Cannes in a Can 2026: Four signals shaping the future of brand growth

Cannes Lions, the international festival of creativity, has always been a useful temperature check for the industry. It tells us what marketers are excited about, what they’re worried about, and increasingly, where they’re placing their bets.

The Kantar team came to Cannes this year with a clear ambition: to bring sharper intelligence and more actionable insights to the conversations shaping the future of marketing. Across our Content Studio activation, client meetings, keynotes, panels and media interviews, one theme kept surfacing: clients don’t need more data, they need clarity and greater confidence connecting their marketing ecosystems across brand, media, creative, and culture to drive growth.

That challenge feels more urgent than ever.

With AI dominating nearly every conversation this year, what stood out wasn’t the hype, it was the shift in tone.

Marketers are no longer asking whether AI will change the industry. They know it already has. The focus now is much more practical: how do you use AI to build stronger brands, make better decisions, and drive growth?

All along the Croisette, four themes kept coming up again and again:

1. Marketing in the AI era: Brand still standing

One of the biggest questions we heard this year was also the simplest: does brand still matter when AI increasingly sits between consumers and the brands they choose?

The short answer from Cannes was yes, perhaps more than ever. As more discovery happens through AI-powered search and recommendation, brands are facing a new challenge. It’s no longer just about showing up in the consumer’s mind. Increasingly, brands need to show up in the machine’s mind too.

The data tells an interesting story. Our 2026 BrandZ study found that the world’s Top 100 brands reached a record $13.1 trillion in value this year, up 22%. That suggests something important: AI hasn’t weakened brands - if anything, it’s making strong brands more valuable. As machines do more of the searching and filtering, standing out matters more.

2. Creator marketing: Get more effective with me

Creators had their biggest moment yet, but the conversation has moved beyond reach and engagement. The focus now is effectiveness.

Brands are investing heavily in creator partnerships, but measurement hasn’t kept pace. We launched a study during Cannes called The creator game plan, analysing 15,000 creator assets across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. The findings were striking: platform engagement aligned with brand-building results only about a third of the time, and just 6% of assets were both highly engaging and strong at building brand equity.

The takeaway is simple: platform engagement alone is an unreliable proxy for effectiveness. Marketers need better ways to understand which creator content is actually driving growth.

3. Scaling creative impact: Going bigger and better

One of the clearest signals from the Palais this year was the launch of the new Creative Brand Lion. The introduction of this award sends a message to the industry. Creativity that moves the needle does not happen in a vacuum. Brands need the right infrastructure in the form of capability building, internal processes and measurement frameworks, to repeatedly achieve success. And right now, they need to do all of that at scale, with teams producing more content, across more channels, at higher frequency, while being held accountable to prove it is working.

AB InBev’s inaugural Grand Prix win in this category made that clear. Their “Creativity at scale” delivered impact on sales and brand. Eight of the ten most valuable beer brands in our 2026 BrandZ ranking sit in its portfolio. The lesson here is simple: creativity still drives growth, but increasingly, the winners are the brands built to scale it.

4. AI in advertising: More pop, less slop

The AI and creativity conversation felt noticeably more grounded this year. The debate has shifted away from human versus machine and toward a more useful question: at what points of the creative development process can AI improve the work?

One of the sharpest provocations came from Fernando Machado, CMO legend and currently Chief Brand Officer at Chipotle. He argued that marketers have become so obsessed with optimisation, accelerating production and cutting costs that they risk losing sight of what drives effectiveness – creativity.

What does all of this mean?

If there was one big takeaway from Cannes this year, it’s this:

AI is changing a lot, but it isn’t changing the fundamentals of growth.

The winners won’t be the brands with the most AI. They’ll be the ones using intelligence to make better decisions, build stronger creative, and stay meaningfully different where it matters most.

Want to go deeper?

Missed Cannes this year, or want to revisit the biggest themes?

Join us for our post-Cannes webinar on 2 July, where Kantar experts will unpack the key takeaways, share standout Lion-winning work, and discuss practical actions you can apply right away.

Register here