My old creative director texted me a photo at two in the morning Portland time. Rosé, a boat, the Croisette going gold behind him, and a caption that just said: we are so back.
Cannes Lions opened Monday on the Riviera, in person, for the first time since 2019. Three years of cancellations and a virtual edition nobody willingly attended. Three years in which the entire industry told itself it was rethinking everything.
Three years, and the answer we brought back is a hotel bill.
I am not sneering at the festival itself. The work that wins there is often genuinely the best work of the year, and juries argue about it seriously. But watch what the week is organized around now. Half the beachfront is rented by platforms. The panels are about the metaverse, Web3, NFTs, and the creator economy, which is to say they are about the sponsors. The awards have become the part of the schedule you attend if you did not get the better dinner invitation.
A festival is a mirror, and the industry that came back to the Croisette this year pointed it at its own tools instead of its own work.
Here is what I would have expected from three years off. A hard argument about what creativity is worth when a client can buy attention directly. A reckoning with the fact that the most talked-about brand voice of the last two years belongs to Duolingo and was made by a twenty-something with a phone. Some honesty about who gets sent, because the delegate list is still the shortlist of people whose agencies can absorb ten thousand dollars a head.
Instead we got the same week with better weather and a longer waitlist.
What separated the winners from the noise in the last three years was not distribution technology. It was brands with a position they could actually defend under pressure. Patagonia telling people what to do with their money. Liquid Death making a joke that turned out to be a business. Oatly writing on the carton like a person rather than a category. None of that required a yacht. All of it required someone senior to hold a line for longer than a quarter.
I know how this sounds from someone who went four times and loved it every time. That is why it bothers me. I have watched this from inside the pitch rooms, and I know what the week is really for, which is proof to your clients that you still matter.
Three years, and the answer we brought back is a hotel bill.
I watched the livestream from a table at Ovation with a cortado, which is roughly nine thousand dollars cheaper and offers a comparable view of the work. Then I texted him back. Congratulations, I said, and I meant it. Bring me something worth the airfare.