08/10/2026
Rolling into Cannes this year felt like going back to your hometown after 10 years of living another life somewhere else. You recognize the streets, the rituals, the ambition in the air. But you also realize you are not the same person walking through it.
This was the Cannes we had never known before. Not the Cannes of chasing the Palais from the inside. Not the Cannes we used to treat as the season finale: the walk of fame, the trophies, the brag, the next promotion, the salary bump.
This year, Rise New York & Partners showed up across the off-Palais stages alongside partners such as Google, The Female Quotient, Indie Agency News, AdWeek, and HUMAN Security.
We had a choice to make. Spend the week chasing the old scoreboard, or use the week to test a bigger thesis. We chose the latter. And it may have been one of the clearest business decisions we have made as an agency.
We came to Cannes with a point of view to validate, a reputation to build, and a question to keep asking:
What happens to creativity when AI shares the same rooms where work is imagined, made, scaled, and judged?
A lot of the industry is still talking about AI in terms of efficiency. Reduce costs. Move faster. Make more. But the conversations that mattered in Cannes were not really about speed. They were about trust, control, creative vision, authorship, vocabulary, who is behind the machine, who writes the rules, and who protects the work.
We heard the same concern in almost every senior conversation we had.
AI is powerful at analyzing patterns, processing them, and producing from them. But serious, elegant, high-impact marketing has always depended on knowing when to break those same patterns.
Over the next 10 days, we will unpack what Cannes opened for us across these topics and stages, what changed for us, and what comes next.
For now, here is a glimpse of the week.
Rise is a mindset™
