The most important marketing moment of the year is approaching, and at Cannes Lions 2026, conversations will look different than they did even a year ago. The industry has moved beyond whether AI belongs in marketing, whether CTV is growing, whether creators matter, or whether brands need to show up in culture. We know the answer to all of that is a resounding “yes”.

The better question to ask this year is: what separates the brands that participate from the brands that actually win? It will not be enough to create the most ad variations. Instead, the brands standing out are leaning into human creativity to launch clever campaigns and show up in the cultural moments on everyone’s mind. 

That is the thread running through Smartly’s Cannes programming this year: embracing scale, without losing the power of human creativity. Here is what will define the brands built to win.

1. Building For the Age of AI

AI is no longer the shiny object in the room. It is the room.

For years, marketers talked about AI as a tool for speed: faster copy, faster edits, faster versions, faster everything. That still matters, especially for teams buried under requests for more.

But at Cannes 2026, the more important conversation is how AI changes the way marketing organizations operate. That’s why we’ll explore how AI is reshaping team structures, leadership models, workflows, and the skills modern marketing organizations need to move faster without losing creativity, culture, or human judgment.

Because the real AI advantage is not “we made 500 assets instead of 50.” It’s:

• Creative teams knowing what to make sooner
• Media teams understanding what will move performance
• Data teams informing decisions before spend is wasted
• Leaders building organizations that can actually act on intelligence

AI is a set of dials, not a switch. The best teams will know what to leverage, and when to let human judgment lead.

2. Turning Cultural Relevance into Business Value

Showing up in culture used to be the goal. Now, it is the starting line.

Brands have gotten better at moving with the internet. But as cultural participation becomes standard, attention alone becomes less differentiating. Everyone can show up. Not everyone can make it matter.

That is the tension behind our Cannes Day 2 theme: “From Vibes to Value.” The programming asks a sharper question for 2026: How can brands turn relevance into results and convert attention into something that lasts?

This is where creative intelligence becomes critical. The brands that win don’t abandon vibes; they operationalize them. They understand which creative choices drive outcomes, which audiences respond to which messages, and which cultural moments are worth entering in the first place.

In other words, they have stopped treating creativity like a guessing game with a post-campaign report attached. Instead, they’re leaning on systems that help them know more before they launch, learn faster once they are live, and prove what actually worked after the campaign ends.

3. Reducing Waste Before The Campaign Goes Live

Creative and media have spent too long acting like neighbors who wave politely but never share tools. That doesn’t work anymore.

The modern campaign does not live in one channel, one format, or one moment. Today, attention moves from the feed to search to the groupchat and back again, if you’re lucky. If creative and media aren’t connected from the beginning, the campaign is already behind.

Smartly’s Cannes programming brings this idea forward across several sessions, including a conversation with Cindy Rose, CEO, WPP, and Laura Desmond, CEO, Smartly, exploring how AI is forcing a rewrite of growth strategies, agency structures, and the relationship between creative, media, and intelligence.

The old model was not built for the speed of modern media (and if we’re being honest, it hasn’t worked for decades). Ever since agencies began siloing media, creative, digital, and social, there have been missed opportunities. Winning advertisers understand that media strategy can no longer sit downstream from creative development. Instead, it has to shape what is made and where it goes next.

No one wants to learn expensive lessons mid-flight. They want to know what is likely to work before the money is already spent. That is why winning brands prioritize more connected systems in 2026.

4. Treating CTV as a Creative Performance Channel

CTV is where the old lines between brand and performance marketing have blurred.

Streaming environments give brands the canvas of premium video with the targeting, testing, and measurement expectations of digital. That combination is powerful, but it also raises the stakes. 

Winning brands build campaigns for the way audiences actually engage with ads today. At Cannes, we’ll explore that shift through sessions and partner moments with brands tied to the growing importance of CTV, creative agility, precision, and cross-screen orchestration.

