Cannes we stfu already?
a full rundown of Cannes Lions 2026
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DRINKS FIRST JULY 4 - IN LONDON
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MUSINGS
Ok. Let’s talk about Cannes.
TLDR: I went to Cannes Lions for the first time. Was there for 48 hours. It is genuinely one of the most surreal, overfunded, sweaty, fascinating, occasionally soulless, sometimes magical experiences I’ve ever had. I have a lot of thoughts. Some of them are not nice, some of them are. I saw Keke Palmer. I spent 55 euros on a single cocktail. I stood in a 40-person line in 95 degree heat and it was the most productive networking I did the entire trip. I went back to a yacht at 1am. I have opinions about every brand activation I walked into and I’m going to share all of them.
If you want the South of France recs (restaurants, hotels, the whole thing), those are at the bottom in the paid section because ya girl has gotta eat.
Let’s get into it.
How I Ended Up There in the First Place
I wasn’t supposed to go to Cannes Lions. Let me just say that upfront. I was in the South of France for a wedding. My flight was Nice to Florence. I happened to be in the area. That’s literally it.
I posted once on LinkedIn, one of those casual “hey I’ll be in Cannes for a day if anyone’s around” posts, and my inbox starting pinging. People I hadn’t talked to in months suddenly had “a table” or “a yacht” or “a thing you should come to.” That alone tells you something about what Cannes Lions is. It’s the kind of event where everyone wants to seem connected, everyone wants to be the one who brought someone interesting, and the entire French Riviera turns into a networking fever dream for a week.
So I went. For less than 48 hours. Really one full day of actually engaging. And I have a lot to say.
The Croisette Is Black Mirror
I need to set the scene because if you haven’t been, you genuinely cannot imagine it.
The Croisette is the main strip along the water in Cannes. Beautiful, normally. During Lions, every single inch of it is branded. I mean every inch. Canva Beach. Pinterest Beach. Spotify Beach. Yahoo has a whole setup. Snapchat. These aren’t like, a little pop-up tent with some signage. These are full-scale, multimillion dollar activations with stages and DJs and catering and production that would make most music festivals look underfunded.
Performances by RAYE, John Summit, The XX, J Balvin, and more. At a marketing conference.. let that sink in for a second.
It’s a big dick competition between brands and I mean that in the most literal way possible. Everyone is trying to outdo everyone else. The budgets are genuinely obscene. I don’t know exact numbers but I would bet my entire company that some of these activations cost north of five million dollars for a week. For a marketing conference. On a beach. In France.
And here’s the thing that really got me: it’s not actually cool.
I’ve been to Art Basel in the early 2020’s (prime time) and Basel had this energy where you walk around and everyone is gorgeous and dressed up and there are models and DJs and the whole thing has this aspirational, cultural, slightly unhinged energy.
Cannes Lions has... C-suite marketing executives in ill-fitting polo shirts sweating through 95 degree heat. That’s the general vibe. That’s what’s happening on a random yacht. A bunch of VPs of Brand Strategy getting drunk holding warm rosé. In a way it’s kind of beautiful, but also the disconnect is kinda like watching someone spend $200K on a wedding and then serve cold chicken.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Creator Situation
There were somewhere between 500 and 1,000 creators at Cannes this year. Next year it’ll be 2,000 plus. Probably more. The creator economy has officially infiltrated the ad world and Cannes is ground zero for it.
The content coming out of Cannes was... a lot. Every creator posting the same “day in my life at Cannes Lions” video. Similar beach clubs. Similar yacht shots. The same “so grateful to be here” captions. It was repetitive to the point of parody. I hope this piece provides something slightly different, but honestly, who knows…
Here’s what I noticed: the creators making real money there, the ones getting flown out and put up in hotels and actually doing deals, they’re the thought leadership/tech/AI people. The business creators or creators who had founded a business. Not the lifestyle girlies. The people brands want to work with at Cannes are the ones who can speak intelligently about marketing and media and the future of whatever. Which makes sense… It’s an advertising festival.
I was a barnacle in the ocean of people there. I don’t even really consider myself a creator first, I’m a founder who happens to make content. And even the “smaller” creators I met had 100K plus followers.
The 48 Hours: A Play-by-Play
The HP Yacht
This was my first stop and honestly the most instructive experience of the whole trip.
