Cannes Can Confront Advertising’s Identity Crisis By Changing the Festival Itself

Ask anyone who knows us, and they'll say we're no strangers to being on the fringe of traditional agencies. It's even in our name - Left Field Labs. We pride ourselves on coming out of left field, for building the unexpected, with surprisingly successful outcomes. Not quite advertising, nor marketing in the traditional sense. In fact, breaking tradition is our very ethos.

So this year, my first Cannes experience, I entirely expected to feel that familiar feeling of being outsiders at a convening of traditional creatives.

What I found instead was an entire festival grappling with the same existential tension points we've been solving for 17 years, between human creativity and machine-enabled creativity, and between traditional broadcast mediums of engagement and more dynamic, two-way conversations with audiences.

Tech evolution is a given; as creatives, rather than resisting it, we’ve spent years making it our business to discern the right models of co-creation, and the right mechanism of human-machine feedback loops to engender better creativity and stronger outcomes.

At the same time AI and immersive tech are enabling some of the most dynamic forms of creative expression in my career, the festival left me with a sense of dissonance. Tech and creativity felt like distinct expressions with no connective tissue; there were few places that invited you to see the pathways of connection between the two and forge those synapses in ways that are compelling for the future of our craft.

I often tell clients that AI needs experiential to get real. After this week, I think Cannes does too.

With improvements, Cannes has the potential to not only tap into our collective creative potential as an industry, but to become an exemplar of what this next chapter of collective creative intelligence in the age of AI will look like, to be the global arbiter of what’s next.

Islands Apart: We Have to Bridge Creative and Tech at Cannes

Some people see creativity and technology as mutually exclusive and existing in separate planes, yet they are inextricably linked.

Cannes has always been a space for creatives, and now creators. But the festival hasn’t meaningfully bridged the future of creativity with the future of technology. Cannes isn't another tech conference, nor should it try to be. But it is a place where our industry decides what signals to send about what's next. And if we're serious about helping people engage with new technologies, we need to be more deliberate in how we present tech-enabled creativity.

Cannes should help us understand what it means for both our craft and for the consumers we serve – how will they actually live with these technologies, adopt them, resist them, or be transformed by them? And right now, it's missing that mark.

Instead of blending creativity and technology, most activations leaned into superficial tech without inviting us to build what’s possible. Too often, AI appeared as a surface-level feature, not as a true amplifier of creative work or ideas.

To ask people to buy into a future shaped by new technology, you need to make it tangible. That starts by bridging physical and digital environments—building experiences where technology does real work, doesn’t just show up as set dressing. When people can see and use what you're talking about, belief follows.

This is exactly the kind of thinking that could transform the many beaches across the festival into revolutionary experiences. Imagine live AI-human creative sessions where attendees collaborate in real-time with the same tools powering award-winning campaigns. Even more importantly, imagine broadening participation to the global creative community who can't physically attend. Cannes might build an enhanced digital event platform that uses real-time interaction capabilities and AI personalisation to give remote attendees a genuine feeling of 'I was there,' and the ability to co-create the experience.

It also means enhancing the value the experience offers attendees. One partner at the festival pointed out that agentic tools could make the sprawl across Cannes more manageable—imagine knowing when someone from your top account walks into the room. Another floated the idea of using AR to bring past award-winning work to life throughout the Croisette. Both are practical ideas, and both begin from the same place: immersing the audience.

AI vs. the Agency

Tentativeness around technology’s role in future agency capabilities could be heard and felt across the Croisette. I felt a prevailing feeling that AI is another risk to manage, not an opportunity to embrace.

That risk aversion showed up in this year’s submissions. Of the Grand Prix winners, only two campaigns meaningfully deployed AI. Both powerfully underscore that the value of agencies in the age of AI is using creativity as a problem-solving process to amplify the impact brands can have in the world.

I’ll dial in for a moment on The Amazon Greenventory from Natura and Africa Creative. The effort used drones to map tree locations and species across 400 kilometres of the Amazon rainforest. The resulting database—the largest tree inventory in Amazon history—was shared with local harvesting communities to support more sustainable practices. Work like this would have taken 25 years to complete; it was done in just six months with AI.

There was no shortage of rhetoric about the future of creativity, but only real world examples like this allow us to actually envision the future. Next year, I hope Cannes does more to showcase what happens when creativity and tech work hand in hand.

What 'Left Field' Means in This Moment

For 17 years at Left Field Labs, we’ve made it our mission to be the undisputed place where people come and build what’s next. Our success is dependent on our ability to hold the tension point between perceived opposites in creativity and technology and integrate the two. When Google needed to launch their first smartphone with something no other browser could handle, three people in a tiny Venice shop won the pitch because we could actually deliver on the vision. Later, when Google wanted to prove the creative value of genAI, our 'Best Phones Forever' campaign invited consumers to co-create a campaign, and produced 400+ unique videos in just over two minutes each. GenAI didn’t replace human creativity; it amplified it through the human-to-machine feedback loops we engineered.

The advantage of never having to unlearn traditional agency ways of working is that you can focus entirely on building what actually works. So as we look beyond Cannes, I'm holding onto this question: how might we uplevel the festival experience to spark inspiration for the future of creative technology, invite co-creation into the experience with attending and remote participants, and remind us why we fell in love with this industry in the first place?

I came to Cannes expecting to feel like an outsider. Instead, I realised we've been building the inside track all along. The industry is finally coming to where Left Field Labs has always been: the intersection of creative vision and technological possibility, where breakthrough work actually gets built.