Cannes Lions Is Becoming a Festival of Culture, Creators & AI-Assisted Creativity: Festival Chairman Phil Thomas
CANNES – The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has spent decades evolving from an advertising awards show into something closer to a temporary city-state for marketers, creators, platforms, consultants, athletes, musicians and anyone else with a budget for beachfront real estate.
According to Phil Thomas, executive chairman of event organizer Informa Festivals, the latest evolution is impossible to miss. Just look at the beaches. Thomas is chairman of the Festival. We spoke with him on Sunday on the eve of the week-long event.
From ad agencies to culture
“The most interesting” shift at this year’s festival, Thomas said, is how Cannes Lions increasingly reflects broader culture rather than just the advertising industry that created it.
“If you look at the history of the festival, it really began as an advertising festival,” Thomas said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Pooja Midha. “The big installations were by the advertising agencies.”
That changed during the digital era, when technology platforms became the dominant presence on the Croisette. Now, another transition is underway.
“There’s the Sport Beach. There’s the Music Beach that Spotify put on. There’s a Creator’s Beach,” Thomas said. “This year, we’ve got twice as many creators, for instance, as we had last year.”
The result is a festival that increasingly mirrors the worlds brands are trying to reach.
“We’ve always wanted to try to have an event that did reflect culture,” Thomas said. “And I think the brands that are here and the partners that are here also want to get into culture.”
Thousands of marketers descend on Cannes
The festival continues to grow despite economic uncertainty, political tensions and persistent questions about whether anyone really needs another panel discussion featuring the phrase “future of marketing.”
Attendance this year is running at roughly 13,000 badge holders, according to Thomas, with thousands more unofficial attendees circulating between yachts, beach clubs and coffee meetings that somehow become acquisition talks.
One of the fastest-growing groups is brand marketers.
“There are thousands of CMOs here, thousands,” Thomas said.
Their objective is relatively straightforward. They’re looking for partners, technologies and ideas that can help drive business growth while also giving them ammunition for conversations with skeptical boards and finance departments.
“They’re trying to find partners who can help them grow their businesses,” Thomas said. “And they’re trying to find partners who they can use to persuade their boards to invest in marketing and creativity.”
The network effect of everyone showing up
Thomas attributes much of the festival’s continued expansion to a simple principle familiar to every social network, nightclub and high school cafeteria.
“If people feel everybody’s here, then everybody wants to be here,” he said.
The festival has worked to stay relevant by continuously adapting to industry priorities. This year that includes expanded forums for senior executives, including the return of the CEO Forum and the debut of the Global CMO Forum, both designed to connect creativity more directly with boardroom discussions around growth and capital allocation.
The event’s owner, Informa, has also contributed resources and expertise since acquiring Cannes Lions.
“It doesn’t really affect the festival other than in positive ways,” Thomas said. While Cannes Lions continues to operate independently, he said Informa’s global event management capabilities have strengthened operations and partnerships behind the scenes.
Humans still want to gather in person
For all the industry’s obsession with AI, automation and virtual experiences, Thomas believes recent years have reinforced a much older truth.
“I think the pandemic taught us something, and I think AI is teaching us the same lesson,” he said.
“Deep down after many millennia of development, the human beings are social animals.”
That desire for community helps explain why large-scale business events continue to thrive.
“People want to be together,” Thomas said. “People want to be with their own tribe.”
In other words, even in an era when an AI agent can summarize a keynote in seconds, many executives still prefer to discuss it over rosé while trying to remember where their next meeting is.
New award spotlights creative cultures
Among this year’s additions is the inaugural Creative Brand Lions award, which recognizes organizations that build systems and cultures capable of consistently producing outstanding creative work.
Rather than evaluating a single campaign, the award asks brands to demonstrate how creativity is embedded into their operations.
“What you’re trying to do is persuade the jury that you have created an environment, a culture, that allows creativity to flourish,” Thomas said.
The category arrives as brands play a larger role throughout Cannes Lions. According to festival data, 10% of all award submissions this year came directly from brands, up from 8% in 2025. Roughly 400 brands are participating across the festival.
The new award also reflects a broader industry question: Once executives accept that creativity can drive growth, how do they actually build organizations capable of delivering it repeatedly?
AI moves from experiment to creative partner
No Cannes Lions conversation would be complete without AI, and the festival’s awards data suggests the technology is rapidly becoming part of the creative process.
Two years ago, only 11% of award submissions reported using AI in some capacity. That figure climbed to 20% last year and has now reached 40%.
“That doesn’t mean the work was created by AI,” Thomas said. “But what it does mean is AI was a partner to the creative people, to make the thing happen.”
This year’s festival introduced AI Craft subcategories across several awards programs, recognizing work in which human creativity and artificial intelligence combine to produce results neither could achieve independently.
The emphasis remains on creative intent and craftsmanship rather than technology for its own sake.
Meanwhile, more than 300 jurors from around the world have gathered in Cannes to evaluate 20,050 award submissions from 92 countries. Festival organizers also implemented new Awards Integrity Standards designed to strengthen judging credibility and submission quality.
For a gathering founded around advertising, Cannes Lions now finds itself judging not only campaigns but cultures, communities and increasingly the relationship between humans and machines.
The beaches, it seems, are evolving right alongside the industry.
Editors’s Note: This video was produced in partnershp with the New Y0rk Stock Exchange Live.