I got invited via LinkedIn. Some HP contact reached out, said they’d love to meet. I showed up to this yacht thinking I had a meeting. Like, I was prepared to sit down and have a conversation about a potential partnership or collaboration or whatever. I get there and they’re basically like “no, this IS the meeting. Just hang out.”
So I hung out on a yacht. With a bunch of very corporate ad tech people. Which, fine. I learned that HP has an entire media arm that sells data from printers and computers, which is the kind of thing you learn at Cannes and then never use again but it lives in your brain forever.
The key thing about the HP Yacht though, and why I was so grateful to be invited: being registered meant I could come back anytime. Which I did. At 1am. More on that later.
The Vayner Creator Salon
This was supposed to be a roundtable with Gary Vee. What it actually was: a bunch of creators hanging out in a beautifully appointed room overlooking a main square of the Croisette.
I’ll give Vayner this, they were PREPARED. Hair and makeup available, those Shark Chill Pill fans (which retailed for like $135 and honestly did more for brand loyalty than any activation I saw the entire trip), AC in certain areas, drinks flowing. They understood the assignment on a human comfort level in a way almost nobody else did.
But there was zero structure. None. You just showed up and had to figure it out yourself. Which, if you’re an extrovert who knows people, fine. I went alone and had to just butt into conversations, which is not my favorite thing to do but I’m good at it.
I saw Keke Palmer. I saw Ashley Graham. I saw Karissa Dumbacher. My friend Greg from Studio Santos did all the event production, which was fun to see. I met a 19-year-old who is apparently one of the top female Twitch streamers in the world. I was telling her about Drinks First, she asked if I had ever met anyone through it… the answer was yes.
The Vayner Launch Party
This was downstairs from the salon and it was where things started clicking because I finally ran into people I actually know.
Contessa, who works at Vayner. Amber from Glioblastoma Research Org. Brian from the Sweat Equity podcast. Brandon Berman from Updating. Jacob Pace, who founded Flight House. All in Cannes. There’s something very specific about seeing your network and friends on the French Riviera that makes your brain short circuit a little.
Digital Fight Night (The Five-Minute Stop)
After Vayner I went to this thing called Digital Fight Night. It was supposed to be some exclusive party or fight event. We got there and it was a verbal debate. Very ad tech heavy. Very weird. Left after five minutes. Back to Vayner.
La Petit Maison
Ended up meeting friends for dinner at La Petit Maison, which is down the Croisette. I’d actually been to their pop-up in New York a couple weeks before. A friend of mine ordered drinks for us without looking at the menu because he’d been to the Miami location.
The drinks were 55 euros. Each.
Legit highway robbery. I didn’t eat much because I didn’t want to hemorrhage money, though I will say the potato gratin was genuinely one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. So there’s that.
Back to the Yacht at 1am
After dinner, my friend and I went back to the HP yacht. Because it was still open… because of course it was.
And this is where I landed on something I think is actually useful advice: sit yourself in one or two places and let people cycle through. Everyone at Cannes is running from event to event to event. If you just... stay somewhere, people will find you.
The yacht at 1am was more interesting than the yacht at 3pm because by that point people had their guards down, the corporate mask had slipped a little, and actual conversations were happening. I talked to a father of two who told us all about his ayahuasca trip and highly recommended we do it. He was a super buttoned-up ad exec.
I took a 30-minute Uber back to my parents’ hotel in Saint-Paul-de-Vence (I told you, I was on a family vacation that accidentally became a work trip), slept, and woke up for day two.
Day Two: The Motorola Brunch
Their PR team in New York invited me. I genuinely have no idea how they knew I was there. Maybe they saw the LinkedIn post, maybe they’re just good at their jobs. Either way, it was a panel and lunch at a Michelin-star restaurant outside the Croisette with people from Motorola, Pantone, Bose, and Swarovski.
I’ll be honest: I have been to a lot of conferences. I have found value in exactly zero panels at any of them. All of the value, every time, is in the conversations with the people sitting next to you. That was true here too. But the setting was beautiful, the activations were memorable, and the food was good. Also, now I’m writing about Motorola, Pantone, Bose, and Swarovski so slay for them.
Collins House
This is where things got interesting.
