It feels a little perverse to be recapping Cannes during such a weird week of [waves arms] all this other stuff happening. 

But @Katy says I have to, and I’m committed to doing whatever she tells me to do. So here goes. 

There’s no such thing as a fully accurate “Cannes recap.” Cannes Lions is the annual advertising festival in the south of France, and it’s waaaaay too big for anyone to experience even a fraction of it. There are hundreds of panels, parties, dinners, salon discussions, brand activations, and everything else. It’s a lot. 

Themes emerge, but this is my fourth year at Cannes, and the themes have been the same every year. Brands need to be bolder. AI can help with creativity. Creators are the future. Gen Z is different. Storytelling is powerful. Authenticity is everything. Got it. 

I have yet to see a panel where the speakers disagree about anything, maybe because the kinds of topics where disagreement might happen are avoided. Mark Penn runs the buzziest beach party. Nobody bats an eye. 

I don’t mean to sound cynical. I really enjoy Cannes. I tend to avoid the formal programming, I meet a lot of interesting people, and I come away each year with all kinds of new ideas and directions I want to pursue. Because Cannes isn’t the hundreds of panels and parties. It’s the four or five things you go to, and the 20 new people you meet, and the 5 awesome conversations you have every day while you’re there. It’s the friends you make along the way. (Sorry.)

So here’s my non-recap-recap, a quick digest of my favorite conversations from the 2025 Cannes Creativity Festival. 

• F1 came up a lot. The MacLaren team was everywhere. The consensus was that “spending on sports is easy,” and people like writing easy checks right now. As a MacLaren fan, I’m cool with this. (We’ll have more to say about F1 in the next few weeks. No, we’re not sponsoring a car [yet].)
• A Londoner at a big PR agency is moving to NYC to open their first office stateside. Weird timing, but good on her! She got a big bump in salary but is nervous that it’s still not enough to cover the cost of living. And she’s looking for a place in NoHo, so she’s probably right. 
• A big-agency account lead won a Gold Lion for a great campaign. She said she knew it would win the moment she heard the pitch, even though her client initially said no to it. They had to fight to get it made. 
• I overheard a couple guys talking about how it’s impossible to win a Lion unless you have friends on the jury to fight for your work. (Not exactly news, but I’ve never heard it stated so plainly.)
• Nobody I was with talked about AI that much. 
• A sales rep at a big newspaper and I talked for like 45 minutes about the need for independent journalism, and how trustworthy media brands are more important than ever. It was inspiring. 
• A couple of older creatives (by “older” I mean they’re in their forties, my age) talked about how they could be laid off at any moment, and they don’t have a lot of optimism there’ll be another job waiting for them when it happens. 
• An art director I worked with years ago died this month, and everybody found out while we were at Cannes together. She’d been sick for a while, but had been very private about it, so it came as a sad surprise. We toasted her memory. 
• I met a train operator who was at a party with his wife, who works in ad sales. He was a lot of fun to talk to. We discussed the shortage of people who want to be train operators, in a world where everyone wants an email job. 
• The conference attendees on the Croisette talked about not wanting to make the trek to the house parties in the hills. Too far away! The people at the house parties in the hills talked about not wanting to spend time on the Croisette. Too crowded and noisy! Everyone agreed that you should never go to a yacht party unless the boat was staying docked. 
• I met the guy who organizes those thousand-person concerts where everyone plays the same song together. He said drummers are the hardest to work with, because they want to hit their drums all the time. Bass players are the easiest. (As someone who plays both, yes, this is true.) 
• Every copywriter I talked to is working on a script. One just got the greenlight to produce a feature film. 
• I met someone from Ad Council, the non-profit that works with agencies to do really cool ad campaigns for good causes. I said NYC is struggling because Gen Z doesn’t drink, and joked that maybe they should do a pro-alcohol campaign to convince kids to go to bars. She thought about it, and said it should be a campaign about the necessity for third spaces where people can socialize and fight the loneliness epidemic. She took my dumb idea and made it brand safe! I was very impressed. 
• A magnum is only 2 bottles of wine. A Jeroboam is 6 bottles of wine. A Salmanazar is 12 bottles of wine. Now I know!