For the next couple of weeks from today, we’re running articles covering the huge variety of roundtables, panels, interviews and podcasts that took place at our venue Maison NDA, which made me reflect on what the festival stood for today
For decades, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has been one of the most important events in the advertising industry’s calendar. It has long been a celebration of creativity. But, to echo the words of Terry Kawaja last week, the tech takeover of Cannes is complete.
I’ve been attending Cannes for what seems like decades. What started off, even before my time, as a gathering of creative directors celebrating their work in the south of France has evolved into something unrecognisable. As I’ve said previously, there are now two Cannes festivals operating side by side: the original creative Cannes, and the tech, programmatic Cannes.
The creative Cannes is still centred in the Palais, where the best creative work is celebrated and recognised, and where a Cannes Lions award can still make or break a creative career. But more and more, the real action happens outside the Palais, along the Croisette, in the grand hotels like the Carlton or the Majestic, on yacht row, in villas taken over by tech firms, or on the beaches now owned by the platforms like Google and Meta.
This shift has been happening for quite some time, but I now fully agree with Terry Kawaja: the tech takeover is complete. Cannes Lions is no longer just a festival of creativity, it’s a festival of innovation and technology.
And is this a bad thing? I don’t think so. Creativity itself has evolved, becoming more powerful through the use of technology.
I’ve spent many years at Cannes Lions hosting panels about data and creativity and how the two should collide. In many of these panels, it was clear that this hadn’t happened yet. The creative side of the industry, epitomised by Cannes Lions, did not initially want to adopt technology or see the value in data.
There was a rather sniffy attitude towards things like programmatic advertising, which many thought was driving a race to the bottom in terms of creativity.
But over the last few years, that’s totally changed. The best creative directors now harness the power of data and technology. The best creative work uses technology and data to create better experiences for consumers. The whole industry that Cannes Lions celebrates is now built on technology, built on data.
And so yes, the tech takeover of Cannes is complete, and that is a good thing.
I was interviewing Brian O’Kelley from Scope3 during Cannes at our venue this year, and he made a suggestion that sounded like a joke at first, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. He said we should have a hackathon takeover in Cannes next year. The idea of a hackathon at Cannes might make some of the more traditional creative directors spin in their graves, but O’Kelley isn’t far off the mark.
Creativity has always been about innovation, about thinking differently, about doing things differently. And nowadays, and really for quite a long time now, all those things are increasingly driven by technology. A hackathon, in many respects, is just another way of delivering what the old-school creative brief once aimed to do: come up with something new that captures attention, solves a problem, and resonates.
The most creative minds in our industry now include engineers, data scientists, and product designers, as well as art directors and copywriters. The best campaigns, products, and experiences are built by interdisciplinary teams who understand both humans and code.
So yes, the tech takeover of Cannes is complete. But rather than mourning the old Cannes, I say we celebrate the new one. It still glitters, it still inspires, and it still leads the way. It’s just now actually a festival of technology.
