Kantar at Cannes Lions 2026

Design for meaningful difference: distinctive experiences that drive growth

Activate untapped growth for your brand that lies at the intersection of Marketing and Customer Experience. Join Kantar and global branding agency JKR for a roundtable on how everyday interactions can become distinctive experiences that drive brand growth.

Together, we'll pinpoint the moments that matter, discuss what helps (or hinders) distinctive experiences, and co-create 2-3 practical actions that can help you intentionally design for difference. 

Turbo-charging marketing performance with AI-driven campaign intelligence

Winning brands turn intelligence into advantage. This session shows how AI merges creative and media intelligence into a single growth engine.

Learn how smarter signals, stronger storytelling, and precise activation can help your brand outperform the market. 

Creative consequences: why the world’s strongest brands create the world's best ads

Creativity is the industry’s most celebrated asset – but least understood growth driver. Join the premiere of the largest-ever global analysis in collaboration with Saïd Business School that proves how creative quality and brand strength fuel each other.

Drawing on more than a decade of Kantar LINK and BrandZ data, we reveal how great advertising builds brand equity, the creative elements that drive long-term brand growth, and how to turn creativity into a practical advantage. 

Sustainability that builds brands

What sets sustainability leaders apart? This session brings together top-ranked brands, based on consumer ratings of over 2,000 organisations, for a candid panel on how sustainability drives equity, growth, and sharper creative choices.

Equip yourself with the strategic intelligence to power real sustainable transformation. 

AI-Driven creative content optimisation with Kantar and Microsoft

Imagine moving from AI that analyses, to AI that decides and acts. In this lively session with Kantar and Microsoft we will discuss what intelligence you need to make decisions and predict success before your content is in-market. In a world where we can make faster decisions at scale, what are the trade-offs and opportunities that AI brings? 

Creative ReCode: how to sell to humans and algorithms

Creative campaigns and creator content have a second audience: they need to win round both people and LLMs.

This session explores how machines and humans interpret creativity differently, what that means for brand building, and introduces The Creative ReCode, a new playbook for growth. 

The creative power of sports

Sport remains one of the last shared cultural stages and a rich environment for signal-driven learning.

This panel shows how brands can harness the live energy of fandom and athlete-creators to improve their creative choices, sharpen activation, and link brand actions to growth. Join us to learn how cultural moments can be turned into measurable advantage. 

Creative Intelligence in motion

AI predicts; people validate. Join us to hear how Kantar pairs AI-driven diagnostics with in-market human measurement, backed by 250,000 creative tests and more than 100 billion human interactions, to decode the most impactful creative. 

When the world goes quiet, South Africa gets louder

Across many markets, brands are getting quieter: safer, blander, more careful. South African marketing has spent decades practicing something harder: showing up anyway because difference isn’t a panel topic, it’s the daily context.

In one of the world’s most unequal, most linguistically diverse, most culturally charged markets, brands don’t get to opt out. They must communicate across communities, hold tension without flinching, and earn trust where it isn’t given for free. This session is a practical, provocative look at what global brands can learn from a country that has had to build relevance, resonance and credibility in complexity.

If you’re serious about growth in an era of polarisation, cultural risk and fractured attention, this is the session to be in. 

Creator-led marketing: from chaos to catalyst

Creator budgets are rising fast, but which bets will pay off? Cut through the noise with the latest learning on what makes creator-led marketing effective.

Hear from well-known brands that have found success, using the right intelligence to make confident decisions that translate into more effective campaigns. 

Made in Germany 3.0: When German Brands Evolve into a New Species

What happens when a premium icon chooses evolution over preservation?

Miele is redefining its category—stretching its brand while protecting what makes it distinctive.

In this session, we go behind the decisions that matter: how to stay modern without dilution—and why growth comes from better choices across brand experience and creativity. 

Creativity is business: France's most effective advertising

For the fifth year, Kantar is partnering with the AACC and Media Figaro on the “Creativity is Business” initiative. Brand managers and creative directors will share insights into the performance of 10 French campaigns nominated for Cannes Lions. This session will be in French. 

Cultural OS: New brand intelligence for winning with creators & fans

Creators, fandoms, and earned attention are powering the media multiplier. But as budgets are rising, effectiveness, ROMI, and brand growth are harder to prove.

This session shares new intelligence on creator and fandom success, spotlights what really works, and creative cases that bring it to life.