July 10, 2026
Last week, WMG brought together three industry leaders fresh off the plane from the Croisette for a post-Cannes debrief: Tamara McMillen, Chief Revenue Officer at Economist Enterprise, who chaired the discussion; Alysha Dino, VP, Global CTV Revenue at Brand Metrics and Alex Sladen, Director, Global Marketing, Media & Partnerships at PwC.
For anyone who wasn’t in Cannes this year, here are the five themes that came up consistently throughout the week.
1. AI has moved from possibility to responsibility
Each panellist agreed that AI was the undercurrent that ran through the whole week, but the tone had shifted markedly from previous years. As Alysha Dino put it, “last year AI was all about possibility, and this year it was about responsibility.” Conversations have moved on from hype towards proof: what AI is actually doing, how it scales and whether it delivers real outcomes.
That said, there was a noticeable gap between the stage and the sidelines. Sladen observed that “on stage was still very much big, high level media execs talking at 60,000 feet,” while the more practical examples about start-ups who are disrupting industries, for example, happened off stage and in one-to-one meetings.
Cost was also firmly on the agenda. Sladen described how PwC takes a tiered approach to AI access, reserving its most advanced tools for use cases where they add the greatest value, while helping control costs at enterprise scale. He shared an anecdote about a small business that had blown through the equivalent of two creatives’ salaries in AI tokens in under a year. The word of the week, he said, was “tokenomics.” The panel agreed that organisations should adopt AI where it genuinely fits the business problem, not as a bolt-on, and be honest when a workflow doesn’t need it at all.
2. Trust is a no longer just about reputation
With machine-generated content everywhere, trust has become a commercial issue rather than a reputational one. Tamara McMillen shared findings from Economist Enterprise’s research in partnership with McCann’s The Truth About Global Brands study, which found that 92% of B2B buyers said they want to be able to trust a brand, and 79% said they would end a relationship with a brand if they lost trust in it. As McMillen noted, “the value on trust has never been higher.”
The panel agreed that trust comes from being transparent about where AI has been used, being honest with partners, and, as Dino put it, going back to “the human connections…making sure you’re having the right conversations with partners and being honest about what you’re building together.” Sladen added that “proof trumps promise,” arguing that brand messaging only works when it’s backed by credible thought leadership and case studies, not just an AI disclosure label.
3. Human creativity is still what wins prizes
Despite (or perhaps because of) all the AI conversation, the work that stood out at Cannes this year was overwhelmingly human-led. McMillen pointed out that 32 of the 34 Grand Prix-winning campaigns had humans at the heart of the story.
There were two examples that particularly stood for Sladen, both Cannes Lion Titanium PR Grand Prix winners:
The Kit Kat “heist”, a near-zero-budget PR campaign built around a stolen truckload of Kit Kat chocolate bars, which won a Cannes Lion Titanium PR Grand Prix by turning the audience itself into the search party.
AXA France’s “Three Words”, which quietly added domestic abuse cover to home insurance policies, addressing a real and previously unmet need for women unable to leave abusive homes.
Dino also flagged the Claude “no ads” campaign as a standout, arguing it captured a wider mood: that AI, done well, “is oddly bringing us back to humanity ” rather than replacing it.
The word that kept coming up in relation to creativity was ‘distinctiveness’. With AI trained on the same underlying knowledge, several similar-looking ideas are starting to emerge across the market. As Sladen summarised: “Brands really are under pressure now to do things differently, and to think out of the box, to create with a human at the centre, and develop something that really sets you apart from the rest.”
4. The shift in how creators are perceived
Dino noted a real shift in how creators are perceived. She compared it to the way that CTV was once dismissed as a passing trend (“Nobody would lean in because they thought streaming wasn’t going to be a thing”). It’s now taken seriously enough that measurement, standards and outcomes are built into the conversation from the outset. Creators are a part of that, and they have moved well beyond influencer marketing. As Dino explained “people aren’t following platforms, they’re following people,” and audiences are increasingly drawn to podcasts and creator ecosystems over traditional formats.
The panel also discussed the reputational risk of rushed creator partnerships, contrasting a stunt that fell flat (an influencer no-show at a brand activation) with the long-term value of sustained partnerships built on a genuine fit between brand and creator.
5. Measurement is shifting from KPIs to outcomes
Proving marketing value remains challenging, but the panel felt progress was being made. Sladen described PwC’s move away from media-buying metrics like unit cost or click-through rate towards brand health, intent and attention measures that connect directly to business outcomes such as pipeline and revenue.
Geopolitics wasn’t a headline track at Cannes, but Sladen described it as “an undercurrent” in almost every conversation. He referenced data from a PwC study with Source Global Research suggesting the industry has moved from a period of uncertainty into one of unreliability. “Uncertainty is waiting for a bus, and it’s annoying, but you know the bus is going to come. Unreliability is, you wait for a bus, you don’t even know if it’s going to come.” In that climate, trust and clear, honest positioning matter more than ever.
The value of in-person connection
Beyond the panel discussions, all three speakers came back to the same underlying point: the value of Cannes lies as much in the in-person connection, the conversations that happen over dinner or on the beach, as it does in anything said on the main stage. Dino summed up, by saying “It’s the one event that’s had by far the most impact on me” of all the events in the marketing calendar, precisely because of the real, unscripted conversation it makes possible.