Attendees say DEI had less visibility at Cannes Lions 2025, reflecting a broader industry pullback.

If Cannes Lions is a microcosm of the ad industry, then this year’s festival mirrored a trend playing out across the corporate world: the public discourse about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has gotten quieter.

As recently as three years ago DEI was the topic du jour at Cannes Lions. But attendees this year told ADWEEK they observed fewer Palais sessions focused on DEI and less conversation about it offstage.

“There were disappointingly few discussions devoted to addressing diversity,” Rania Robinson, CEO of London agency Quiet Storm, told ADWEEK.

Cannes Lions hosted a few main stage talks at the Palais focused on DEI. Havas and The New York Times spoke about neurodiversity, and talent agency ZBD Talent spoke on a session called “The Inclusion Revolution.” However, conversation at the festival centered instead on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI), as well as trends such as creators and sports marketing.

“Conversations that once centered on equity, representation, and systemic progress were largely replaced with AI, ROI, and humor as the new creative currency,” said Ted Kohnen, CEO of agency Park & Battery.

Cannes Lions spokespeople did not respond to ADWEEK’s request for specifics about the diversity of attendees or DEI programming this year.

The lack of open discussion about DEI in Cannes reflects a wider corporate shift amid businesses walking back their DEI commitments due to right-wing political pressure. Target, Ford, and Walmart are among major brands that have ceased or rolled back DEI initiatives in the past year.

During Pride Month in June, companies including Anheuser-Busch, PepsiCo, and Nissan dropped or scaled back their sponsorship of Pride events, the Associated Press reported. And during Black History Month in February, mentions declined in brands’ social media and corporate announcements, ADWEEK analysis revealed.

Marketers are more cautious about articulating values and taking public stances amid an “increasingly unpredictable” and tense geopolitical environment, according to research from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) published this month. In WFA’s survey of global marketers, 81% said that today’s environment is riskier compared to 12 months ago.

Cannes Lions has been criticized in recent years for too heavily awarding purpose-driven work rather than commercially-driven campaigns. Last year, the festival added a humor subcategory to encourage more business-minded entries.

Amid these pressures, attendees like Lola Bakare, inclusive marketing strategist and author, observed a prevailing “attitude of restraint around discussions related to DEI.”

While Bakare participated in panels hosted by partners such as ADWEEK, Tubi, Purpose Hive, and e.l.f. Beauty that “addressed the subject head on,” she “saw a lack of willingness to ‘go there’ from others whom I’ve partnered with in the past, like LinkedIn,” Bakare said.

Instead, she observed an increase in “coded language” at many events, replacing the terms “diversity, equity, and inclusion” with words like “culture” and “purpose.”

She said brands and platforms with the power to advocate for DEI boldly are shying away from the opportunity. Instead, they’re “toeing an arbitrary line drawn in the sand by a loud minority of voices that prefer we regress back to a status quo.”

Filling in the gaps

Though DEI discussion was noticeably quieter, the topic wasn’t totally absent from Cannes.

Fringe events, such as WACL’s Empower Café and Cannes Can: Diversity Collective (CC:DC)’s Inkwell Beach, “filled in the gap for more inclusive conversations,” said Adrianne C. Smith, founder of CC:DC and chief inclusion and impact officer at FleishmanHillard.

Inkwell Beach debuted at Cannes in 2019 in an effort to make the festival more inclusive. In its first year, Inkwell drew an average of 40 to 50 attendees per session. This year, that increased to an average of 100 to 150 attendees at each of its seven or eight panels per day, Smith said. Over 10,000 people registered for the beach this year.

However, Inkwell also had to slightly scale back its activation this year after some sponsors reduced or ceased their investment, Smith said.

“There were even some who pulled out 10 days before we hit the ground, which was devastating,” she said. “Uncertainty is the thing making people risk averse–they want to just do what they know.”

Visiblity in the work

At odds with the lack of candid conversation along the Croisette, the work awarded at Cannes this year came from a more diverse set of global agencies.

For example, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Chicago Hearing Society, and FCB Chicago won three Grands Prix for “Caption with Intention,” which redesigned closed captioning for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing communities. British broadcaster Channel 4 won a Film Grand Prix for its Paralympics ad challenging disability stereotypes. And Brazilian company Idomed and agency Artplan won the Industry Craft Grand Prix for a book addressing racial inequities faced by Black patients in the healthcare system.

Cannes Lions also expanded the scope of the Glass award—established in 2015 to recognize work progressing gender equality—to campaigns promoting representation across disability, race, sexuality, and social inequity. The 2025 Glass Grand Prix went to Dove’s latest “Real Beauty” initiative.

“While diversity wasn’t trending in the talks or headlines, it was still present in the work, in casting, in storytelling, and in the topics brands are willing to tackle,” said Alex Bennett-Grant, co-founder of Amsterdam agency We Are Pi. “The creative industry hasn’t turned away from it—not yet.”

He and Smith said that while open discussion about DEI waned along the Croisette, they both observed a more diverse crowd of attendees compared to previous years.

“Most of the people who looked like me in the first year [I attended Cannes] were either the help or the entertainment,” Smith said. “Now I see more thought leaders in C-suite or leadership positions who are on the stages, and that’s important.”

Still, she noted the lack of “mainstream presence of [DEI] conversations” at the festival, adding she hopes for more next year.

For his part, Bennett-Grant warned that as government policies and corporate priorities shift, the ad industry “needs to stay vigilant” about DEI.

“There’s a real risk that progress starts to roll back,” he said. “We must protect the space that’s been created for underrepresented voices.”