6 biggest moments from Cannes Lions 2026 and what they mean for the future of advertising

Shaquille O'Neal makes his debut Amazon Live stream with a game show in front of a packed Amazon Port. Bethenny Frankel compares AI to a boyfriend you need to build a relationship with...date a few. NBA superstar Kevin Durant speaks to how creator-led brands, like Boardroom, offer authentic conversations, allowing brand integrations to feel native and not forced. Over four days at Cannes Lions 2026, some of the most trusted names in business, entertainment, and advertising visited Amazon Port to offer a look at where this industry is headed next. The crowds who passed through Amazon Port sipped drinks at a speakeasy inspired by brands like Lexus, Hellmann’s, and Nespresso, who have all had huge success with groundbreaking campaigns. Guests indulged in gelato from Twitch, and maybe a glass or two of Aperol Spritz. They saw Prime Video’s page-to-screen promise brought to life. And they learned from some of the smartest minds in the business about what it takes to connect with audiences in this era of advertising.

AI is making full-funnel advertising simpler and more accessible. Authenticated signals give brands confidence in who they're reaching. Creative tools are catching up to creative ambition. And the distance between an audience discovering a product and actually buying it is closing. Across sessions, the throughline was clear: the next era of advertising replaces assumptions with real-time understanding, powered by trillions of browsing, streaming, and purchase signals that connect impressions to outcomes. Here are six ideas that defined the week, and what the future of advertising looks like.

Charlotte Maines, Vice President of Devices Content & Ads at Amazon, led a conversation with WPP Chief Innovation Officer Elav Horwitz and entrepreneur Bethenny Frankel about how shopping is evolving from search-based discovery to conversational, AI-driven experiences.

1. The brands AI recommends will be the brands that grow

Earning trust from machines is becoming as important as earning trust from people. Monday's Amazon Port session, "Psychology of a shopper and the rise of agentic commerce," explored what happens when AI becomes a decision layer between brands and consumers. Charlotte Maines, Vice President of Devices Content & Ads at Amazon, led a conversation with WPP Chief Innovation Officer Elav Horwitz and entrepreneur Bethenny Frankel about how shopping is evolving from search-based discovery to conversational, AI-driven experiences.

As AI agents increasingly guide purchase decisions, brands need to earn trust from machines and humans simultaneously. Horwitz introduced the concept of "Share of Answer," a new way of measuring whether your brand is the one AI recommends, while Frankel made the case that no amount of AI optimization can substitute for genuine brand equity built over time. Both agreed that the winners will be brands with clear, structured signals and real customer trust behind them. They explained it with a relatable analogy: building trust with AI is a lot like finding the right boyfriend. You have to date and get to know different people. It’s the same with AI.

Maines explained how that could work in practice.

“With Alexa for Shopping, a shopper doesn't have to search ‘moisturizer for dry skin,’” Maines said. “She's chatting with Alexa+ about the cold weather and Alexa+ connects the dots, surfacing the right moisturizer without being asked. Not just any moisturizer, the right one for her, based on her history, preferences, and what she almost bought last week. That's the power of a logged-in customer relationship.”

For advertisers, the action is straightforward. Invest in structured product information. Make your brand story legible to machines. And treat brand equity as a technical asset, not just a creative one.

2. From discovery to purchase in a single conversation

What if the entire purchase funnel happened inside a single conversation? On Tuesday, Amazon introduced Alexa+ Agentic Ads, the first ad format that takes a customer from seeing an ad to completing a purchase entirely within the dialogue. The format launched on Echo Show devices with partners including Papa Johns for food ordering and artists Beck, Jill Scott, and Omar Courtz for concert ticket purchases through Ticketmaster.

"Customers are already turning to Alexa+ to discover and decide," Maines said. "Alexa+ Agentic Ads close the gap between intent and action. A customer can go from curiosity to a completed purchase in a single conversation."