Collins is a design agency that was known for having the best activation at Cannes the year before. My friend Eron Lutterman is one of their heads of experiential, and my friend Jake Sacks from 3rd Space was helping produce their events and dinners. So I had an in. But I didn’t use it.
I got there and there’s a line of 40 people in 95-degree heat. I could have texted Jake. I could have name-dropped. I just... got in line. By myself.
The two guys in front of me were probably late 30s, early 40s. One of them looked at my fan and goes “you’re not going to share that with me?” I gave it to him because I had a backup in my bag (Vayner, thank you). We ended up talking for 20 to 30 minutes. Just chatting. No pitching, no “so what do you do,” just people standing in the heat trying to pass time.
Eventually Jake comes running out looking for one of these guys. Turns out one of them started Hyphenated, an agency. The other was Head of Creative at Audible. Jake sees me, goes “why didn’t you text me?” The kind thing anyone who is working an event has to say in that situation. I could tell everyone was working hard to make things move.
This is another point: the valuable networking I did at Cannes was standing in a line I didn’t have to stand in, being friendly to strangers I didn’t know were important. And I genuinely didn’t know. That’s the whole point.
Inside Collins House it was actually not that packed, which is a testament to the fact they were holding their capacity limits hard. I can imagine the french neighborhood bureaucracy isn’t easy to work with. I did what I’d learned the night before: parked myself and let people come to me. Talked to a woman who runs a creative agency in Dubai, a guy from london who did the typography for the event, met Brian Collins because he liked my sunglasses, and sat in on some talks.
And then one of the moments that’s probably going to stick with me the longest from the entire trip… I stopped to take a photo and this Indian woman asks me to take her picture. I said of course. We started chatting. She had a British accent, asked where I was from, very warm. At no point did I ask what she did. We ended up grabbing water together, I helped her figure out her Uber home.
She was Head of Sony Music Asia.
She told me, unprompted, “I don’t really say this to a lot of people, but please connect with me if you ever need help with anything.” All from taking a photo and being kind. That’s the magic of Cannes when it works. The people there are genuinely high-quality, and you have no idea who you’re standing next to. Collins House was absolutely worth the trip and the time.
The Forbes Top Creators Party
As some of my followers know (lmao), I’m Forbes 30 Under 30. I like the team at Forbes a lot, but they are underfunded… and if they do have money I don’t think they put it in the right places necessarily.
They had probably every single huge creator at this party. The guest list was incredible. But there was nothing to do. Barely any alcohol. It was really hot. They were handing out weird gifting. People came and left quickly.
This is where I want to make a broader point about brand activations at Cannes, because I kept seeing the same mistake over and over.
What Brands Get Wrong (And What Actually Works)
The most important thing at Cannes is the guest list. That’s table stakes. Forbes had it, Collins House had it, Even the HP yacht had it (in its own corporate way). But a great guest list with a bad experience is a wasted opportunity.
Here’s what people actually need at Cannes: they’re hot, they’re tired, they’re hungry, they’ve been on their feet all day, and they want to talk to interesting people. That’s it. Solve those problems and you win.
The $130 Chill Pill fan from the Vayner Creator Salon (and UTA beach) did more for brand recall than 90% of the activations I walked through. That’s not shade, it’s just true. A weird little pastel fan that people actually wanted, actually used, and actually posted about without being asked. No QR code to scan, no “immersive journey,” no five-step brand activation funnel. Just a cute fan that made people go “wait, I need that where did you get it?” That’s the bar. And most brands spending six, seven figures on the Croisette didn’t clear it.
I think about what I would have done if I were, say… Uber at Cannes: instead of spending hundreds of thousands on an activation, put $100K+ towards Uber credit within the Croisette or run shuttles from one end to the other and sponsor late-night Uber Eats. My friend ordered a pizza late one night and I think it was actually sponsored by Uber, and that is such a smarter play than a branded tent nobody remembers.
If I were J&J, I’d hand out hydrocolloid band-aids for blisters and small first-aid kits with electrolytes and deodorant. Clip-on stuff people could carry in their bags. Things that say “we see that you’re a human person who has been walking in the sun for nine hours.” The brands that won at Cannes were the ones that thought about people as people, not as impressions.
Would I Go Back?
