What Cannes Lions tells us about marketing in 2027

The 73rd Cannes Lions festival is taking place from June 22nd to June 26th this year. Far from an outdated festival, Cannes points to key shifts and trends within the marketing industry. 

“The industry landscape is changing at lightning speed. And, in common with the rest of the industry, Cannes Lions is adapting at pace to meet this.”

- Simon Cook, CEO, LIONS

In this post, I take a look at what Cannes tells us about marketing trends to come in 2027. I’ll cover predicted Cannes Lions trends and show marketing leaders how they can plan for the future of marketing.

Cannes Lions is still the reigning awards ceremony in creative excellence. Racking up over 26,900 award entries in 2025, a record for the event, Cannes is still highly relevant to creative teams looking to prove innovation, strategy and talent to the rest of the industry. 

The 2025 festival celebrated 828 Lion winners from 48 countries and hosted over 500 speakers from actress and director Reese Witherspoon to pro athlete Serena Williams. The festival continues to demonstrate some of the most creative, exceptional creative and campaigns in the industry.

More than an awards show: How Cannes signals industry priorities

Essential themes change every year. 2025 highlighted some of the creative industry’s biggest issues and focuses of the year. Last year’s awards put the spotlight on the elevation of the CMO role, AI implementation, the importance of retaining humanity in the field and cultural fluency as a growth driver.  

Cannes also helps actively shape the creative industry moving forward. The ads and campaigns celebrated during the festival set the bar, becoming the standard for the months ahead. 

While Cannes' ever-changing award categories, like AI Craft under the new Creative Brand Lion, help signal current creative relevance and direction. 

Separating lasting trends from event hype

While Cannes serves as a compass, highlighting the current trends defining the creative industry, it’s important to separate passing trends from what will actively shape marketing in the following 18 months. Smart marketers have a discerning eye — they don’t get caught up in the Cannes hype, they simply use it as a signal on where the industry is going and who is leading the way. 

"Creativity is only valuable if it's credible. And credibility must be earned, not assumed. These timely changes mark the beginning of a new era for us all — not just for Cannes Lions, but for the future state of global creative marketing."

- Simon Cook, CEO, LIONS

For several years, the creative industry has been moving away from shallow vanity metrics, becoming more refined and targeted in creative measurement. Creative campaigns are now built with key business metrics in mind from the earliest stages of development.  

The festival institutionalized the shift to a new focus on marketing accountability by unveiling a comprehensive new framework on accountability measures and integrity standards for all entries from 2026 onwards with a focus on: 

• Ownership and authorship

• The veracity of impact claims (verified with a new AI-assisted screening system)

• New consequences and multi-year bans for misrepresentation

• Due process overseen by an independent Integrity Council

• Additional transparency in governance, reviewed with an annual public audit

Why effectiveness is replacing awareness as the primary KPI

Vanity metrics are out. Cannes 2025 marked the shift from prioritizing awareness to focusing on creative effectiveness. Decisions are now being made based on the tangible impacts they can make on audiences and business metrics. 

The growing demand for commercial outcomes

With 71% of CEOs prioritizing revenue metrics over vanity metrics, the pressure is on marketing from the top down to prove the financial ROI of their creative and campaigns. This guides development from the earliest stages.  

Interbrand's independent analysis of the top 50 Lion-winning brands in 2025 demonstrated a clear connection between creativity and business growth. The research found that creative excellence directly translates into business performance: showing an average 2.7% increase in profitability and 4.7% growth in market capitalization in the year after a Lion win, outperforming market averages.

Cook says: “At the heart of the Lions is creativity that drives growth. These renewed standards reflect our responsibility to both provide a platform for, and protect the value of creativity, and reinforce that creative excellence should be synonymous with creative integrity.”

How creative and measurement are becoming more connected

In the past, creative and analytics teams were highly siloed. But the best teams are now baking testing and measurement into the earliest stages of their creative and campaign development. 

Innovative brands are also bringing in testing and development to the consumer-side of their campaigns. Recent Lions winners have helped illustrate this shift. 

The 2025 Vaseline Verified Titanium Lion-winning campaign, developed by Ogilvy Singapore, brought together brand scientists, creators and commercial teams to myth-bust popular uses of Vaseline alongside celebrating some of its consumers and creators' most creative uses of the iconic beauty product, where brand scientists tested some of TikTok's Vaseline tips in the labs. 

