Cannes Lions 2026: The Trends That Will Shape Social Marketing Over the Next 12 Months

AI has grown up. Creators have become industry leaders. Cultural understanding has overtaken scale. After a week at Cannes Lions, these are the conversations we think every marketer should be paying attention to.

For one week every June, the marketing world descends on the French Riviera to celebrate the industry's best work, debate where it's heading next and, inevitably, speculate about what the future looks like.

This year, however, felt noticeably different.

Of course, AI dominated the agenda. Creator marketing was everywhere. There were discussions about measurement, commerce, brand building and consumer behaviour from the moment breakfast sessions began until the final beach events wrapped up. But beneath all of those individual conversations was a broader shift taking place.

The industry seems to be moving away from chasing the newest technology for its own sake and back towards something much more fundamental: understanding people.

Whether speakers were discussing artificial intelligence, creator partnerships or marketing effectiveness, the strongest ideas all pointed in the same direction. Better technology isn't replacing great marketing. It's raising the standard for it.

Here are the themes we believe will shape social marketing over the next year.

AI is becoming infrastructure, not the headline

If Cannes Lions 2025 was dominated by questions about what AI could do, Cannes Lions 2026 was much more interested in what it should do.

That feels like an important distinction.

Rather than debating whether AI will replace agencies or marketers, conversations focused on where it genuinely creates value. The consensus was refreshingly pragmatic. AI excels at removing repetitive work, processing vast amounts of information and accelerating production, but the qualities that separate great marketing from average marketing remain remarkably human.

Judgement. Taste. Creativity. Curiosity. Empathy.

Those words came up repeatedly throughout the week because they're becoming increasingly scarce.

As AI makes it easier than ever to create content, simply producing more of it is no longer a competitive advantage. In many ways, the opposite is true. When everyone has access to the same tools, originality becomes more valuable.

That's something we've been thinking about a lot at Pepper.

We use AI across research, reporting and creative workflows because it allows our team to spend less time on administration and more time understanding audiences, refining ideas and creating work that people genuinely want to engage with. AI should make marketers better, not simply faster.

Creator marketing has grown up

One of the most noticeable shifts this year wasn't on stage, but around it.

Creators weren't simply documenting Cannes. They were shaping the conversation. Some of the most insightful perspectives came from independent creators, strategists and journalists who were interpreting what they were seeing in real time, often reaching audiences far larger than the official festival channels themselves.

It's another reminder that authority has changed.

Consumers increasingly trust individuals before institutions, and brands are beginning to reflect that reality.

The most successful creator partnerships are no longer built around borrowing reach for a campaign. They're built around finding people who already have credibility within the communities brands want to become part of.

That's why creator marketing continues to evolve beyond influencer campaigns into something much more strategic. Creators are helping shape product launches, community building, customer research and brand storytelling across the entire marketing funnel.

For us, it reinforced something we've believed for a long time. The best creator partnerships don't feel like advertising because they begin with understanding people rather than planning campaigns.

Cultural understanding is becoming marketing's biggest competitive advantage

If there was one word that surfaced across almost every conversation, it was culture.

Not culture as a buzzword, but as a genuine source of competitive advantage.

Whether discussions centred on fandoms, online communities, women's influence on digital culture or emerging behaviours, the strongest brands weren't trying to speak to the broadest possible audience. They were finding ways to become genuinely relevant within communities that already existed. It's a subtle but important shift.

For years, marketers have been rewarded for reaching more people. Increasingly, success is being measured by whether brands understand people deeply enough to create something worth talking about.

That's why audience research is becoming such an important part of modern social marketing.

Demographics alone rarely explain behaviour. Understanding motivations, shared interests, online communities and cultural signals provides a far stronger foundation for creative decisions than assumptions ever could.

It's exactly why we've invested so heavily in InfluenceIQ. Great campaigns don't begin with content calendars. They begin with understanding what actually matters to the people you're trying to reach.

Better measurement starts with asking better questions

Marketing effectiveness was another recurring theme throughout the week, although not in the way many people expected.

The industry appears to be moving away from obsessing over individual metrics and towards understanding genuine business impact.

Reach, impressions and frequency remain useful indicators, but they don't necessarily tell us whether marketing actually worked.

Did people remember it?

Did it change the way they felt about the brand?

Did it influence behaviour?

Those are much harder questions to answer, but they're ultimately the ones that matter.

As marketers gain access to more data than ever before, collecting information is no longer the challenge. Interpreting it is.

That shift feels particularly relevant in social media, where dashboards have become increasingly sophisticated while meaningful insight often remains surprisingly scarce.

The brands making the smartest decisions aren't necessarily measuring more. They're understanding more.

Human experiences matter more in a digital world

Perhaps the biggest surprise wasn't what people were talking about.

It was what brands were asking people to do.

Some of the most memorable activations encouraged visitors to step away from their phones altogether. Rather than creating another digital interaction, they focused on tactile experiences, movement, conversation and moments that felt genuinely personal.

After several years of AI dominating headlines, it almost felt like the industry was reminding itself that memorable experiences still happen in the real world.

That lesson extends well beyond experiential marketing. The social content people remember rarely feels manufactured. It feels human. It tells stories, creates emotion and reflects genuine experiences rather than polished perfection.

As feeds become increasingly saturated with AI-generated content, authenticity becomes harder to replicate and therefore more valuable.

Brand building is quietly becoming more important again

Performance marketing hasn't gone away, but Cannes suggested that long-term brand building is firmly back on the agenda.

As AI-powered search, recommendation engines and digital assistants become a bigger part of how consumers discover products, brands need to become easier to recognise, easier to understand and easier to recommend.

Strong positioning, distinctive creative assets and consistent messaging are no longer just good marketing practice. They're becoming increasingly important signals in a world where both people and AI systems are interpreting brands.

The fundamentals haven't changed; they're just becoming more valuable.

The future belongs to marketers who understand people

Leaving Cannes, it would have been easy to focus on AI announcements, new technology or the latest platform updates.

Instead, the strongest takeaway was surprisingly simple. The brands that will succeed over the next few years won't necessarily be those with the biggest budgets, the most sophisticated technology or the highest volume of content.

They'll be the ones that combine technology with creativity, data with judgement and research with genuine cultural understanding.

At Pepper, that's exactly how we think social marketing should work. Great creator partnerships start with audience insight. Great campaigns are built around behaviour rather than assumptions. Great social content doesn't interrupt culture. It contributes to it.

AI will continue to transform how marketing gets done, but it won't replace the qualities that have always made great marketing great.

Understanding people is still the most valuable competitive advantage any brand can have.

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