I didn’t go to Cannes Lions this year. But I kept my ear to the ground all week while getting ready to help deliver the Lions Creative MBA. The whole thing reminded me of a house party.
The thing I love about house parties is that the host really doesn’t get to choose how the party plays out. A host can spend all day setting up the living room. The lighting and ballons are perfect, the snacks are artfully arranged, and a carefully curated playlist is humming from the speakers.
This, they’ve decided, is where the party will be.
But where is the party really?
It’s squeezed into the kitchen. Leaning against counters sticky with spilled drinks, stepping carefully around bodies and looking for booze in the fridge. The real party—the messy, loud, interesting one—is always (always) in the kitchen.
That party, in all its glory, was how Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this year looked like from a distance. The rosé has been drunk, the trophies polished (well done Miami Ad School), and a thousand sunburned folks are waltzing back to their businesses with renewed inspiration.
The festival has always been our industry’s giant house party. But this year, it’s clear the party has split into two very different, and conflicting, rooms.
In the living room, everything is beautiful.
This is the room of ideals, the one we show to the public. Here, we give a standing ovation to AXA’s “Three Words” campaign—a genuinely kick-ass piece of work that uses the sterile language of an insurance policy to offer a lifeline to victims of domestic violence. Three words. Simple. Powerful. Human.
This is the room where we celebrate the pure, unadulterated fun of Seal dressing up as a seal for Mountain Dew because it just “made people smile.” This is the work we tell ourselves we’re here for. It’s the art, the craft, the purpose. It’s the reason the whole damn festival exists, right? Yes. But.
Then there’s the kitchen.
The kitchen is messy, loud, and smells faintly of desperation.
In the kitchen, a Grand Prix winner is being investigated because the case study video might be kinda bullshit. In the kitchen, agency chiefs admit they haven’t had a single moment to actually go see the work in the Palais because they’re trapped in back-to-back M&A talks and agency reviews in hotel suites.
The real business, as they say, is happening out of sight.
The kitchen is also where the tech giants—Meta, Google, TikTok, Spotify—have set up permanent residence, dominating the beachfront with neon signs and discussions that have less to do with creativity and more to do with ad products, retail media, and supply chain efficiency.
The kitchen is where everyone is talking about AI, not as a creative partner, but as a tool to make things faster, cheaper, and maybe, just maybe, make the talent in the living room obsolete.
So which is it? Is this a festival celebrating creativity or a trade show for deal-making and ad tech?
The truth is that it’s both.
The weird part isn’t that both rooms exist; it’s that we’re all trying to be in both at the same time, maintaining a conversation about social impact while checking our phones for an update on a multi-million-dollar media review.
This isn’t a new tension, but the balance feels different now. The kitchen is getting bigger. The hum of its machinery—AI-generated video, programmatic efficiency, creator economy ROI—is getting louder. Meanwhile, the living room feels like a beautifully curated exhibition of what we once were, or what we tell ourselves we still are.
We honor legends like David Lubars for a lifetime of creative achievement, while the next generation is told their craft might be learned better at an indie shop because holding companies have gone slightly loopy. We see the rise of the creator economy, a strange hybrid of both rooms—raw authenticity packaged for mass-market transactions.
The state of our industry isn’t about choosing a room. It’s about acknowledging the cognitive dissonance of standing in the doorway between them, one ear listening for a brilliant idea, the other for a business opportunity. This schizophrenic, paradoxical, and deeply insecure state is the state of the industry. And maybe it’s always been a bit like that.
So, save some space in the fridge for me. I can’t wait to be there next year.