Walk the Croisette on the first morning of Cannes Lions and the whole apparatus has reassembled itself, as it always has — more or less. Meta at the Plage Barrière Le Majestic. Amazon at its port. Pinterest and its Manifestival, a word that should not exist and yet somehow does, and somehow fits. Spotify, Salesforce, LinkedIn are present, and accounted for, exactly where you left them, like very expensive furniture in a house no one has actually lived in. Havas has a café at the Mondrian, which is its way of having a beach.
The rosé is at the same temperature it was last June. The same people are making the same speeches about transformation, and the speeches are, in their way, also at the same temperature.
There are, of course, structural reasons for the stasis, and the industry will tell them to you if you ask, and also if you don’t. Beach leases are negotiated months in advance. Sponsorship arrangements run multi-year. The platforms that have colonized the waterfront have both the resources to stay and an incentive so elementary it barely requires articulation: to be seen.
Which is what makes departures, when they come, so open to interpretation in a way that arrivals, cushioned by money and advance planning, rarely are.
The most telling signal this year is an absence. One should note, before proceeding, that what we are discussing is a patch of sand on the French Riviera, and that an industry’s habit of reading its own real-estate decisions as omens — as precise indexes of power, confidence, and strategic intent — says something about the industry that it would, one suspects, rather leave unsaid.
But fine. Here are the changes:
LinkedIn moved off the beach and onto a rooftop at the Carlton. Snap, once commanding its own perch at La Malmaison, is now sharing space inside Sport Beach. Reddit has scaled back to something it is apparently calling a pop-up deli. Canva shifted venues. MediaLink, under new ownership, is operating as UTA Beach. Each of these is, in isolation, a minor adjustment, something you say not to alert people but to confirm what they already know.
And yet. A social platform that once needed its own building now fits inside someone else’s. A professional network that built its Cannes identity around waterfront presence has retreated to a rooftop. A content community that arrived at the festival riding the creator economy wave is serving sandwiches. And then there is the WPP beach at the Miramar Plage private beach club. Or rather, the absence of it. In its place is PMG, an independent agency whose founder has a standing rule: nobody at his company is permitted to use the word “agency.” Read them individually and they are footnotes. Read them together and they sketch, however faintly, the contours of an industry that is quietly, and not always voluntarily, consolidating — pulling back from the maximalism of the mid-2020s peak, when every platform needed a beach the way every agency needed a transformation strategy, which is to say: urgently, expensively, and not always for reasons that held up under scrutiny.
“Cannes is not the creative spot anymore,” said Christoph Berg, CEO of MINT Square. “The Lions Festival used to be the spot for all the creative minds out there. Now it’s more about technologies. It’s Silicon Valley who found a spot there.”
For the last four years, that observation — Silicon Valley ate Cannes — has carried the faint whiff of the obvious dressed up as insight. Everyone could see it happening; pointing it out still felt, somehow, like a provocation. This year it doesn’t. This year it feels less like a diagnosis and more like a done deal, the kind of thing you say not to alert people but to confirm what they already know. OpenAI is hosting a press briefing at the Spa Villa Belle Plage today (June 22) while execs like ads boss David Dugan are taking meetings down the road on Wednesday at the Majestic. Adobe is on the Croisette positioning itself as the default creative technology partner for the creator economy, which is either a masterstroke of timing or a very expensive hedge, depending on who you ask. And Solomon Partners, an investment bank, has its own summit — because Cannes, it turns out, is now also a deal conference that happens to give out awards.
“We expect a lot of conversations about AI use cases and the organisational transformation needed to scale those use cases,” said Charles Ping, managing director at Winterberry Group. “The primacy of data as a true moat has come into sharper focus with AI, whether that’s owned data or derived data as a work product. The code in an algorithm on its own is no longer a moat, so data becomes even more elevated. So far, so last year. 12 months on we’re now in a position where use cases are proving or disproving hypotheses and agentic is becoming a reality, so how agentic AI can work in practice and how guardrails can be configured becomes a point of difference.”
There’s a quieter story underneath this. The usual theory — CMOs moving media in-house — doesn’t hold up, said Olivier Gauthier of industry research firm ComVergence. What’s actually growing is offshoring, media work centralized whether labor is cheapest. BMW’s spend moved from Germany to Dentsu, then to Poland. Croatia and Slovakia are next. It’s a less photogenic kind of consolidation than leaving a beach club but it’s the same instinct: do more with less, and stop paying for what you don’t need to show.
“I won’t be surprised to see the next step towards this centralization — this simplification — is to start closing some offices in countries where it doesn’t make sense to have people on the ground anymore,” said Gauthier.
Cannes used to be an awards show. Now it’s a dealmaking conference
Dealmakers used to keep a low profile at Cannes. Not anymore.
Two years ago, Shailin Dhar put it plainly to Digiday: “You don’t see yachts with PE fund banners on them,” said the Futureprood TMT adviser, who helps broker M&A in the ad industry. “They’re there to blend in.”