You’re watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2026, produced in collaboration with NYSE. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
CANNES – The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has spent decades evolving from an advertising awards show into something closer to a temporary city-state for marketers, creators, platforms, consultants, athletes, musicians and anyone else with a budget for beachfront real estate.
According to Phil Thomas, executive chairman of event organizer Informa Festivals, the latest evolution is impossible to miss. Just look at the beaches. Thomas is chairman of the Festival. We spoke with him on Sunday on the eve of the week-long event.
From ad agencies to culture
“The most interesting” shift at this year’s festival, Thomas said, is how Cannes Lions increasingly reflects broader culture rather than just the advertising industry that created it.
“If you look at the history of the festival, it really began as an advertising festival,” Thomas said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Pooja Midha. “The big installations were by the advertising agencies.”
That changed during the digital era, when technology platforms became the dominant presence on the Croisette. Now, another transition is underway.
“There’s the Sport Beach. There’s the Music Beach that Spotify put on. There’s a Creator’s Beach,” Thomas said. “This year, we’ve got twice as many creators, for instance, as we had last year.”
The result is a festival that increasingly mirrors the worlds brands are trying to reach.
“We’ve always wanted to try to have an event that did reflect culture,” Thomas said. “And I think the brands that are here and the partners that are here also want to get into culture.”
Thousands of marketers descend on Cannes
The festival continues to grow despite economic uncertainty, political tensions and persistent questions about whether anyone really needs another panel discussion featuring the phrase “future of marketing.”
Attendance this year is running at roughly 13,000 badge holders, according to Thomas, with thousands more unofficial attendees circulating between yachts, beach clubs and coffee meetings that somehow become acquisition talks.
One of the fastest-growing groups is brand marketers.
“There are thousands of CMOs here, thousands,” Thomas said.
Their objective is relatively straightforward. They’re looking for partners, technologies and ideas that can help drive business growth while also giving them ammunition for conversations with skeptical boards and finance departments.
“They’re trying to find partners who can help them grow their businesses,” Thomas said. “And they’re trying to find partners who they can use to persuade their boards to invest in marketing and creativity.”
The network effect of everyone showing up
Thomas attributes much of the festival’s continued expansion to a simple principle familiar to every social network, nightclub and high school cafeteria.
“If people feel everybody’s here, then everybody wants to be here,” he said.
The festival has worked to stay relevant by continuously adapting to industry priorities. This year that includes expanded forums for senior executives, including the return of the CEO Forum and the debut of the Global CMO Forum, both designed to connect creativity more directly with boardroom discussions around growth and capital allocation.
The event’s owner, Informa, has also contributed resources and expertise since acquiring Cannes Lions.
“It doesn’t really affect the festival other than in positive ways,” Thomas said. While Cannes Lions continues to operate independently, he said Informa’s global event management capabilities have strengthened operations and partnerships behind the scenes.
Humans still want to gather in person
For all the industry’s obsession with AI, automation and virtual experiences, Thomas believes recent years have reinforced a much older truth.
“I think the pandemic taught us something, and I think AI is teaching us the same lesson,” he said.
“Deep down after many millennia of development, the human beings are social animals.”
That desire for community helps explain why large-scale business events continue to thrive.
“People want to be together,” Thomas said. “People want to be with their own tribe.”
In other words, even in an era when an AI agent can summarize a keynote in seconds, many executives still prefer to discuss it over rosé while trying to remember where their next meeting is.
New award spotlights creative cultures
Among this year’s additions is the inaugural Creative Brand Lions award, which recognizes organizations that build systems and cultures capable of consistently producing outstanding creative work.
Rather than evaluating a single campaign, the award asks brands to demonstrate how creativity is embedded into their operations.
“What you’re trying to do is persuade the jury that you have created an environment, a culture, that allows creativity to flourish,” Thomas said.
The category arrives as brands play a larger role throughout Cannes Lions. According to festival data, 10% of all award submissions this year came directly from brands, up from 8% in 2025. Roughly 400 brands are participating across the festival.
The new award also reflects a broader industry question: Once executives accept that creativity can drive growth, how do they actually build organizations capable of delivering it repeatedly?
AI moves from experiment to creative partner
No Cannes Lions conversation would be complete without AI, and the festival’s awards data suggests the technology is rapidly becoming part of the creative process.
Two years ago, only 11% of award submissions reported using AI in some capacity. That figure climbed to 20% last year and has now reached 40%.
“That doesn’t mean the work was created by AI,” Thomas said. “But what it does mean is AI was a partner to the creative people, to make the thing happen.”
This year’s festival introduced AI Craft subcategories across several awards programs, recognizing work in which human creativity and artificial intelligence combine to produce results neither could achieve independently.
The emphasis remains on creative intent and craftsmanship rather than technology for its own sake.
Meanwhile, more than 300 jurors from around the world have gathered in Cannes to evaluate 20,050 award submissions from 92 countries. Festival organizers also implemented new Awards Integrity Standards designed to strengthen judging credibility and submission quality.
For a gathering founded around advertising, Cannes Lions now finds itself judging not only campaigns but cultures, communities and increasingly the relationship between humans and machines.
The beaches, it seems, are evolving right alongside the industry.
Editors’s Note: This video was produced in partnershp with the New Y0rk Stock Exchange Live.
You’re watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2026, produced in collaboration with NYSE. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
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