Why Cannes Lions isn’t about the spectacle - it’s about creating space for serendipity
As brands get ready to descend on the Croisette for Cannes Lions next month, Sophie Hulf, strategy director at Identity, argues the real value lies not in the biggest activation or loudest pitch, but in designing experiences that spark unexpected conversations, meaningful connections and long-term relationships.
Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the beloved feature of ad land. But the significance of this annual award ceremony is swamped by the accompanying experiential expo - brand activations spilling into every corner, nook and cranny of Cannes, and transforming this small coastal city into the humming heart of global creativity.
The Croisette is one of the most expensive postcodes in experiential, and one of the most competitive. For agencies and brands weighing up the investment, the question is reasonable: is it worth it? The answer depends almost entirely on what you understand the aim of Cannes to be, and then designing for it accordingly.
Cannes creates conditions that don't exist elsewhere: high density of senior decision-makers, compressed time, and social informality layered over professional intent… the beach, sun, and rosé can’t hurt either.
What results is a recipe for rare openness, space for spontaneity otherwise optimised out of fast-paced working lives. The festival's cultural power comes from this unscripted quality. For attendees, Cannes’ value is in the conversation that became more, the intro they didn’t see coming, or the idea reframed over a drink. Because while spectacle might get people there, serendipity is what makes them stay.
Sophie Hulf, strategy director at Identity
Sophie Hulf, strategy director at Identity
Designing for the room, not the pitch
Marketing to marketers is no joke, let alone at Cannes, where people are overstimulated and protective of their time. Arrive with a demo station, sales pitch, or a static broadcast and you'll repel the very people you're there to reach. And the harder a brand tries to assert its agenda, the faster relevance slides. In truth, the transactions that matter at Cannes aren't informational: nobody leaves the Croisette with in-depth understanding of a new feature set. But that’s also not the point – ROI here is emotive and fuelled by trust, storytelling and a sense of possibility.
You can't manufacture this spontaneity, but you can create the conditions for it. The right question is not "how do we communicate our product", but "how do we create an environment where people want to stay, talk, and think differently?". This means flexibility, convening around a genuine perspective rather than a sales message. When that balance is struck, people dwell longer, connect more openly, and leave feeling empowered with curiosity piqued, opening the door for an ongoing brand relationship.
Adobe's presence at Cannes has evolved in a way that reflects this. Over several years, our strategy has shifted to build spaces that function as gathering points, celebrating the creativity of their own community. The result is a presence that generates meaningful commercial outcomes - significant enterprise pipeline, hundreds of substantive customer meetings - but whose strategy starts with the shared passions and values of real people.
From this insight, we’re better able to design the rhythm of the environment, develop the layout of the space, and craft interactive moments that immerse guests not in just what a brand does, but what it feels like. This means treating the experience not as a vehicle for the brand story, but as the conditions for other people's stories to begin. And accepting that the best outcome of your activation might be a conversation that leads somewhere you won't hear about for six months - which can feel counterintuitive when budgets are large and stakeholders are watching.
Intention over spectacle
Fortunately, creating value at Cannes doesn't have to be complex. Sometimes it's a moment of genuine delight in a week that can feel relentlessly transactional: novelty that stops people in their tracks, a workshop that shares something they’ll use, even just aircon and a place to decompress. The common thread isn't format or scale, it's intention - moments that work because they were designed with the audience's experience as the primary goal, not a brand's sales agenda. They treat people as participants. And in doing so, create a memorable connection no media buy can replicate.
This is the discipline that experiential brings to Cannes, and it's one the wider marketing industry is still learning to value. Cannes works for the brands and agencies that understand what it actually is: not a stage, but a room full of people who are, for five days, slightly more open than they're usually able to be.
The job of the strategist and designer is to make that room worth staying in. To create the conditions where something unplanned, and genuinely useful, becomes more likely. And to trust that if you get the experience right, the people will do the work.