Cannes Briefing: The Cannes confessional

The numbers, once you start collecting them, get hard to unhear.

Outside a pub one night, someone mentioned, almost in passing, that an ad tech firm had paid $1.7 million for a setup outside one of the hotels, then spent a good two minutes listing what else that money could have bought. A few hours later, a different visitor admitted they’d had to fight the organizers down from a six-figure ask to a five- figure one just for signage on the outside of the building they were using for the week — a number that had apparently arrived with all the negotiating flexibility of a parking ticket. Neither figure came close to the exec who, almost casually, put one of the bigger setups on the Croisette at $25 million.

It’s the thread connecting the beachfront builds to the bar-stool bubble talk. More people than usual are doing the math out loud this year, on the same stretch of coastline, in the same week. Not everyone’s reckoning with it, and not everyone agrees there’s anything to reckon with. But Cannes made the bill big enough that fewer people could pretend not to notice it.

One marketer put real numbers to it in conversation with Digiday. The going rate for a top-tier AI tool is about $200 a month, they said. What it actually costs the vendor to serve a user at that level is closer to $5,000. Call it what it is, they continued. A subsidy. It won’t last forever, and somebody’s going to end up paying the real price eventually.

A few other moments punctured the week the same way.

One ad exec told another that half their job at brand pitches now is just selling air. The exec laughed, but didn’t disagree.

A consultant who’d spent the week in back-to-back rooms with marketers said several of them eventually steered the conversation toward principal trading, wanting to know, off the record, whether they were quietly being charged for risk nobody was actually taking on.

Another consultant, fresh out of a meeting with their agency’s AI lead, came away with one line stuck in their head: agencies are further along on this than clients are, whether clients want to admit it or not.

And a strategist recapping a string of Cannes meetings said the same thing kept surfacing in every room: brands aren’t short on creative ideas anymore, they’re short on the people who can stitch those ideas into something that runs for months instead of one campaign cycle.

Add it all up and Cannes 2026 looks less like an industry celebrating itself and more like one quietly comparing notes on what it can no longer justify, between meetings before going back to justifying it anyway.

But not every moment this week was spent doing the math.

On the roof of one of the hotels, a creative agency had just found out they’d won a Cannes Lions Gold. There was music. People who’d worked on the campaign hugging — the kind of recognition from peers that actually means something in this industry. CEOs out on the dance floor with their teams, not above them for once, just celebrating a win together. The song blaring out over the speakers was the Black Eyed Peas, “I Gotta Feeling” and for once here the line wasn’t ironic.

This is the part of Cannes the spreadsheets can’t capture. A room full of people who got into this business because they wanted to make something good, watching that thing get recognized by the people whose opinion actually matters to them. It’s a small moment. It’s also the reminder underneath everything else this week. However strained the economics get, the industry is still full of people who care about the work and about each other. That’s worth holding onto, long after the numbers get sorted out.

Overheard at Cannes 

Cannes Lions runs on three things: sunshine, spritzes and the radical belief that nobody can hear you over the DJ. They were wrong.

“Everyone is reigning in costs this year. I heard the WPP yacht trip isn’t happening.” — outside a bar opposite the marina

“I always felt like I was chasing my tail. There was always another meeting to be at or an event to attend.” — on the train from Cannes to Paris

“Davos is 20 times better than Cannes. Here,you have a few global figures who are relevant but niche whereas at Davos there are decision makers in every industry.” — on the same train

“I took a helicopter here because a car was just too slow.” — on the Croisette

“You need to look at rebates, specifically on the SSP side. Agencies don’t want to onboard certain ad tech companies because doing so would impact the rebates they get.” — outside the Ma Nolan Irish Pub

“La Guérite is not the freaky island. It’s just the party island.” — outside a bar

“There are more rhinestone embroidered trucker hats on this flight than polo shirts, it’s the creator express.” — on the Sunday overnight flight from JFK to Nice

“That ad tech firm just fired all their regional managers.” — outside Caffé Roma

“I feel like I’ve already been here a month.” — on the Croisette

“It’s only Monday morning, and I’ve already been offered wine before 10 a.m. — I’ve completed Cannes.” — on the Criteo yacht

“I only come here for the yachts.” — on the Croisette 

“How pissed would you be if your swag this year was an umbrella.” — on the Croisette

“Oh, there’s Ryan Seacrest, with a dog?” overheard upon seeing the celeb walk through the lobby of the Majestic hotel with a pooch

“AI AI AI AI. Everything is AI.” — Youth 1, vaping along the Croisette. “I don’t know why everyone is so excited about AI. Anyone who’s using it is just using it to skim their job.” — Youth 2, vaping along the Croisette

“Anyone bored of talking about AI yet? I just want a drink.” — on the Croisette

“Colin Jost was so out of it yesterday.” — Preson 1 on the Croiestte, said to another. “He called Karen [Karen Kovacs, President, Advertising & Partnerships, NBCUniversal] Susan.”

“Are you here all week?” “Yes — the end can’t come soon enough.” — two people talking in the Carlton lobby

“I know she’s famous” “Really, who is she? “No idea, there’s so many of them” — two people in the Carlton garden

 “I love our CEO, but he’s a straight white man with a little bit of a God complex.” — along the Croisette. 

“The shopping journey is much more of a jungle gym than it is a linear funnel,” said Chris Riedy, CRO, Ibotta, on camera in the Digiday video studio in the Ibotta suite at the Majestic