Cannes Lions Admits It Was Never About Creativity

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

I’m sitting exhausted on a beach in Penang after another relentless week at Cannes. 6 keynotes, 2 podcasts, 4 dinners, 2 parties, and a partridge in a pack of vogue cigs.

The environment is incredibly taxing. An American business culture exported to Europe - the most intense networking of your life, the sweatiest you’ve ever been, set against the beautifully ‘high-friction’ French service environment.

As with every conference, I am more interested in reading the tea leaves than analysing the talks themselves. Note that I am going to split this over two articles: one about media, one specifically about creators.

Thanks for reading Considered Chaos! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Cannes Is Media

This year I heard about the platforms, the products, the technology and commerce underpinning creativity, everything but the substance of the creative messages themselves.

The fact that ads are not really the talk of the Croisette anymore is commonly used by the peanut gallery to bemoan the death of Cannes.

But Cannes was really about the media all along, whether or not it could admit it out loud. It’s a place in which ad people could rent access to the lifestyle led by those with the real resources: the brand and media owners. My cultural capital for your economic capital, and for a week, we can pretend we’re equals (ad people performed this exchange in turn with artists, there’s always a subcontractor).

This agency/client equilibrium held as long as the role of advertising was mostly to make short films that could be reliably blasted across stable monocultural environments like television, so the focus was naturally on the content.

But now, it is the shape of the media itself that presents the most significant challenge in creativity. It is only natural that is where the effort of conversations should move. So the platforms take centre stage. And now so too do creators.

eugbrandstrat

View more on Instagram

We are working through the death of monolithic, monocultural media. There are simply far fewer mass moments that can justify investment into the single hero ad. Even when we have our Super Bowl or World Cup moments, the cultural metabolism is so fast they are refreshed at the rate of the feed - only massive, sustained output can create lasting brand memory over time (an approach I call the Charli XCX model of cultural scaling).

Everything else is fragmented across a million channels and moments: reality bubbles are the new normal, the water cooler moment is the exception, not the rule.

This was the subject of the keynotes I delivered at my VideoAmp panel and TikTok’s agency and CMO roundtables - when we no longer have clear paths to distribution, when audiences and cultures have become so fragmented, the simple linear repeatable model of plan-create-burst-track-repeat falls apart.

Everything becomes non-linear, always on, delivered through armies of mediators: creators, curators, gatekeepers, partnerships, collaborations, communities and activations.

If you are still building brand strategies in isolation of how that message will be distributed, you are 5 years behind.

The Death of the Middle

This year was somehow the biggest Lions ever.

But again, to those who have called it the ‘death of Lions’ - don’t make me fucking laugh - next year I suspect will be even bigger.

The opulence and largesse of this event may seem to stand in stark contrast to the currently grim assessment of the marketing industry, but when this is contextualised through the eyes of the broader K-shaped economy, it suddenly makes total sense.

This place is a mirror that reflects exactly where budgets are moving. Capital’s share of income relative to labour is some of the highest it’s been in the Western world in a century. Companies have money to burn.

Watching from home, it is easy to feel disgusted, but being at Cannes you realise the spectacle is the sideshow. The rose, yacht parties and celebrity spotting are merely a pretext to the real reason the big dogs are here: this is where the major media deals get negotiated, and there is plenty of money in the banana stand to attract the right eyeballs.

Being here, I have also observed how Cannes extravagance produces its own sort of attractive business environment: for a week we’re all media moguls, loose-lipped, casually discussing 7 or 8-figure deals, while unbuttoned, hot, bothered, and sweating next to each other at Tiësto or Olivia Dean. Make no mistake, the ironic detachment everyone espouses, “Isn’t Cannes insufferable?” is a send-up, not a take-down. People are utterly relieved to be in the tent.

Expect to see ever-more extravagant spectacles in future years as brands and platforms confront the same challenge marketers do every day: how the fuck do we even get people’s attention any more?

So the top of the market will be fine. As will the bottom, who are not here, (and were never going to be here,) who operate less via attraction and more via inevitability. Costco’s, Walmart’s, Octopus Energy’s.

This leaves the mid-market most at risk. Middle-of-the-road ideas, middling production, mid-market brands and mid-tier creatives are those getting squeezed most - by technology, by economic anxiety, by capital accumulation.

This is a clear-eyed warning to those seeking a future in this industry. As I mentioned in a conversation with Will Poskett a few weeks back - the bottom 90% of the creative services is going to suffer. But every percentage point you can get into the top 10 will provide you with exponential rewards.

If you want a successful, comfortable career in creative services, you need to lock in and figure out exactly what your path is to getting into the rooms here.

Remember, darling, there is no such thing as ‘not in the budget’, only ‘not in the budget for you’.

It may seem like I am delivering a critical assessment of Cannes, but ask me whether I think it’s worth being here? Of fucking course. There is nowhere else in the world granting access to such a concentration of senior people and talent.

Cannes will not make your career, but it is a ratification of the work you’ve done to get to the point where you deserve to be here. Now you get to show whether it was worth opening the door.

Stick around because we’ve got a double feature - tomorrow same time, a dispatch on Creator marketing at Cannes 2026.

This piece was originally published on Considered Chaos. 

Eugene Healey is the educator, brand strategist, and creator for marketing’s era of entropy. He develops strategies for brands to survive a climate where media is fragmented, attention is fracked, and algorithms have dissolved mass culture into soup.

Looking for a new agency? DCA cuts through the noise to connect brands with agencies that fit

• We cover all types of projects and disciplines, from strategy and creative to performance and tech.

• Our editorial team vets every agency, so you skip the pitch theatre and get straight to capable partners.

• We offer consultancy, pitch management, or a complimentary shortlisting service if that's all you need. Submit a brief today