The early days of AI involved frenzied testing and experimentation. Now, over 87% of marketers use AI in their workflows. That means that the main focus of the industry will now be built around understanding how to best integrate AI into their infrastructure. 

The shift from AI tools to AI workflows

AI-based platforms no longer exist as a single standalone platform in marketing teams’ stacks, AI tools have become fully integrated into marketers workflows. 

AI marketing now looks like: custom integrations, specialist tools, hyper-connected pipelines and structured variations over single assets. AI continues to background support across content, strategy, consumer insights, and production. 

As Think with Google's Cannes coverage notes: "AI isn't the headline anymore; it's the infrastructure. At Cannes, this theme was front and center, in conversations around speed, interactivity, and storytelling at scale.” 

85% of marketers report they now use AI writing or content creation tools in some form. While the average marketer reportedly saves 6.1 hours every week with gen AI, giving them the space they need to go all in on creativity and higher-level strategy.

Where marketers are seeing real productivity gains

In 2026, PwC reported that AI is most effective when it acts as a force multiplier in high-level creative roles. Here, AI takes on the support role to the artistry, strategy and innovation of the marketing team's talent. 

IAS CEO Lisa Utzschneider concretizes the weight of the change AI has made to productivity, "Three years ago, we were classifying one year of video data a day. And today, we classify 40 years of video data every single day"

AI continues to take on the boring necessities of the industry. And teams are seeing productivity gains across high-volume production, content personalization and data synthesis. 

Justin Lefkovitch, Founder and CEO at Mirrored Media says: “The conversation around AI shifted from being about a glossy new conceptual tool, to a more infrastructure-based discussion helping to speed up workflows, personalization, and scale storytelling. The conversation circled around how AI is the new backbone for creatives."

The new role of human creativity

"At the end of the day, we are human beings, and human beings love nuance and feeling and magic, and that is what our teams do."

- Maggie Malek, CEO of Crispin, on balancing AI with human creativity at Cannes Lions

In the first year AI was adopted, many marketers and creatives found themselves locked into heated debates on whether AI could ever do as good a job as creatives when it came to audio, visual and written content. 

Now that creatives understand AI and where it fits in their processes, we can expect to see an even bigger switch towards creative experimentation across the industry — with more creatives moving towards using AI in more intuitive, innovative ways in their campaigns.

Tata Motors CMO Shubhranshu Singh notes on the development reflected at Cannes, “The line between creativity and technology is disappearing. Today’s most effective campaigns are not just emotionally resonant, they’re also powered by data, algorithms, and automation.”

R/GA shared the innovative strategy behind their 2025 AI-based campaign for luxury fashion brand Moncler. Nick Pringle, chief creative officer at R/GA EMEA, explained, “We wanted to test the real-world physics, the character design, the real-world locations, and push that to the nth degree.” The campaign led to a 72% jump in conversion rate. As R/GA Global Chief Creative Officer and Global Chair Tiffany Rolfe said, “One of the best ways to get clients to embrace new technologies is to allow them to be experimental."

While past Cannes award-winner Heinz’s Ketchup AI campaign perfectly captures the balance between tech and human creativity:

Insights are evolving. In 2025, 1 in 3 companies centralized or restructured their insights function. 

We share in our foundational content: "Decision velocity has exploded - insights professionals and marketing teams today face more choices, at greater speed, across shifting competitors, consumer behavior, and technology. To keep up, you need more than one-off research projects. You need a connected system that puts insights at the center of decision-making."

Faster decision making becomes a competitive advantage

Consumer insights were previously locked inside drawn-out static research projects. Insight generation typically took weeks, slowing down development and strategy momentum. This meant that creatives often built campaigns and creatives around consumer perspectives, emotions and behaviors that had already shifted by the time they were ready to be integrated. 

Changing technology allows teams to access early, ongoing insights — helping them to make data-backed decisions that align with consumers across project development. Modern, AI-based consumer insights platforms can deliver insights in as little as twelve hours. 

The demand for continuous learning

The most innovative brands are baking consumer insights into the earliest stages of their creative projects, building creative around continuous feedback loops. This transforms consumer insights from the static to the dynamic. In marketing teams that prize innovation, insights become continuous, predictive and highly actionable. 

Data fragmentation is still a huge barrier in modern marketing with 41% of marketing professionals noting its the core barrier to the effective use of insights in marketing. Innovative teams allow insights data to flow easily between people and systems. Connected teams win. Organizations with connected insights experience a 24-point higher satisfaction rating with their insights function. 

