REFLECTIONS FROM CANNES
A VIEW FROM KAT
Hello,
Welcome to this special Cannes edition of The Difference.
This was my first time back to Cannes since 2010, when I went as a Young Lion, and spent most of the week locking in a cold room in the Palais working on a brief! Suffice to say, my experience this year was very different. I got to see Cannes from a completely different angle, and it was a revelation and a privilege to be surrounded by people who care about this industry as much as we do, all wrestling with the same questions at once.
The Lions festival has always felt to me to be the place where the wider industry takes stock and sets out its agenda, but what felt different this year was how large media has become within the conversation.
That showed up in lots of ways across the week. In the client conversations, in the platform discussions, in the work itself, and in the repeated question of how we reimagine the role of brands in this new media ecosystem. What does growth look like now, when discovery is less linear, influence is more collective, and people have more ways than ever to explore, compare and decide?
There was a lot of talk about AI, of course, but the more interesting thread for me was not really about technology in isolation; it was about how organisations adapt, how leaders create the conditions for curiosity, and how brands keep earning attention and trust in a much more fluid landscape.
One of the things I found most encouraging was the renewed focus on craft. Not craft as a nostalgic word for beautifully made advertising (although we should never lose that), but craft in the broader sense: really understanding audiences, recognising the power of communities, designing better value exchanges, and being much more intentional about how and where brands show up.
There was also a lovely sense of optimism running through the week too, a feeling that the industry is ready to ask better questions and be more ambitious about the answers.
In this edition, we’ve brought together some of the thinking, work and reflections that stood out from Cannes, including Tamara’s perspective on creativity in media, the brilliant work recognised on the Cannes stage, and some of the ideas and announcements we think are worth keeping on your radar.
I hope you enjoy it.
Kat xx
Kat Bozicevich
CEO
Reflections from Cannes 2026: From Our Chief Creative Officer Tamara Cross, Cannes Lions Juror 2026
Between clocking up 30,000 steps a day storming up and down the Croisette and constant WhatsApp pings of ‘Can you get me into the Spotify party?’ - the focus of the festival, which is the work, can get overlooked.
Luckily, this year I was fortunate enough to be a shortlisting judge in outdoor and so got to see a lot of the work - and the ultimate winners - up close and there are a few pieces of work that really caught my eye. Some were shortlisted, some won, some didn't even get a look in - and that’s the challenge and beauty of creativity, it can be subjective, it can drive delight in one judge and mediocrity in another. Global regulations (and the lack of) mean that innovation, particularly in media, sometimes doesn't travel, but the thinking behind it can - and two of the Grand Prix winners in Outdoor and Media did just that.
The Grand Prix winner in Outdoor, Mercado Livre's "Field Barcode" by GUT São Paulo and the Grand Prix winner in Media, Uber Eats' "Build Your Own Super Bowl" by Special LA were united by their identical dedication to through the line, full funnel, brand to basket comms architecture - and it’s hard to argue what good looks like when the creative idea is a strong as the business results it delivered.
Retailer Mercado Livre's Field Barcode took an often-ignored piece of media related estate - the pitch in a stadium and turned it into a 140-metre barcode during a live match. Scannable by the supporters in the stadium and watching at home on TV or YouTube, using the code during the match unlocked a 25% discount resulting in $1.78 million in sales. What I love about this campaign is the commitment to the brand business. As a retailer, a barcode is part of the fabric of their business, gameplay is intrinsic to sport and so feels natural within the context of the stadium - and everyone there wants to win, whether that’s this, the match or a 25% discount. It’s fun, it’s smart and importantly it feels right for the brand, something I questioned in a lot of other entries.
Similarly, Uber Eats’ Build Your Own Super Bowl keeps food at the heart of the idea with playful conspiracy but crucially gets people straight into the app, uses native UX as an interface to create their own ad, and once they are there, are more likely to convert to an order due to every frame being focused on food. Super smart, super entertaining and for something that could have been generated by AI, a beautifully crafted, authentic customer experience that drove record breaking sales.
I love that both these winners have surprising ‘media’ at the centre of the campaign, media that is often much lower down the funnel and not always thought about creatively - but both these campaigns show that every touchpoint can be innovative if you approach it in the right way.
The final campaign I loved, which scored a bronze for Large Scale Media, was Crosses for Crisis by Mutant for the Red Cross. Working with the iconic green LED crosses the feature outside nearly every European pharmacy, they used tech and data feeds to trigger alerts for blood shortages in the area by turning the green crosses red and changing the temperature to blood types in need in the area. I love the use of iconic symbols becoming life-saving media and the simplicity of the execution and as someone who works on NHS BT, I wish we had something similar in the UK for our own donation efforts. The best work is work which makes you say, “I wish we’d done that’ and this is definitely one of those for me.
Tamara Cross
Chief Creative Officer