I didn’t expect them to dominate so many conversations. A decade ago, creator marketing was treated as an experimental budget line. Today, that distinction has disappeared.

Many creators now have audiences that rival or exceed those of traditional media. More importantly, they have something increasingly difficult for brands to build on their own: trust. Consumers are overwhelmed with information. Increasingly, they rely on creators to filter, interpret, recommend, and explain the world around them. Trust has become one of the most valuable assets in marketing, and creators have become some of its most important custodians. For brands, this changes everything.

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2. AI isn’t replacing marketing—it’s expanding what’s creatively possible

Last year, most AI conversations centered on fear: Will it replace agencies? Will it replace creatives? At Cannes 2026, I heard much less of that. Instead, marketers are asking a far more interesting question: How can AI help us create things that weren’t possible before?

In the creator economy, sponsorships have barely changed in years. A creator typically pauses the video, explains why today’s sponsor is great, shares a discount code, and moves on. The format works, but viewers often skip it, creators rarely have time to make it genuinely creative, and brands don’t expect much more. AI changes that equation. At Linguana, we’ve begun using AI to create creator-approved brand integrations woven directly into the video’s narrative. Instead of interrupting the story, advertising becomes part of it. We’ve seen everything from talking fish appearing inside fishing videos to dramatic rescue scenes in aviation content—all designed to match the creator’s style and the video’s theme.

These integrations can then be localized into multiple languages, allowing a single creative concept to reach audiences globally while still feeling native in every market. The result is a rare win-win-win: brands receive more attention, creators earn incremental revenue without additional production work, and audiences remain entertained instead of reaching for the skip button. The companies that stand out over the next decade will use AI to make advertising more engaging.

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3. Human creativity just became more valuable

One paradox of Cannes was impossible to miss. Even while AI dominated conversations, the campaigns people talked about most were deeply human. When content becomes abundant, originality becomes scarce. AI can generate endless variations of something average. It cannot easily replicate taste, humor, lived experience, or cultural intuition. Those remain profoundly human advantages. I’ve seen this pattern before in multiple technology cycles. New technology rarely eliminates differentiation. More often, it increases the value of the things machines still struggle to do. Creators understand this instinctively. People follow creators because they’re authentic.

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4. The marketing strategies are starting to extend beyond humans

Another theme that surfaced repeatedly at Cannes was the growing role of AI agents and large language models in discovery. Increasingly, consumers are starting product research by asking ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. That fundamentally changes marketing. If AI systems increasingly mediate discovery, brands need to think not only about influencing people, but also about influencing the information environments these systems learn from and retrieve from.

Influencing AI-generated recommendations is fast becoming central to every modern CMO’s strategy. Product discovery is increasingly happening inside AI conversations, so we’ve been testing how creator content, transcripts, and video descriptions can carry brand messages not only to viewers, but also to the LLMs that increasingly mediate discovery. If consumers ask AI systems which product to buy, marketers need to think carefully about the information those systems can access and understand.

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5. Agility is becoming marketing’s most important capability

Perhaps my biggest takeaway from Cannes had nothing to do with creators or AI. It was speed. The pace of change across media, advertising, commerce, and technology feels faster than at any point in my career. Technologies that seemed experimental 12 months ago suddenly became mainstream. In this environment, annual strategic plans have a very short shelf life.

The companies that will thrive are those that can sense change early, test quickly, learn continuously, and adapt without becoming emotionally attached to old assumptions. I’ve seen this repeatedly throughout my career—from the globalization of e-commerce to the evolution of cross-border payments to today’s AI revolution in media. The lesson remains remarkably consistent: vision matters, but adaptability matters more.

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The bottom line

I attended Cannes expecting to learn about advertising trends. I left convinced that we’re watching the early stages of a much broader transformation. The boundaries between media, technology, commerce, and creativity are disappearing. The companies that succeed won’t simply adopt new tools. They’ll rethink old assumptions about how audiences discover, trust, and buy. And from what I saw in Cannes, that reinvention is already well underway.

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This article was first published in Inc.com.

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