He wasn’t wrong. The investment bankers and private equity execs who descended on the event were conspicuous by their number but deliberate in their discretion. They took meetings in the margins, scoped out management teams from a distance and left the main stages to the CMOs and platform execs. Bruce Biegel, a senior managing partner at Winterberry Group, captured the mood in three words: “Here to hunt.”
That was then.
At Cannes Lions 2026, which runs all week on the French Riviera the finance crowd has stopped pretending its just passing through. Shamrock Capital, the Los Angeles-based PE firm., has a partner on the PMG stage of the AI & Tech Sandbox, the festival’s buzzy new technology hub at Miramar Beach. Providence Equity Partners, one of the largest media-focused PE funds in the world, sits alongside them on the same panel. Meanwhile Solomon Partners, an investment bank, whose client list spans PE sponsors and hedge funds, is an official festival partner — the first time an investment bank has appeared in the Cannes LIons partner roster. It’s running an invitation-only C-suite summit Tuesday (June 23) and a full-day private yacht event the following day.
“We could do the same conference in Vegas, and the caliber of the attendees is different,” said Mark Boidman, a partner and the head of media and entertainment at Solomon Partners. “Here, you’re not sending your analysts, you’re sending a senior partner or an MD.”
It wasn’t always like this. When Boidman first made the trip to Cannes in 2014, he was the only person from the investment bank there. “Just me and a pencil,” he said. Granted, the business was always there — Cannes has never purely been about the work — but it operated quietly, in the margins. The finance crowd came, took meetings and left without making a scene.
What shifted was scale. As the festival absorbed platforms, ad tech companies, consultancies and retail media networks, the dealmaker population grew with it. The event that was once an agency awards show became the one place a year where every relevant buyer, seller, founder and investor in the advertising ecosystem shows up at once with nowhere else to be.
“You’re not sending your analysts,” Boidman said. “You’re sending a senior partner or an MD. to this event.”
Solomon Partners arrives this week with 10 people, a summit, and a yacht. The pencil stayed in New York. Elsewhere, Progress Partners, the M&A advisory and venture firm, has six named attendees from both its banking and VC arms. Winterberry Group is sending four.
Michael Kelly, co-founder of investment and advisory services firm Kelly/Newman Advisors, told Digiday the (inevitable) pivot to advertising from Anthropic, et al means speculation over M&A moves into ad tech is inevitable, especially in light of deals earlier in 2026.
For him, the big question is how agencies and ad tech respond to rapidly emerging consumer trends, and his conclusion is simple: more consolidation among agencies and media/streaming companies to gain scale and distribution. The model is well understood: agencies are acquiring horizontal scale in ad tech and other capabilities to transform into data, scale, and tech product leaders, moving away from the past human-led FTE model. It’s the kind of climate that makes for interesting discussion over rosé on the Croisette.
“M&A is vibrant, with a higher volume of better-quality businesses coming to market than in 2025,” said Charles Ping, managing director at Winterberry Group. “This is never more apparent than in Cannes. Many others are undergoing preparation for a process, but with timing to be decided later this year, heavily based on global events. Investors still need to allocate capital, so are engaged early in these conversations.”
Ping’s take tracks with what the numbers are starting to show. Publicis buying LiveRamp, Fox swallowing Roku and Accenture taking Whalar’s marketing business — the deals are arriving faster now, and bankers expect Cannes to accelerate what;s already in motion. If their right, the conversations on the Croisette this week will be about what comes next: AI use cases moving from hypothesis to proof of concept, and data being repriced as the real competitive moat now that algorithmic code alone no longer is. The LiveRamp deal will be the awkward backdrop to all of it: a neutral infrastructure player potentially moving inside a holdco, and a gap in the market that competitors will spend the week quietly figuring out how to fill.
Voices from the Croisette
“Artists are increasingly positioning themselves as equity partners with a real seat at the table… The real wins are being found in engineering moments that permeate culture, drive conversation, and inspire a sense of ownership. The way artists arrive and engage at Cannes has evolved to reflect that. Whereas in years past artists might have been viewed as work-for-hire, they simply cannot be ignored as tone-setters, entrepreneurs, and drivers of real businesses.” — Alisann Blood, partner and co-head of music brand partnerships at UTA
Cannes by the numbers
Cannes exists to celebrate the industry’s best creative work. New WFA/LIONS research suggests most of it can’t reliably produce any.
- Only three in 10 multinational marketers say their teams consistently deliver creative excellence, according to the study, which is based on interviews with 160+ senior marketers across 86 brands, 26 sectors and $141 billion in ad spend. It points to short-termism, risk aversion and underinvestment as the main blockers.
- AI will dominate the conversation on the ground this week, but just 35% of respondents say they’re actually using it to improve creative output rather than just drive efficiencies. Only 11% have an agreed plan for using AI toward creative excellence — most (57%) are punting the problem to their agencies.