8 marketing leaders making a splash at this year’s Cannes Lions

For one week every year, Cannes becomes the center of the marketing universe. 

Brand and insights leaders, creatives, media executives and innovators gather to celebrate the industry's biggest ideas and boldest campaigns. But while the award-winning work often steals the headlines, it's the leaders behind the brands who are setting the stage for what's next.

From sharing hard-earned lessons to unveiling ambitious new strategies, these leaders aren't just reflecting on what's working today — they're helping to define the future. 

Here are some of the standout marketing leaders we’re already seeing making waves at Cannes Lions 2026.

As the winner of the Creative Marketer of the Year award for the third time, AB InBev’s CMO Marcel Marcondes is certainly already turning heads at the year’s event. 

During the ceremony, he not only shared the importance of having a relentless focus on creative effectiveness rather than creativity for its own sake, but also his journey and some key lessons he’s learned along the way, including: 

• To dream big but remain humble 

• Creativity must drive business impact

• Consistency over time is gold

• Advertising alone is no longer enough — brands must also show up as experiences

• Technology is a great enabler, but it must always be sandwiched between human judgment

In her session with the CMO of Walmart “Variety in the C-Suite: Breaking Through in the Attention Economy,” Gabrielle Dallas Wesley, Mars-Wrigey’s North America CMO, spoke on why marketing leaders today need to shift their focus to the quality of attention over sheer metrics — a big topic of discussion with the rise of the second screen and the shift in how people interact with media. 

No longer do brands need to have big advertising or sponsorship budgets to get what everyone is working for: attention. And as Wesley aptly shared in her talk:  

“Go big or go home has flipped. Now it’s about personalization at scale. Engage with communities, they create culture.”

Luiz Sanches, Global Chief Creative & Design Officer at Kimberly-Clark and formerly one of the most awarded creative directors in the world on the agency side, spoke candidly about his transition to client side in his Cannes session “What I Learnt Changing Sides in Advertising.” 

We loved hearing not only what he learned crossing the divide but how he is driving creative transformation inside one of the world's biggest consumer goods companies —  and how in just eleven months Kimberly-Clark has won eleven Cannes Lions and counting! 

The theory behind it all? There is no creativity without creativity. Sanchez's guiding belief is that their way of creative transformation is what makes Kimberly-Clark such a special brand. 

Creativity is not a support function — it must sit at the heart of how the company operates. 

His stated legacy goal is to make creativity central to the way Kimberly-Clark operates as a brand — and not as a department, but as a culture.

Aude Gandon of Estée Lauder, alongside Meta’s Nicola Mendelsohn, led a captivating session on “The Anatomy of an Icon” which argued that iconicity isn't accidental. Rather, it's structural, measurable and can be reverse-engineered. 

“What makes a product join the ranks of an icon? The positioning, the storytelling, the creative expression."

In addition to revealing their five dimensions of iconicity, Gandon made the point that icons don't just have great design or great marketing. They have emotional stability, community backing and the ability to be reborn — reframing iconicity from something that was purely mystical into something brands can actively work towards and protect.

In a “CMOs in the Spotlight” session alongside marketing leaders at Intuit and Sephora, Marta García Alonso, VP of Marketing in Mexico at Heineken, discussed the most challenging issues for CMOs today. 

Her vision for the future centered on remembering the power of playing the long game, highlighting the importance of consistency over time. 

“There is always a tension between betting on the short or the long term. Most companies bet on the short term, and that’s why most marketing budgets get cut.”

Her take: To build a brand that’s long remembered you need to be consistent. The challenge is that at the same time you need to tap into culture and community, all of which takes time.

During his part of the “CMOs in the Spotlight” session early in the week, Todd Kaplan, CMO of Kraft Heinz, discussed the importance of brand clarity as a central theme. 

During this talk, he highlighted how important it is for consumers to truly understand what a brand stands for beyond its product attributes. What stood out was his explanation of using the “tattoo test” to find out if that is clear: 

"People tattoo brands on their bodies if they actually stand for something — if it has a deeper emotional connection. They don't do that for products."

He argues that it's not enough to know your functional value. Understanding what the brand means to people as humans is the hardest and most important work. 

In a debate-style session with Jim Squires, CMO at Reddit, Tati Lindenberg took the inspirational stance that belief is what really drives brand growth. 

"Discovery creates customers. Belief creates business."

While discovery still plays a role, her take was that building deep enough belief in your brand is the differentiator that keeps people coming back. The brands that last are the ones that stand for something and consistently deliver on their promise.

Jill Kramer, CMO of Mastercard also caught our ear during the “Priceless Moments, Real Retail: Brand Building in a Complex World” session while sharing her perspective on brand longevity.

She completely reframed what it means to manage a brand platform that has existed for three decades (Mastercard). Rather than treating longevity as proof of success, she described it as a prompt to keep testing the idea.

"Having a 30-year-old brand line is a blessing, but you also don't want to take it for granted. Don't assume it's going to still work. Really know."

Her belief: Brand longevity requires active interrogation, not passive reliance. 'Priceless' works because Mastercard keeps testing whether it still does.

While these are just some of the incredible leaders we’ve heard from so far, they’re already making moves that are turning heads at this year’s event. We can’t wait to hear from more marketing, brand and insights leaders throughout the week! 

Stay tuned throughout the week for more content from us at Cannes and be sure to follow along on LinkedIn for an inside look at this year’s big event.