Five Days. One Location. Zero Excuses.

Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity runs June 22-26 this year. Five days on the French Riviera. The awards still get the headlines, but the real shift over the last few years has been what brands are doing outside the Palais.

LinkedIn built a full video studio on the beach last year. Attendees walked in, got AI-generated content prompts personalized to their profile, and walked out with finished LinkedIn videos. Meta partnered with KidSuper to build the Reels SuperStudio where people co-designed generative AI Reels in real time. Spotify Beach had a podcast studio running next to their Cover Art Creator stations.

Those are massive activations from massive companies. But the underlying move is what's interesting. They didn't build experiences and hope someone took a photo. They built production infrastructure and made the content the experience.

You Don't Need a Beach Activation to Produce

This is the part that gets overlooked every year.

Canva showed up to Cannes for the first time in 2025 and built a full beach setup. Good for them. They're Canva. Motorola and Pantone rented a villa and had a Michelin-starred chef design a dinner around the color palette of the new razr. Beautiful. Also not realistic for most brands.

But here's what else happened last year. Variety recorded their Strictly Business podcast live from a yacht with executives from Deloitte and AWS. DEPT hosted private strategy sessions and dinners from a rented penthouse. Dentsu ran a beach house with intimate talks and curated networking.

None of those required a seven-figure build. A yacht. A penthouse. A private dinner. A table at the right restaurant. The festival is full of moments happening in smaller settings that never get captured properly.

I've seen this play out at events for years. A brand sends five people to a conference. They have incredible conversations. Their CEO sits on a panel. They host a dinner with 30 of the right people in the room. And they come home with nothing to show for it except a few LinkedIn posts and an expense report. The event ends and the content ends with it.

What a Smaller Brand Can Actually Do at Cannes

You don't need to rent the Majestic. You need a plan and someone who knows how to shoot.

Your executives are already there. If your CEO, CMO, or founder is at Cannes, that person is surrounded by the best backdrop, the best energy, and the most relevant conversations of the year. Sit them down for 20 minutes in good light and interview them. What are they seeing? What's surprising them? What are they thinking about for the next year? That's a video series. That's LinkedIn content for a month. That's a thought leadership piece your sales team can actually use.

Your clients and partners are probably there too. Grab a testimonial. Not in a conference room with fluorescent lighting six months from now. At a dinner in Cannes where everyone's relaxed and the conversation is already flowing. The best testimonials I've ever been a part of weren't scheduled. They happened because someone was in a good mood in a good setting and someone else had the sense to ask if they'd go on camera.

The festival has a creators space with a stage, a studio, and an editing suite. Cannes literally built production infrastructure into the festival. It's called LIONS Creators and it's on the beach. Brands that don't have their own activation can still produce content there.

Host something small and capture it well. A private dinner for 15 people. A morning coffee session. An intimate panel on a yacht or a rooftop. The format matters less than whether you documented it. A well-shot 90-second recap of a dinner with the right people in the room tells a bigger story than a thousand-person party with no cameras.

Record a podcast episode. Your founder and a client, sitting at a café on the Croisette, recording a conversation about the industry. The background is Cannes. The content is real. You don't need a Spotify-level studio. You need a good mic and someone who knows how to frame it.

The Brands That Left With Nothing

Plenty of companies spent six or seven figures getting to Cannes last year. Beautiful spaces. Great food. Good conversations.

And they walked away with a handful of iPhone photos from someone on the marketing team.

No coverage of their executives at the event. No interviews. No recap footage that could live on the website for the rest of the year. No social cuts that extend the reach past the people who were physically in the room. Nothing that makes the investment compound after the week is over.

Amazon Port turned a rosé bar into a viral moment that traveled further than any panel that week. That didn't happen by accident. Someone planned for that content to exist.

The New Creative Brand Lion Tells You Where This Is Going

Cannes introduced a new award category this year called the Creative Brand Lion. It doesn't judge a single campaign. It evaluates the systems and capabilities a brand has built to produce world-class creative work consistently.

That's the direction. Not one great ad. Not one great activation. Can you produce? Do you have the infrastructure, the process, the instinct to capture what's happening around your brand and turn it into something?

That question applies to how you show up at Cannes just as much as it applies to your annual content strategy. And the brands that treat the festival as five days of production opportunity are the ones getting more from the same investment.

Eight Weeks Out

Cannes Lions 2026 is eight weeks away. If you're going, most of the big decisions are already made. The pass is bought. The dinners are booked. The flights are set.

The one decision that's probably still open is whether you have a content plan for the week. Not a social media calendar. An actual production plan. What gets shot. Who gets interviewed. What the final output looks like. Where it goes after you land back home.

You don't need a beach. You don't need a villa. You need the people you're already sending and someone who knows how to capture what happens when they get there.

The south of France does a lot of the heavy lifting. You just have to show up ready to produce.