Overheard at Cannes Lions

As the Cannes Lions Festival enters its midpoint, themes are already beginning to emerge.

Conversations had and overheard across the Croisette’s sun-bleached beach houses and over long lunches suggest communications professionals are facing a new set of challenges this year, many of them shaped by changing patterns of information discovery and new notions of trust.

1. The silent stakeholder 

Unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence is the dominating topic at this year’s festival, but what is striking is how the conversation has evolved. Twelve months ago, much of the discussion focused on what AI could create, whereas attention has now shifted towards what AI means for trust and brand discovery. 

Shane O’Donoghue, communications lead for TikTok UK and Ireland, says the traditional communications focus has “collapsed”.

“Audiences no longer move neatly from awareness to trust to action,” he says. “They discover a brand through creators, social video, news, search and AI answers all at once. 

“The most effective communications teams will stop measuring success only by coverage volume and start asking harder questions: are we visible where opinions are formed, are we credible when people check us, and are we positively represented by the voices and sources that audiences trust?” 

Today, audiences discover organisations through a combination of sources: influencers, social video, search results and, increasingly, AI-generated answers.

The wide-ranging implications for communicators are that stakeholders may turn to AI tools to understand a company rather than its website or a spokesperson.Increasingly, communicators are considering how organisations are represented not only to people, but also through the AI systems that increasingly shape discovery. As large language models become another way stakeholders understand companies, communications leaders are beginning to consider what information those systems access and surface.

2. Sustainability has slipped from the agenda

For much of the past decade, sustainability occupied a central position at Cannes. This year, it is almost absent. 

Several attendees noted that sustainability had slipped from the week’s headline discussions. Whether that reflects a lasting shift in priorities or simply the industry’s current preoccupation with AI remains to be seen, but the contrast with previous years is striking.

3. Community intelligence is becoming more valuable

Another recurring theme is the growing importance of communities as sources of insight. 

Reddit was mentioned repeatedly in conversations this week, not as a communications channel but as source for candid opinions and burgeoning trends. 

The shift reflects a broader change in how organisations understand audiences. As communications and marketing functions continue to converge, there is increasing emphasis on understanding culture in real time rather than simply broadcasting into them. 

In communications, the challenge is becoming less about controlling the conversation and more about understanding where that conversation is taking place.  

Taken together, these trends point towards a communications environment in which brand discovery is increasingly mediated by technology and organisations must work harder to understand the communities they hope to engage.