Cannes Lions has always been where the industry performs optimism. What made 2026 different was how much of the conversation was about proof. Not creative ambition, not platform potential, not what AI might do someday, but solid proof. Proof that creative investment moves business outcomes. Proof that sponsorship spend is working. Proof that the measurement frameworks brands have relied on for years are still holding up under CFO scrutiny.
Spoiler: some of those frameworks aren’t holding up. Our team spent the week in those conversations. Here’s what we came back with.
Who We Sent to the Croisette
MarketCast had four leaders on the ground at Cannes Lions 2026. Here’s who they are and what they came back thinking about.
Lana Busignani, Chief Executive Officer
For Lana, the week confirmed that the industry’s consolidation story is far from over and that its implications for the agency model are only beginning to surface in serious conversation.
Paul Shortley, Chief Revenue Officer
Paul came back focused on a single number: $50 billion. That’s the estimated global sponsorship spend this year, and most of the marketers behind it still can’t tell you whether it’s working.
Kerel Cooper, Chief Marketing Officer
Kerel’s read on the week: this wasn’t a year defined by a single trend. It was defined by a single demand: proof. Proof that creative drives outcomes. Proof that measurement connects to decisions. Proof that the investment was worth it.
Lisette Williamson, SVP, Media
Lisette spent the week tracking where budgets are moving and found a creator and influencer economy that has graduated from test budgets to core investment, without the measurement infrastructure to match.
The Signal Underneath Everything: Creativity and Measurement Have to Work Together
The biggest shift our team noticed wasn’t a single session or a headline announcement. It was a change in how the room talked about two things that have historically been kept separate.
Kerel Cooper, Chief Marketing Officer, put it directly: “My biggest takeaway was that creativity and measurement are no longer separate conversations. They have to work together. Great creative builds emotional connection, but if you can’t measure how that connection influences brand and business outcomes, it’s increasingly difficult to justify the investment. The marketing teams that will win are the ones that can connect emotion to outcomes and tell one clear story about the value of their marketing investments.”
That framing kept showing up across sessions. Advertising luminary and board member with Dstillery, David Bell said it best from the stage: “Without emotional connection, brands can’t thrive.” It reinforced what practitioners in the room already believed: people remember how brands make them feel. The harder question is whether they can prove it.
Kerel also kept hearing a related point throughout the week: marketing has never had more data, but the opportunity isn’t collecting more of it. It’s bringing it together, showing how creative, media, and measurement collectively drive business outcomes in a single coherent story.
Sports Was Everywhere and the Conversation Has Matured
If there was one topic that commanded more floor space than expected, it was sports.
Lana Busignani, Chief Executive Officer, was struck by the breadth of it. “There were so many forums discussing media and sports strategy, high-performing content, leagues, global audience expansion ambitions, the right players to right brands, the game around the game. From the media and rights holders side, the conversation around building and leveraging fandom to drive stronger value for sponsors and advertisers. From the brand side, brands are looking for ways to connect authentically with sports stories and relevant offerings. They are not only demonstrating their right to be there but creating emotional resonance with their consumers.”
What’s changed is the sophistication of the question. It’s no longer whether sports is a brand-building platform. It’s how brands earn the right to be part of the story and how they prove it when someone asks.
Paul Shortley, Chief Revenue Officer, added a specific dimension that stuck with him: the NFL’s CMO spoke about players becoming brands in their own right. They’re now active participants in promotion, functioning as cultural amplifiers and social influencers, not just athletes in a jersey.
Lisette Williamson, SVP, Media, saw a connected opportunity and a gap sitting right next to each other. Athletes are increasingly central to brand strategy, but the measurement infrastructure hasn’t kept pace. The analytics available to support athlete partnerships don’t extend much beyond social stats like follower counts, engagement rates, basic reach. The data needed to validate what those partnerships actually deliver to a brand is still catching up to the investment.
Influencers and Creators: From Test Budget to Core Investment
Lisette also flagged one of the clearest shifts in how budget conversations are being framed on the ground. “I was struck by the focus and investment going toward influencers overall. I heard many comments about moving beyond test budgets and into more substantial portions of the budget. Now we’re seeing other platforms trying to attract budgets away from social, even more than big linear, and there’s a focus on developing tools to continue to support creators and influencers across platforms.”
The creator economy is no longer a line item to experiment with. It’s becoming a primary channel with its own measurement demands and right now, many brands are investing at a level that outpaces their ability to evaluate it.
A related observation from Lisette: brands are increasingly functioning as media networks themselves, monetizing first-party data as both a revenue source and an intelligence asset. The line between advertiser and publisher is moving.
AI: The Pressure-Testing Phase Has Begun
In previous years, AI conversations at Cannes tended toward the expansive. What AI could do. What it might become. What it would change. But this year was different.
Paul’s read: “My number one takeaway is that AI will continue to be a dominant force, but brands are looking for the right data sets and insights to power their models. The sheer speed AI delivers is important, but creating emotional, human connections is critical.”
He also pointed to e.l.f. Beauty as a case worth paying attention to. Their approach treats community insights as raw material for creative, leaning into what individual consumers actually say rather than averaging responses into abstraction. The finding: you cannot build bold creative that disrupts by averaging out comments. Community intelligence, held at the individual level, produces something different than aggregated sentiment.
The AI question at Cannes Lions 2026 has moved from “what’s possible” to “what’s actually working, and what data is behind it.” That’s a harder conversation. It’s also the more useful one.
What the Cannes Lions 2026 Measurement Trends Point To
Taken together, the conversations our team had this week point in one direction: the industry is done accepting measurement that describes what happened. The pressure is for measurement that connects what was spent to what actually moved people, whether it’s from CFOs, CMOs defending budgets, or brands trying to justify athlete partnerships and creator investments and sports activations.
The gap between what the industry says it measures and what it actually measures came up in session after session. The brands and properties that walk away from Cannes with an advantage are the ones treating that gap as a solvable problem, not a condition of the business.
Connect Emotion to Outcomes
Want to see how MarketCast connects creative performance, media investment, and brand outcomes in a single measurement frame?
Request a briefing with our team.
We’ll walk you through what the data looks like in practice — and what it makes possible.