Honestly? Probably. But differently.
If I go back, I’m planning months ahead. Not weeks. The people who had the best Cannes were the ones who’d been building relationships all year and used the week to deepen them. They had dinners locked, meetings set, a real reason to be there beyond “I should probably be there.”
I also want to see if some of the relationships I started actually go somewhere. That’s the real test. Cannes is great at generating warm intros and “we should totally do something together” energy. Whether any of that converts into actual work, actual partnerships, ask me in six months.
Here’s what I do think: next year is going to be even more creator-forward. The shift was already obvious this year. Brands are realizing they need people who actually know how to make things people want to watch, not just media buyers who can negotiate CPMs. And the experiential side? That’s where I think there’s a real lane. If you’re someone who knows how to bring people together IRL, create moments people talk about after, Cannes is basically a week-long pitch meeting for that skillset.
I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t thinking about Drinks First the entire time. Because I was. The whole week felt like a giant case study in what works and what doesn’t when you’re trying to get strangers to connect, and I’ve been doing that every week in New York for years.
So here’s my actual pitch, out loud, in writing: if you’re a brand who wants to show up at Cannes next year and do something people actually remember, not a bigger tent, not another beach takeover with a headline DJ, but a room people genuinely want to be in, I want to build it with you. I know exactly what that looks like and I know exactly what’s missing. Reply to this email or DM me. Let’s talk before everyone else starts planning theirs.
But here’s my biggest takeaway on the logistics: you do not need seven days. Three, maybe four if you’re pushing it. Fly in Tuesday, leave Friday. The first couple days are slow and the last day is a ghost town of hungover people pretending to network. The middle is where everything happens. Cannes is a marathon, and most people try to sprint it, and by Thursday they’re shells of themselves ready to start their real euro trips.
If You’re Thinking About Going
I’ll be real with you. If you don’t already know people there, or know people who know people, don’t go yet. Build the relationships first. Cannes is not the place to cold-start a network. It’s the place to activate one you already have.
Also: you cannot do Cannes on a “budget”. I mean you physically can, but you’ll be on the outside of every room that matters. Between flights, hotels (which are absolutely insane that week), dinners, drinks, transportation, random expenses you didn’t see coming, expect to spend somewhere between $5K and $10K. Minimum. If that number makes you flinch, it’s not your year. No judgment. It wasn’t my year for a long time either and I’d argue it still isn’t. I know someone who flew via serbia and stayed at an airbnb an hour away, they did it but it was a struggle. I would say if you want to show up as your best self, you should optimize for being close and flexible.
Go if you have real conviction about why you’re going. A specific deal you want to close, a relationship you want to build, a part of the industry you want to break into. Go with intention. Don’t go because you saw everyone posting about it and felt FOMO. That’s the most expensive FOMO on earth.
And remember, it’s still a professional conference. I know the rosé and the yachts and the beach clubs make it feel like vacation, but the people getting the most out of it are working. Hard. Between every party there’s a meeting. Between every meeting there’s a follow-up. It’s fun, but it’s work disguised as fun, and if you treat it like a vacation you’ll come home with a tan and nothing else.
I watched a lot of Cannes content coming out of the week, during, after, the whole thing. And most of it said the same stuff. “It’s about relationships.” “Brands need creators.” “AI was everywhere.” I know. We know. I hope this was at least a little different. I tried to write the version I actually wanted to read and couldn’t find. I also want to make a note about how grateful I am/was to be in these rooms, I know this article sounded very cynical, but this was meant to be an honest op-ed of my brief time at Cannes. I’m excited to see how it evolves, and if I’ll continue to be a part of it.
Anyway, my full South of France itinerary and restaurant recs (the actual good ones, not the scene-y ones everyone already knows) are below for paid subscribers. Because if you ARE going next year, at least eat well.
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This chic as hell spa in SoHo is one of the best resets you can do for yourself. I loved the 60 min facial and the massages always hit. Try it for yourself- use code DRINKSFIRST for $50 off.
Now… enough of all that serious talk. Paid subs- Time for my rapid fire recs:
These are the things, places, etc. I’m loving right now. As well as my south of france itinerary
<3 That’s all for you freeloaders xx
Rapid Fire Recommendations
Date Night: Bar Chimera
