96. In Defense of Cannes Lions 2026
The Ad Stack’s Annual Review, in which we mount a full-throated defense of the industry’s most important week, and ask only that you read each sentence all the way to the end.
The Ad Stack is a light and satirical look at AI, Advertising, and Marketing.
It has become fashionable,
in certain bitter corners of the internet, to be grossed out by Cannes. We at The Ad Stack will have none of it. The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is a serious institution doing serious work, and this year we’d like to defend it properly; point by point, leaving nothing out.
One more thing. “AI is everywhere.” Feel free to insert this wherever you like.
First, and most importantly: Cannes is about the work.
It is. It always has been.
The week exists to celebrate the most awarded creative on the planet, which is why it remains so easy for attendees to name a single Grand Prix winner that wasn't their own. Try it at the next offsite. Ask the most senior person in the room to name one 2026 Film Lion. Watch them reach, with great dignity, for their rosé. The work is so central to Cannes that one top comment in the r/advertising thread about the festival, sitting at 277 upvotes, simply read: "Cannes is honestly dead and super cringe at this point. Entries are down like 25% in a single year for good reason." Down twenty-five percent! Proof, surely, that only the truest believers now enter. The chaff has self-selected out. What remains is pure.
Second: The panels.
Ah, the panels. Panels, panels, panels.
Where else would a marketing leader learn that AI is important? Where else would one top up a depleted reserve of expert takes for the LinkedAI-In feed? You cannot simply know that AI is changing everything. You must hear it confirmed, from a beach, by a person wearing linen, into a microphone, at 11 a.m., beside a person from a different holding company who is about to say the identical thing on the next panel over. As one attendee on Reddit memorably summarized the programming: “’I’ll go to YOUR panel on the future of A.I. if you go to MY panel on the future of A.I.’”
We did wonder, briefly, where all the panel-talkers will go once the tents come down. Then we remembered. They’ll go to LinkedIn. They were always going to LinkedIn.
Third: Networking.
Critics call it a “yacht party.”
We call it irreplaceable face-time. After all, how else would we know which competitor’s award-winning creative to borrow for this year’s kitty-litter campaign? You can’t reverse-engineer a Lion from a case-study video alone. You have to be there. You have to feel the craft. You have to stand near the people who made the thing you are about to make again, slightly worse, for a litter brand, in Q3.
(A representative voice here is the user Dogwalker_123, who we are confident would have delivered a devastating defense of Cannes networking, something about “synergy at sea level,” except their flight, hotel, and job were all cancelled the week prior, in that order, by the same email.)
Fourth: The holding companies show admirable commitment.
“The Art of Influence?”
Consider Omnicom, attending in 2026 for the first time as the new Omnicom, freshly merged with IPG, and organizing its entire festival presence around a single idea. The idea, and we want to be very clear that we did not invent this, is “The Art of Influence.” This from a company that took its combined headcount from roughly 128,000 before the merger to about 105,000 after, on the back of 4,000-plus announced cuts and a stated target of $750m to $1bn in labor-cost savings, and which Adweek reported clawed back IPG’s “Christmas week” and trimmed benefits on the way in.
The Art of Influence. We’re not going to do anything with that. We’re just going to leave it there, on the Croisette, next to the branded fans, and let it influence you.
And Omnicom is hardly the whole story. WPP shed some 7,000 roles (700 from Ogilvy alone). Dentsu cut around 3,400, about 8% of its people. IPG let go roughly 3,200 in nine months, before its new parent even got started. Forrester expects agency headcount to fall about 15% by the end of 2026. The Art of Influence, it turns out, is a team sport.
How many did Omnicom send to Cannes? Reddit insists “hundreds.” Omnicom, a firm with deep, proprietary expertise in influence, declined to influence us with a number, and we respect the discipline of that.
Fifth: It is a celebration of craft.
Never more so than this year, which introduced fresh recognition for AI-assisted work.
Or, as the user mkiv808 put it with real warmth: “There’s literally a category for AI slop now. AI ‘Craft’ lol. It stopped being about creativity a long time ago. It’s now primarily a C suite yacht party circle jerk money grab.” You can feel the love.
The craft extends to the metrics, too. We’re told by McGee_McMeowPants of having to gently correct a colleague who wished to claim a campaign “reached 100 million Australians,” patiently explaining the difference between reaching Australians 100 million times and reaching 100 million Australians, given that there are only 28 million Australians. This is the kind of numerical rigor that wins Effectiveness Lions, and we will not hear it disparaged.
Sixth: It is more relevant than ever.
The proof is everywhere.
Agency emails trumpeting “our wins at Cannes” are read with such enthusiasm that ShopToyLife reports deleting them immediately, a response so instant it can only be devotion. kebabmybob notes the festival “hasn’t been about the creative awards in a very long time. It’s an adtech conference,” which is wonderful news, because adtech conferences are famously beloved and never described as soul-flattening. And OkPhase1545 offered perhaps the highest compliment available in the English language: “Cannes and Soho House are spiritually similar.”
So there it is.
A vigorous, sincere, entirely straight-faced defense of Cannes Lions 2026.
A festival about the work, fortified by essential panels, powered by vital networking, committed to by its largest holding company, in celebration of craft, and more relevant than ever.
We rest our case. We rest it the way the industry has rested tens of thousands this cycle: regretfully, on LinkedIn, with a photo of the sunset.
No one cares about the winners except the winners. Congratulations to the winners.
The Ad Stack
A note on sourcing, because we manage reputations for a living and ought to manage our own:
Quotes attributed to real Reddit handles (ShopToyLife, kebabmybob, mkiv808, McGee_McMeowPants, OkPhase1545, Cornwallis400) are drawn from the public r/advertising thread “Any One Else Grossed Out by Cannes This Year?” and are reproduced as the (pseudonymous) commenters wrote them.
Dogwalker_123 is a fictional character invented for satire; that quote is fabricated and so is the email.
Omnicom’s “Art of Influence” festival theme, the 4,000-plus announced cuts, the combined-headcount drop from roughly 128,000 to 105,000, the $750m to $1bn labor-cost target, and the benefits changes are from trade reporting (Omnicom, Campaign, PR Week, Adweek, The Drum, HR Grapevine).
Industry-wide figures: WPP ~7,000 (700 at Ogilvy), Dentsu ~3,400 (~8%), IPG ~3,200 over nine months, and Forrester’s ~15% agency-headcount decline projected through end of 2026, are from Digiday, AdExchanger, Campaign, and Forrester. (We have deliberately excluded Challenger, Gray & Christmas’s “150,000+ AI-cited cuts,” which is economy-wide, not advertising.)
The “hundreds at Cannes” headcount is an unverified claim from a Reddit thread and is presented as such. The “entries down ~25%” figure matches multiple trade outlets.