Cannes reflections: ‘Nobody claimed to be the new TV this year, which was nice’
Opinion | Cannes Lions 2026
Cannes was an overcrowded, sweaty endurance test interspersed with moments of illumination and inspiration, says Thinkbox CEO Lindsey Clay.
Eddie Redmayne emerged from the green room on the Freewheel beach looking immaculate. There for a Sky event, his shirt glided across his body like silk. It may have been silk. Seconds later, he looked like he’d been hosed down with sweat.
That was Cannes this year. A bag of juxtapositions. Probably a branded bag of juxtapositions.
On the one hand there’s lashings of human creativity on show. On the other there’s the colonisation of Cannes by big tech – reflecting the flow of media spend.
On the one hand, you realise how many people you adore in our industry, their determined optimism, camaraderie, and kindness. On the other hand, there are the infuriating hordes, the cacophony of braying self-satisfied voices, and the bewildering queue in blistering heat to get a free beach bag.
Anyway, it was a well-intentioned hospital pass from The Media Leader to invite me to share my reflections on Cannes. Might as well count reflections on the Mediterranean.
For there is no single “Cannes”; it’s an unfathomable firehose of stuff and to be exhaustive would be exhausting. But here are a choice few observations – because you probably haven’t had enough of those, have you?
TV now as simple as social
Let’s start with a huge moment: the launch of Universal Ads. For years TV has had the competitive disadvantage of being relatively hard to buy. That’s changing.
Universal Ads is the new self-service advertising platform from Comcast in partnership with ITV, Sky, and Channel 4. It makes it simple for SMEs to buy TV campaigns across all three broadcasters from one place with no minimum spend.
TV is becoming as simple to buy as social, but with none of the “funding harm” buyer’s remorse.
Ian Russell and the Molly Rose Foundation
Speaking of social media, Ian Russell from the Molly Rose Foundation was in Cannes, a voice of humanity.
On RTL’s beach, as Meta’s flags fluttered further along the Croissette, he reminded us of our industry’s noxious current path and the immense power advertisers have to persuade social media to change for the better.
Televisionaries returns
It was telling that Ian Russell spoke in a TV space at Cannes – he also spoke in the Palais – and his theme of detoxifying social was echoed in the two Televisionaries panels. The juxtaposition with trusted media is profound.
This was the second year we did Televisionaries at Cannes, and the feedback has been incredible. Kelly Williams, Rak Patel, Karen Eccles, Deborah Armstrong, and Lee Sears showed an industry on the front foot and full of momentum. Trust, effectiveness, the increasing ease of buying TV, the challenges…there wasn’t a blade of TV’s grass they didn’t cover.
I especially loved watching the audience reactions to the previews shared of what TV has in store. Advertising needs amazing culture-shaping content to rub shoulders with, and TV has it in bucketloads – or magnums as this was Cannes.
All power to Empower
For the third year, Cannes hosted the triumph that is the WACL Empower Café, powered by Propeller. Its programme of talks, discussions and networking events kept the focus on the five levers of change that will help accelerate gender equality (you can read about them here).
Creativity’s comeback
Cannes is a creativity festival, so it’s odd to suggest creativity made a comeback, but there was a strong sense that after last year’s AI onslaught (and the controversy), genuine human creativity was back at the forefront.
The number of award entries was down, but that was just my qualitative sense from the conversations I had. If it is true, then that can only be great news for advertising’s finest creative canvas, TV.
Allied to this was a Havas study released during Cannes, which found that 84% of brands suffer “indifference” from consumers. Guess what can make the difference to indifference?
Havas research finds 84% of brands are viewed with indifference by consumers
The machines get emotional on TV
Talking of creativity, one of my favourite examples was Claude and Mother London scooping the Grand Prix in the Film Lions category for “A Time and a Place”.
These excellent Super Bowl TV ads make fun of other AI platforms introducing ads, showing people speaking to an AI agent and being bizarrely interrupted by ads. TV’s emotional power is being harnessed by the machines to poke fun at…the machines.
Notable absence
Nobody claimed to be the new TV this year, which was nice.
Instead, the existing, expanding TV – from Netflix’s rooftop to the Amazon Port, from RTL’s beach to the Televisionaries – was there to tell the story of how it is getting on with its self-transformation and delivering even more for advertisers.
Lindsey Clay is CEO at Thinkbox