Cannes week does something to me every year. Twenty-four years in this business and the festival still makes me equal parts proud and embarrassed, sometimes in the same afternoon. This week handed me both feelings before the opening ceremony even started.
Let’s go…
ON THE AGENDA
Cannes Lions promised accountability this year.
A Buc-ee’s video beats World Cup ad budgets.
Every snack aisle in America finds its patriotism on the same day.
Apple and Target split on Pride.
The agency that finally killed the conference tote bag.
THE LEAD
Cannes Lions got caught cheating last year.
The ad industry’s biggest scandal got a bigger beach.
Cannes Lions opens today with mandatory AI disclosure, content detection tools, an actual ethics committee, and the authority to strip a trophy after the fact, including a three-year ban for agencies caught submitting false work. All of it exists because last year a Grand Prix winner got pulled after officials found AI-faked CNN footage baked into the case study, and the agency’s chief creative officer resigned over it. So this is the redemption tour. Integrity is the official theme for 15,000 delegates from 90 countries.
Then you look at what’s actually waiting on the Croisette. Yahoo built a purple submarine. Meta took over a beach for four straight days. UTA flew in Paris Hilton, Janelle Monáe, and a creator named Bran Flakezz for its biggest activation yet. The festival tightened the rules on what counts as a winning idea and loosened nothing about what counts as a winning week.
One agency found the gap and used it. DEPT skipped the giveaway table entirely this year and built a streetwear drop instead, invite-only, limited quantities, no logos slapped on anything. More on that below. It’s the best branded merchandise story to come out of Cannes in years.
Everyone covering this week will write about who wins a Lion. The actual story is what brands are willing to spend to be seen winning one, rules or no rules.
↗ Full programme: Famous Campaigns
↗ Beach activations: EventMarketer
↗ The AI integrity reckoning: Campaign Asia
THE RUNDOWN
A Scottish vlogger’s Buc-ee’s video just outperformed the tournament’s ad budgets
Shaun Alexander flew in for Scotland’s first World Cup appearance in 28 years and filmed himself losing it over a Buc-ee’s ice machine. The clip pulled 150,000 likes in days. Sonic signed him for a corndog taste test before the week was out, and the offers haven’t stopped since, including one from an IV drip company after his wife came down with food poisoning on the road.
The thing to remember: This is the best kind of marketing because nobody marketed it. Buc-ee’s didn’t write a brief, didn’t pay an influencer, didn’t sit in a meeting about ice machines. The second a brand tries to manufacture this exact moment on purpose, it’ll feel exactly as fake as it is.
Every snack aisle in America found its patriotism on the same day
General Mills put patriotic packaging on 79 products. Chobani’s La Colombe rolled out a commemorative 1776 tin. Xochitl rereleased red, white, and blue chips it already made last year, now with an official America250 partnership stamp on top. All of it timed to the country’s 250th birthday, all of it sitting on the same shelves at the same Walmarts at the same time.
The thing to remember: I don’t buy the nonpartisan framing for a second. A flag on a bag of chips is a bet that profiting off a moment beats picking a side, and that bet only holds until somebody calls it out. Seventy-nine SKUs of the same idea reads like volume standing in for an actual point of view.
Apple went all in on Pride. Target went quiet. Both made a choice.
Apple rolled out a full Pride collection this year: a new watch face, a Pride Edition Sport Loop, matching wallpaper across every device. Target scaled back again, the third straight year of smaller displays and lower visibility following the backlash and security concerns that hit its earlier collections.
The thing to remember: Target’s getting the headlines here, but Apple’s the one that should make people a little uncomfortable. Going big costs Apple almost nothing, they can absorb whatever backlash shows up overnight. Target has actual stores that get targeted and employees that get threatened, which makes their caution a lot harder to mock from the outside.
DEPT skipped the tote bags and built a streetwear drop instead
DEPT’s Secret Garden has quietly been one of Cannes’ best invites for two years running. This year the agency added a Souvenir Shop next door: reserve a slot, show up, find out what you’re taking home. Raffia totes, leather travel tags, ping pong paddles, postcards, all limited capsule pieces, none of it stamped with a logo. No browsing, no bins, no leftover boxes shipped back to the office.
The thing to remember: This is the first Cannes activation in years I’d actually want an invite to, and I don’t say that about agency stunts often. Most exclusive branded merchandise is just regular merchandise with a velvet rope in front of it. DEPT built the scarcity into the product itself, which is the part everybody else skips.
BRETT’S TAKE
The conference giveaway is dead. Nobody sent the memo.
I’ve watched companies hand out branded merchandise at trade shows and conferences for decades. Tote bags. Stress balls. The pen nobody picks up off the table. The math never changes: order in bulk, drop the cost per unit, hope somebody keeps it past the parking lot.
DEPT just proved that math was always backwards. The agency capped its Cannes drop at a fixed quantity, made guests reserve a slot, and let them discover what they got only when they showed up. No logo plastered across the front. No bin of leftovers shipped home. People will be talking about a ping pong paddle long after the event.
Compare that to the America 250 packaging rush sitting two stories up. Same instinct, opposite execution. Brands raced to put red, white, and blue on as many SKUs as possible, betting that more shelf space equals more relevance. It’s the conference tote bag logic wearing a different outfit.
The lesson isn’t complicated. A branded item everyone gets stops being a gift the moment it ships. It becomes inventory. The item somebody had to reserve a slot for, the one they couldn’t just grab on the way out, that’s the one that gets a story attached to it. Stories get repeated. Inventory gets thrown in a drawer.
If your branded merchandise budget is measured in units ordered instead of stories generated, you’re funding the tote bag pile, not the ping pong paddle.
THE PITCH
If your branded merchandise spend is still measured in units ordered instead of stories generated, that’s exactly the gap ourBrand Friction Audit is built to find. It looks at where your program actually lives, the trade show table, the new-hire kit, the client gift box, and tells you honestly whether it’s producing something somebody keeps or something somebody pitches the moment they get home.
Decades of watching both outcomes happen taught us the difference is almost never the budget. It’s whether anyone designed the experience before ordering the inventory.
That’s it for this week…
Thanks for reading. Comment below and share far and wide.
P.S.
Didn’t make the games. Didn’t make the parade either, if I’m being honest, thought about it, thought about the crowds, stayed home instead. Watched the whole thing from my couch and loved every second of it. I still wasn’t sure I believed it until the confetti actually came down. Go New York Go.
See you next week.