The foundation for this moment has been building for years. Alexa for Shopping, which unifies product expertise with personalized context and shared memory across surfaces, was used by more than 300 million customers in 2025 and helped drive nearly $12 billion in annualized sales, representing 400% engagement growth year over year. Alexa+ Agentic Ads take this further, creating new moments for brands to connect with engaged shoppers ready to act.

Alexa+ Agentic Ads join a broader set of agentic capabilities across Amazon Ads tools. Creative Agent produces professional ads in hours. Ads Agent turns weeks of campaign setup into minutes and has already demonstrated measurable results: advertisers using Ads Agent for campaign targeting during closed beta saw an 18% CPM reduction and 16% CPA reduction, with 65% seeing delivery improvements. In Q1 2026, adoption grew 82%. And the Amazon MCP server connects external AI agents to the Amazon Ads API via simple prompts with no custom coding required, giving advertisers and partners optionality in how they build and buy.

Heather Kehrberg, Director, Advertising Services, Amazon Ads; Joe Park, Vice President, Creative Experiences and AI solutions at Amazon Ads, Alissa Hansen, North American CEO Omnicom Production; and Academy Award-winning filmmaker and The Roots member Questlove discussed the role technology has in the creative process.

3. Display creative is becoming a brand-building powerhouse

As media buying becomes increasingly automated, creative is emerging as the primary lever for differentiation and performance. Rich media, video storytelling, and AI-generated creative that adapts to every placement in real time. That's Responsive eCommerce Creative (REC), an automated display solution Amazon Ads announced during the festival. REC dynamically generates and optimizes ads based on placement, device, shopper intent, and campaign objectives, and advertisers using it have driven up to 37% higher click-through rates and 26% better conversion rates.

The creative is shaped by how people actually shop, stream, and engage, with Amazon's authenticated graph reaching over 90% of U.S. households and connecting unique retail purchase signals and streaming behaviors to deliver a depth of audience understanding that continuously optimizes what the ad says and how it performs. With closed-loop measurement tying every impression back to business outcomes, advertisers can see exactly how creative decisions translate to results.

Brands can upload their own video, pull from existing campaigns, or generate entirely new creative using AI, including product-in-use videos and lifestyle imagery that previously required full production shoots. AI-powered tools remove the production barrier entirely, taking any brand from brief to launch-ready creative across formats in minutes. For larger brands and agencies, that means more experimentation and faster campaigns without added headcount. For smaller businesses, it means access to formats like streaming TV without a production budget. Starting in July, conversational prompts expand beyond Amazon.com to third-party publisher sites across the open internet.

But what’s important to remember is that human creativity will always be important regardless of the new technology that allows us to move faster. On Tuesday’s session “Minds and machines: The next creative frontier” Heather Kehrberg, Director, Advertising Services, Amazon Ads; Joe Park, Vice President, Creative Experiences and AI solutions at Amazon Ads, Alissa Hansen, North American CEO Omnicom Production; and Academy Award-winning filmmaker and The Roots member Questlove discussed the role technology has in the creative process. As Questlove explained, music making has evolved and adapted as long as new tools allow musicians to write and produce songs differently. And all agreed that the human creative element is, and always will be, essential.

Candace Parker, NBA/WNBA Analyst on Prime; Tim Ellis, Chief Marketing Officer of the NFL; and Julia White, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President at Amazon Web Services (AWS) explored technology and storytelling.

4. Fans are going deeper, and brands can meet them there

Sports fandom keeps getting richer. Tuesday morning's "Front row seat: Inside the future of live sports" brought together Candace Parker, NBA/WNBA Analyst on Prime; Tim Ellis, Chief Marketing Officer of the NFL; and Julia White, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President at Amazon Web Services (AWS), to explore how technology and storytelling deepen fan engagement at global scale.

AWS powers the cloud and agentic AI delivering live sports to hundreds of millions of fans, with a single Next Gen Stat requiring 75+ machine learning models running simultaneously to deliver insight in under one second. Prime Vision's interactive format now reaches across Thursday Night Football, NBA on Prime, and Champions League in Europe.

