Afternoons at Cannes tend toward a particular kind of frenzy. The rosé is flowing, the diary is full and somewhere on the Croisette a panel is running 15 minutes over. Kelly Taylor has other plans. On at least one afternoon she intends to disappear — onto her balcony, alone, with a glass of wine and a fresh baguette.
“Stepping away from the chaos gives you time to recharge,” said the global growth director at Jellyfish. “And to appreciate that, despite the madness, there are far worse places to spend a week at work.”
She is not, it turns out, alone in this. The Croisette has an introvert class — and it is larger than the industry likes to admit.
Spend enough time talking to the people who come back every year and a different picture emerges — of mornings started deliberately, of parties quietly skipped and, ultimately, of a week softly negotiated on their own terms.
Matt Longley, CEO at Mobta, is one of those. He’s been coming to Cannes long enough to have developed a settled philosophy about what it is and isn’t for. The networking, he thinks, is overrated — or at least the version of it that the festival seems to prescribe.
“There’s plenty of performative networking happening,” he said. “Give yourself permission to sit back, listen and let other people do the talking. You don’t need to optimize for endless reception-hopping.”
He is making a point that sounds simple and yet is quietly radical in a context where the received wisdom is that Cannes; value is a function of how many rooms you work. The formal program — the seated sessions in the Palais — is, Longley argued, undervalued precisely because it doesn’t look like hustle. You go in. You listen. You leave.
“I don’t think it’s a crime to attend content,” he said. This year that programming includes Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, the LionHeart seminar from media legend Oprah Winfrey as well as marketing gurus Byron Sharp and Mark Ritson on the same program — which historically means at least one argument worth having. For some, that’s reason enough to be in the room rather than the beach bar next door.
“You don’t need to prove you’re having a successful Cannes by being constantly visible,” Longley said.
MediaLink principal Brent Baldwin goes further. He has published his own “introvert’s guide to Cannes Lions — a rundown of 10 tips and tricks he’s learned over the years of attending the festival. Much of it reads like a permission slip to skip the thing that doesn’t feel essential, to leave when you hit the wall and to resist the pressure to perform availability as a substitute for doing anything useful.
The through-line across Baldwin and everyone else who has seriously thought about this is not really about tactics. It’s about temperament.
Where the festival’s default mode is accumulation — more meetings, more networking and more cocktail parties — the introvert’s instinct is to run in the opposite direction. Fewer things, done with more intention.
Matt Barash starts his days early. The chief commercial officer at creative ad tech platform Novan takes long walks along the Croisette before the city has assembled itself. He does this with the people he actually wants to spend time with.
“The promenade is still quiet,” he said, “and there’s none of the posturing or peacocking that can define the week. Just genuine conversation, fresh air, and the chance to connect with people before the day’s whirlwind begins.”
For that period — before the beach activations are staffed and the badge checkers are at their posts — the festival is briefly something else. The point, for Barash and for the growing cohort who quietly renegotiated their relationship with the week, is not avoidance. It is sequencing. Get something real in early. Bank it. Then face the day.
There are, of course, other ways to get the most out of Cannes. The midnight terrace, the chance encounter and the room worked with genuine ease. For some people that is not performance. It is just how they operate. The festival was built for them and it delivers. What Barash and the rest represent is something simpler: the acknowledgement that another way exists, and that not enough people feel they are allowed to take it.
Sherzod Rizaev, chief operating officer Assertive Yield, books his meetings before he arrives. This is, in theory, what everyone does. In practice, many people land in Cannes and spend the first two days discovering who’s there. Rizaev’s view is that this wastes the week’s scarcest resource — the hours before the heat and rosé and the accumulated social debt conspire to make everyone slightly less useful than they were at breakfast.
The introvert’s advantage at Cannes is real, even if it isn’t the one festival sells. But the more honest framing is that Cannes was never meant to be one thing. The extrovert has their beach. The introvert is finding theirs. What’s changed — slowly, quietly in the way these things tend to — is the acknowledgement that both routes exist and that neither has a monopoly on what a good week here looks like.
“You don’t have to work every room or attend every gathering. Instead, focus your energy on fewer worthwhile events and, most importantly, aim for genuine conversations rather than superficial ones. Having priorities can help you maximize your time at Cannes,” said April Weeks chief investment and media officer at Basis.