For the first time in three years, marketing mavens will be hunting lions along the French Riviera.

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is once again an in-person event. Some agencies are sending smaller contingents, having been burned by past COVID cancellations or looking to cut costs after the pandemic made CFOs realize how many gazillions were being spent on conferences and travel without any discernible effect on agency growth.

(A few agencies have cited carbon offsets as a reason for sending fewer people, which sounds about as credible as a politician’s promise. Believe me, those agencies will not hesitate to burn millions of gallons of jet fuel on their next big pitch, global warming be damned—but it does make for a better sound bite than “cost-cutting.”)

Yet despite some initial hesitation, festival organizers say that registrations are now comparable to numbers from years past. That means over 10,000 clients, agencies, tech platforms and media companies will converge on a small strip of sand to network, sell and celebrate.

Many agencies booked late once they confirmed clients would be attending, because at the end of the day, Cannes is all about connections. Reconnecting with an old client you suspect is disgruntled with their current agency. Meeting that headhunter you’ve only spoken to on Zoom, in hopes of playing your get-out-of-jail-free card at just the right time. Hugging colleagues and compatriots, mask-free, just like in the old days. Going to incredibly creative parties thrown inexplicably by the least creative agencies. Cringing at the posturing on panels but cheering at the bursts of brilliance in the work.

Cannes was meant to be a festival in the truest sense, a sensational shindig that brings glamour back to an industry that too often loses its swagger. Here’s hoping attendees dismount the high horse of virtue-signaling that sucked all the fun out of the industry over the past few years. Cannes needs to return to its roots as an unabashed bullhorn for an industry invested in fame. Fame is the fuel that powers progress. Famous brands are relevant, famous clients become celebrity CMOs, and famous agencies win more business. Creative ads drive more business, which creates more jobs, which turns this backwards economy around. If you give a mouse a cookie, you know what happens—and if you fuel the fame of ad people, you just might (maybe, kinda) save the world.

Think of Cannes as a virtuous circle of lions chasing each other around a watering hole where everyone is perpetually thirsty.

And speaking of water, attendees should prepare for a deluge of delights from the media and tech platforms along the oceanside promenade. The platforms command most of a marketer’s money and want to keep it that way. With a recession looming, jockeying for pole position on a client’s media plan is do-or-die, which makes Cannes the debutante ball for brands. While that once meant an invitation to party on a yacht, this year the schmoozing will be super-sized. Pinterest has an entire pier. TikTok has its own beach. Amazon has a port. (Meta also has a beach, but rumor has it that Facebook is hiding in the sand like a crusty old crab unwilling to let go. Once you brush the sand off your feet, make sure to check your pockets to see how much of your data was stolen.) Sometimes all it takes for a platform to make its annual sales goals is landing one whale of a client, so buying all that beachfront property may not be as extravagant as it seems. 

Programming this year will follow six tracks based on a survey of marketers around the world on their most pertinent issues. Select panels will focus on the talent crisis; sustainability; DEI; creative effectiveness; business transformation; and data & tech innovation. With no small amount of restraint, let’s say these topics seem fairly obvious, given how much coverage they already get in the trade press. For the biggest festival of the year, it would be refreshing if the Lions tackled the elephants in the room. Creative answers to questions no one seems willing to ask.

Why not address intellectual property, and who owns it? Since the holding companies gave away the farm by swapping media commissions for hourly rates, the entire industry has been financially underwater. That’s the reason we have a talent crisis— the sheer lack of upside on salaries, bonuses and longevity in an industry notorious for ageism and tight-fisted staffing plans. Licensing an agency’s IP to clients—instead of giving it away—might help close that revenue gap. (A quixotic client uses your tagline and campaign after they fire you? No problem, you still get royalties.)

How about focusing on conflicts, like how ludicrous it is for clients to work with management consultants who also work with their competitors, only to turn around and tell agencies they need exclusivity? Not only do marketing clients miss out on category expertise from agencies, they conveniently ignore the fact that nothing shared with an agency is as confidential as the first-party and financial data given to consultancies. Eliminating conflicts would create specialist agencies at scale, improve agency margins and reduce costs for clients through the efficiency of expertise. In other words, get over yourselves—none of this marketing stuff is top secret. The hard part is crafting the story, which is why a true celebration of creativity should kick conflicts to the curb.

Those are just two examples—and no one really goes to Cannes for the panels—but next time you program, please push the envelope a little more. This year can simply be a test run of socializing again, standing shoulder to shoulder with colleagues who have sat alone in their apartments for too long, hunched over a laptop pretending the two-dimensional world was enough. (It’s not and it never was.)

For those who said we could work remotely indefinitely, that meeting in-person was a thing of the past, you were wrong, or maybe in denial. Younger talent learns from observation. Seasoned talent gets ideas from the hallway conversation after the meeting. Clients gain trust from looking you in the eye without worrying where your eyes are actually looking. You can’t get that on a video call. Our industry is a people business, our only product ideas, our only resource talent.

Can we make this industry even better than it was, more creative than it’s ever been? With apologies to Harold Zidler from “Moulin Rouge,” we can-can-Cannes! And we must.

And that’s what Cannes is all about.