Why research is moving closer to everyday marketing decisions

"Connected insights also democratize access — making consumer knowledge actionable across the entire organization, enabling teams to move faster, with more confidence and at greater scale, rather than keeping research locked inside a specialist function."

- Zappi

The gap between insights and strategic marketing decisions is dissolving. This development was already beginning to be reflected in the brand campaigns scooping up Lions during the 2025 awards season: 

For a research project used to mark the brand's 20th anniversary, Dove found that 1 in 3 women felt the pressure to change their appearance due the pressures of AI images online. Dove gave consumers the opportunity to retrain the algorithm to only show them images that matched their definition of beauty — building the campaign around real insights into consumers' perceptions of beauty. 

Consumers continue to split attention between several marketing channels, making it harder to capture than ever. Here’s exactly what marketers are up against. 

The challenge of reaching audiences at scale

Media consumption continues to fracture across channels and audiences are harder to reach than ever, jumping between streaming services, heavily-algorithmic feeds on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, and niche online communities. The everyday consumer now moves between an average of 6.5 different social media platforms every single month. 

To reach audiences, brands must understand the new non-linear consumer journey — tracking consumers as they jump from channel to channel. Motivations, content and channel preferences and sentiment all need to be tracked and understood to ensure proper targeting as consumers move through the real-world and digital ecosystem. 

Creator ecosystems continue to grow

Creator ecosystems will continue to grow. Creators are moving from content amplifiers to full-funnel strategic partners with a unique understanding of their audience and native platforms — a knowledge that eclipses that of any top marketing agency. To reflect this change, Cannes has introduced dedicated sub-categories focused on co-creation and social commerce.

Stacy Martinet at Adobe shares: "One of the clearest shifts at Cannes is the growing influence of creators. The creator economy isn't emerging anymore. It's becoming the center of gravity for how culture is created, distributed and monetized." 

Why attention is becoming harder to earn

With fractured attention continuing to intensify among consumers, offline and online attention will only continue to become harder to win. Content fatigue is pervasive. Gen Z’s attention span for online ads has dropped to just 1.3 seconds. To make content and creative worth noticing, brands will need to test creative and content early and often with consumers before launch.

In 2027, creative and performance teams will further merge — putting creative effectiveness at the center and ensuring it drives every campaign. The upcoming Cannes heavy hitters will be the brands that successfully build workflows that allow creativity to inform data-backed strategy and vice versa. 

Testing before launch becomes standard practice

AI is going beyond content creation and productivity gains. Teams that prioritize creative effectiveness are now using AI-based consumer insights platforms to test variations of creative before launch. ​​WARC's notes on Cannes 2025 winners: "The challenge for marketers is to move beyond merely integrating AI into creative processes and focus on proving its unique, quantifiable contribution to campaign effectiveness."

Testing before launch allows creatives to understand the nuances of their creations and how each element stands alone or interacts to impact the consumer’s experience of an ad. Visuals, audio, taglines — every element is dissected, measured and analyzed. And this understanding is used to guide the campaign as it moves through early-to-late stages of production. 

Why creative confidence matters more than ever

Data-based decisions inform and embolden creative risk taking and confidence. The brands that win at Cannes are the brands that take calculated creative risks, rather than repeating tired advertising formulas. 

Justin Lefkovitch, Founder and CEO at Mirrored Media says, "This year, creativity is about clarity and conviction. With AI accelerating and attention shrinking, sameness is the real threat."

The right data allows teams to balance strategic creative decisions with creative experimentation and play — allowing them to make bolder decisions that align with both brand and consumer. Bringing in consumer insights early and often allows brands to make dynamic creative decisions quickly. 

Closing the gap between creative teams and performance teams

The gap is also closing between creative teams and performance teams. As covered above, vanity metrics are out. Typically intangible, unquantifiable assets like brand vision, creative intuition and emotional resonance are no longer disconnected from business outcomes. Creative is measured, analyzed and revamped, ensuring market fit and delivering a direct, measurable return on investment.

Tom Roach, celebrated British Strategy Director & Author, shared: "The best performance marketing people are also big believers in brand and creativity — because they've seen its impact on the performance of their work. You won't get off the performance plateau armed with spreadsheets alone." 

With the new developments in the marketing industry, here’s how marketing leaders can plan and prepare for the upcoming changes over the year ahead. 