Amazon's combination of premium live sports inventory, authenticated audiences, and full-funnel advertising capabilities means brands can understand what audiences are feeling in a given moment and integrate into those environments with relevance. Interactive Video Ads (IVA) let viewers explore products, add to cart, or send to phone without leaving the screen, turning brand awareness into measurable interactions. During the NBA Conference Semi Finals on Prime Video, Wingstop's IVA unit delivered 26.9 million impressions and a click-through rate 110% above non-endemic benchmarks, driving 6,000+ orders and approximately $143,000 in attributable sales. The panelists agreed: brands that show up most effectively in sports deliver moments that feel like part of the broadcast.

Neil Lindsay, Senior Vice President of Amazon Health Services speaks with Sir Martin Sorrell, Founder and Executive Chairman of S4 Capital/Monks, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, actor and producer, and Kate McCagg, Director, Brand Innovation Lab.

5. Your category is a suggestion, not a boundary

Growth shows up in unexpected places when you follow your customers instead of your competitors. Tuesday afternoon's "The outsider's advantage: The upside to competing where you don't belong" explored what happens when people and companies deliberately enter spaces they weren't designed for. Sir Martin Sorrell, Founder and Executive Chairman of S4 Capital/Monks, bought a wire basket manufacturer and turned it into WPP. Neil Lindsay, Senior Vice President of Amazon Health Services, built Prime, Devices, and now Health Services at Amazon. Priyanka Chopra Jonas, actor and producer, crossed from Bollywood to Hollywood, then launched ventures across beauty, technology, and entertainment.

Each panelist described the moment they knew a new space was ready for them, and it always came back to a customer signal, not a category analysis.

Chopra Jonas explained how she found comfort in new spaces at a young age.

“The biggest myth is you need permission. You don’t need permission you need confidence, knowledge, and faith, “Chopra Jonas said. “My dad – quoting Bruce Lee--said to be like water you need to walk in with your strengths not your weaknesses.”

And that can work for brands, too.

With authenticated signals spanning hundreds of millions of customer relationships, brands can identify where audience intent is shifting and show up confidently in new spaces. Sorrell said that AI is changing everything in the way we operate, noting that the production cost of scaling a new idea has never been lower, as long as you bring the initial creative spark.

Lauren and Shaq hosted his first-ever Amazon Live shopping stream on stage.

6. When talent trusts a product, audiences trust a purchase

Partnership plus sponsorship. That was the defining message of Wednesday's "Built different: When talent becomes the brand," where Shaquille O'Neal joined Wayne Purboo, Vice President of Amazon Shopping Video and Amazon Live, and Angela Lauren, Amazon Live Host, on the Amazon Port stage.

Across restaurants, fitness ventures, tech investments, and now The Shaq Shop on Amazon, the 15-time NBA All-Star has built a business powered by personality, trust, and a genuine understanding of what his audience wants. Shaq builds and curates products because he believes in them, and his audience can tell the difference.

Then, Lauren and Shaq hosted his first-ever Amazon Live shopping stream right there on stage, complete with contestants guessing prices on Shaq-a-licious XL Gummies and Shaq Devastator high-tops, a free throw competition, and signed Shaq bobblehead giveaways. It was without a doubt the best Shaq-hosted live game show Cannes has ever seen—and the wall-to-wall Shaq fans at Amazon Port were ecstatic to see the basketball and media legend.

At the top of the week, Wondery announced a partnership with Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman's Boardroom, a sports and entertainment media brand, which extends this creator-partnership model even further. As part of this multi-faceted agreement, marketers can unlock sponsorship and brand partnership opportunities across video, social, and live experiences, connecting brands more deeply with one of sports and entertainment's most engaged fanbases. With both O'Neal and Boardroom panels, it's clear that when creators genuinely trust a product, audiences lean in.

Bountiful insights, four days, one throughline: AI is simplifying full-funnel advertising and making sophisticated capabilities more accessible. Authenticated signals replace approximation with precision. Creative tools remove the trade-off between customization and scale. The brands moving fastest right now are rethinking how they connect with audiences, wherever those audiences spend their time.