The takeaway: CTV success will come from building creative systems that can:

• Adapt messages across audiences
• Align video creative with performance goals
• Connect CTV with social, commerce, and digital touchpoints
• Measure what is working beyond surface-level reach
• Move quickly when audience behavior changes

CTV may be premium inventory, but it still demands modern agility. The brands that win bring social-grade speed to streaming-quality storytelling.

5. Understanding More Inputs Doesn’t Always Drive Better Outcomes

Modern marketing has a volume problem: More channels. More formats. More assets. More versions. More dashboards. More meetings about the dashboards.

The answer cannot simply be more. That’s how we ended up with truffle ketchup.

Winning brands will not confuse abundance with intelligence. They will know which inputs matter. They will prioritize the signals that actually inform stronger work. They will build creative with intention, not just variation for variation’s sake.

This is especially important as AI makes it easier than ever to generate more. More versions can help, as can more  personalization and testing. But only if the system behind it knows what it is trying to learn. Otherwise, “more” just becomes “messy”. 

The best brands use AI and automation to create smarter creative ecosystems, instead of just injecting truffle oil in every dish known to man.

6. Proving Creative’s Impact On Growth

For a long time, creative measurement has been caught between two unsatisfying options: Either creative was treated as intangible magic, too emotional and subjective to measure properly, or it was reduced to surface-level performance metrics that did not capture its real business impact. And neither is good enough for 2026.

We’ll directly address that shift in a session that explores how creative intelligence is changing the way marketers understand performance, moving beyond traditional metrics to measure true lift, incrementality, and the connection between creative quality and business outcomes.

That may be one of the most important conversations at Cannes, because scale is no longer a roadblock. The harder question is: which creative actually drove growth? 

Winning brands are able to answer that with confidence, because they use incrementality to understand what changed because of their marketing, not just what happened near it. They connect creative decisions to business outcomes and know when to increase investment, adjust the message, and stop dedicating budget to work that only looks good in a vanity metric.

7. Moving At The Speed Of Live Moments

Whether they’re live sports, cultural events, or breaking trends, today’s audience conversations move from broadcast to social to group chat before your brand team has opened the shared doc. Winning in those moments requires readiness.

Our panel with Amazon focuses on exactly this challenge: how brands can develop, adapt, and deploy creative in real time across streaming, social, and digital platforms while balancing speed, authenticity, engagement, and performance. That balance matters.

The fastest brand is not always the smartest brand. We have all seen what happens when a brand jumps into a moment it does not understand. The better opportunity is to build systems that allow teams to move quickly because the strategy, guardrails, workflows, and creative intelligence are already in place.

Winning brands go from chasing culture to being ready for it by asking “How do we prepare better so we can act when it matters?”

8. Remembering That Human Creativity Still Carries The Moment

For all the conversations about AI, automation, measurement, and orchestration, Cannes is still Cannes. People come for the ideas, conversations, and unexpected connections. Then there’s the thing someone says on a panel, at dinner, or during a happy hour that suddenly makes sweating through your clothes all week worth it.

That human layer shows up throughout our programming, with a locally-guided dinner, comedy show, and happy hour, all designed to offer connection. 

That matters because great advertising cannot be defined by automation alone. The strongest brands use technology to make space for better human decisions. Better ideas. Better taste. Better timing. Better judgment.

AI can help marketers scale. Intelligence can help them optimize. Measurement can help them prove impact. But creativity still needs people who understand context, emotion, culture, humor, and when not to force the brand into the conversation.

The brands that win don’t choose between intelligence and imagination; they build systems to optimize both.

Winning Brands Orchestrate

Cannes has always celebrated creativity. In 2026, the definition of creative excellence is expanding. Winning brands still need bold ideas, but they’re not enough alone.

Operating models must move at the speed of AI, with creative intelligence to turn relevance into results. Media orchestration must connect every screen and moment, with the measurement discipline to prove what drives growth. And it all needs a healthy dose of human judgment to keep the work sharp, useful, and worth remembering.

That is the new bar.

Better systems empower better decisions, which empower better creative outcomes. Join us this year at the Smartly penthouse at Cannes to learn how to achieve exactly that.