Budget implications

Despite tough economic times for brands, the data continues to prove that cutting marketing’s budget is still the wrong move. Analytic Partners, a company that models marketing effectiveness globally, found that brands that increased their marketing spend during difficult economic times saw a 17% increase in incremental sales compared to those that pulled back spending. 

Trends at Cannes highlight how marketing team budgets should be structured for the year ahead. As creative effectiveness takes priority, teams must invest in MMM capabilities, digital attribution and AI-driven analytics. 

AI-based consumer insights platforms like Zappi will become essential, enabling teams to test, validate, and optimize creative concepts with real consumer insights before launch — ensuring market fit and helping to deliver greater ROI.

Team structure changes

Another essential area to look at is team structure changes. The lines are blurring between creative and performance teams, with talented professionals looking to break down silos and increase collaboration in order to hit business objectives. While AI will continue to act as a trusted sidekick, becoming more deeply embedded into professionals’ workflows — supporting research and higher level creative strategy.  

CMO roles will also continue to evolve. The most effective leaders become proficient in both the language of creativity and commercial growth — signifying a move towards dual fluency that's becoming the defining competency of effective high-level marketing leadership.

New measurement frameworks

Many marketing leaders are refining and implementing new measurement frameworks. Blanket measurement frameworks (think ROAS or CPM) are being replaced with targeted plans that acknowledge the unique potential of every element of a campaign. While predictive measurement will be prioritized across creative and campaigns. 

Technology and research investments

First-party data infrastructure will continue to sit at the center of many brands’ data strategies with brands seeking to understand and influence consumers through data collected across sites, apps, CRMs, interviews and surveys. 

As has been the case for the last three years, brands will continue to invest in innovative new AI tools and increasingly refined AI-backed workflows. AI-backed testing, allowing creatives to test multiple variations with real audiences before budget investment and launch, will become a key priority for marketing teams looking to align creative and campaigns more closely with ROI. 

What will marketing organizations look like as we head into 2027? Based on current trends, we can expect to see agencies that are faster, more accountable, more data-informed and more AI-reliant. 

Faster

From creative and content creation to consumer insights generation, marketing departments and agencies will keep doing more, faster. Marketers report a 27% reduction in campaign build times with the support of AI compared to traditional automation alongside a 4.5x acceleration in analytics cycles.

Marie Gulin-Merle, Global VP, Ads & Commerce Marketing at Google says: "2026 is the year we break the speed barrier in marketing. We must reorganize for a unified, real-time reality where creative and optimization happen at the same velocity as consumer behavior." 

More accountable

As we've seen, Cannes seeks to ramp up marketing accountability with more rigorous curated quality standards — a trend we’ll see replicated across marketing organizations. Smart marketing teams will align themselves with business goals and set concrete, business-aligned metrics from the beginning of project development. They won't look to the CFO or board to guide — they’ll take initiative, put the right systems and measurement tools in place and move towards business goals with confidence.

More data-informed

With AI taking insights generation from weeks to hours, many teams are baking AI-based consumer insights tools into the earliest stages of their creative projects and campaigns — giving them access to consumer data across campaign and creative development and using these insights to guide development before launch.

Andreas Krasser, CEO, speaking at Cannes Lions warns brands not to react blindly and instantaneously to trends resulting in superficial work. Noting that moving at the speed of culture should actually mean slowing down first. He urges brands to immerse, understand and then act with confidence.

More AI-enabled

“We’re past AI panic and on to practical frameworks, learning all of the potential ways in which generative tools will enhance human creativity—not replace it.” –Heather Feit, EVP, Day One Agency

Now marketing teams realize the potential of AI for creative testing, delivering speed and greater productivity, optimizing workflows and supporting creative play (Think: Heinz’s ketchup bottle associations), creatives are moving forward with a greater sense of confidence and play. 

Teams will find new ways to build AI more deeply into their workflows to support greater efficiency, productivity and more confident decision making.

Cannes is far from dead. It’s still one of the biggest celebrations of creative risk taking and ingenuity and it continues to accurately track shifting priorities and strategies within the industry. 

Over the upcoming festival and year ahead, expect to see greater shifts towards greater marketing accountability (with data at the center), creative play, and more strategic and innovative uses of AI. 

And we’re keeping tabs on all the things happening at this year’s Cannes, so be sure to follow along on LinkedIn for an inside look at this year’s big event.