Location: Palais - The Forum
What will the future look like? Our hand-selected visionaries will paint a picture of our world 18 months from now. Attendees will get the scoop on what’s a fad, what’s sticking around and what is still to come.
But why 18 months? Because the insights gained from these sessions will be tangible and immediately actionable for you to future-proof your organisation and creative ideas on your return home.
This session will ignite blue-sky thinking for the possibilities of tomorrow. Attendees will gain valuable insights into the trends and movements that are on the horizon. Further discussion between the future gazers will unpick the world of tomorrow right before your eyes.
Questions this session will answer:
- What will the future look like, and how should you future proof your creative?
- What are some actionable insights into the future you could begin planning for now?
- Where is the industry headed and how can I play a part in it?
This session is part of the Cannes Lions Festival programming and is separate from the dentsu Beach House. You must have a Cannes Lions Festival pass to attend. For more details, please visit Cannes Lions website. You may purchase a pass here.
Following the global impact of a dedicated BBC World News segment on ‘Waves of Will’ the latest solution from an ongoing partnership between Dentsu Lab and NTT, this special session at Dentsu Beach House puts a spotlight on the importance of human-led innovation through an intimate conversation led by Emmy nominated BBC Worldwide journalist Mark Lobel. In the session, we take a critical look at the volatility of innovation, and why it is essential that we prioritise innovation for good, towards the positive progress of humanity.
Together, our speakers will explore ways of harnessing advanced, emerging technology and unique solutions to move the world forward, and address critical, overlooked human needs, told through the lens of dentsu’s groundbreaking innovation work. At the heart of the session, a powerful pre-recorded message from Breanna Olson, Waves of Will protagonist living with ALS, whose story captured a global audience when she performed once more using brainwaves live on stage.
In a world where trends move at the speed of the feed, the most resonant brands don’t just react to culture, they anticipate it, shape it, and show up with a point of view that feels unmistakably authentic.
Explore how brands can sharpen their cultural instincts, from identifying the right moments to engage, to executing with authenticity and speed. Moderated by Ryan Seacrest, the discussion will spotlight brands that are getting it right (the ones generating fomo), and explore how strategic partnerships across sports, entertainment, and creator ecosystems can build lasting cultural relevance.
Expect a candid look at how to move beyond trend-chasing and toward building brands that don’t just participate in culture, but become part of it.
Location: Palais - Debussy Theatre
Creativity has never been more accessible, but how do you move beyond clichéd storytelling tropes to create stories that endure across generations?
Dentsu brings together one of gaming’s most influential and beloved franchises, FINAL FANTASY, with Japan’s leading public broadcaster, NHK, to explore a uniquely Japanese approach to storytelling.
Hear first-hand how these cultural icons continue to innovate, bringing emotional storytelling to life across evolving media and creating work that resonates deeply with audiences over time.
As AI transforms the creative process, this session asks a timely question: what will make tomorrow’s stories truly last?
Questions this session will answer:
- How are the most powerful stories shaped by how time is designed within the audience experience?
- What can Japanese storytelling teach us about building narratives from characters and relationships, rather than starting with plot?
- Why do certain moments stay with us long after a story ends, and what makes them resonate more than scale or spectacle?
This session is part of the Cannes Lions Festival programming and is separate from the dentsu Beach House. You must have a Cannes Lions Festival pass to attend. For more details, please visit Cannes Lions website. You may purchase a pass here.
Join us for dentsu Beach House Opening Reception hosted by Takeshi Sano, President & Global CEO, dentsu.
Set against the Croisette, this opening night brings clients, partners and dentsu leaders together to celebrate creativity, collaboration and 125 years of dentsu innovation.
Expect a special Cannes opening night, designed to spark connections and ideas, and set up your Cannes 2026 experience with dentsu.
The next era of brand-building won’t be won on attention. As agentic AI takes hold, increasingly selecting, recommending, and transacting on consumers’ behalf, brands face a new competitive frontier: becoming the default chosen by machines before a human ever weighs in.
The shift collapses old certainties. Paid, owned, and earned blur into a single connected experience. Creative effectiveness is no longer measured in cultural resonance alone, but in neurological signals, with the brain deciding before awareness catches up. Thus, the first “customer” a brand meets is today often not a person at all.
How can the world’s most influential brands compete and win when human values such as trust and authenticity have become the currency customers value most in an increasingly impersonal, automated agentic world? And how can CMOs navigate the tension between mastering platform gatekeepers and staying personally connected to their customers?
This session brings together two category-defining marketers, Jennifer Treiber-Ruckenbrod of MINI and Lara Balazs of Adobe, and Karin Zimmermann, from dentsu's business transformation practice, to unpack what it takes to build brands that machines recommend and humans love.
As AI increasingly influences how brands are discovered, understood, and considered, the rules of growth are being rewritten. In a world where assistants recommend, summarize, and shortlist, media spend alone won’t make you visible, and creative excellence alone won’t make you chosen.
The brands that win next will do two things at once: speak fluently to machines and mean something to people. They’ll build the structured signals, clear brand truths, and technical precision that AI can recognize - while creating the cultural relevance, community conversation and distinctive ideas that humans trust and talk about.
This session explores the new frontier where media, creativity, data, and community collide. Expect a live discussion on how to stay discoverable without becoming generic, how to stand out in a sea of sameness, and why the future belongs to brands engineered for recommendation but designed for difference.
What happens when partners don’t just plug in, but operate as important value drivers inside your marketing system? This session examines how dentsu.Connect 4.0, a modern internal operating system, transforms collaboration with partners like Amazon and MIQ from basic interoperability to true co‑creation. We’ll explore new ways to unlock partner value, from rethinking how datasets are combined and activated to powering always‑on media and creative measurement. The takeaway: partnerships become living systems, not handoffs—driving smarter execution, faster learning, and outsized impact.
Location: Palais - Debussy Theatre
As dentsu marks its 125th anniversary, join Global CEO, Takeshi Sano in this exclusive fireside conversation, his first since being appointed in the role. Drawing on 30+ years as a growth partner for clients and society, he will reflect on dentsu’s journey from a news agency to one of the world’s most integrated marketing networks.
The session grounds the future of innovation firmly in the founding ethos of the company and will explore what it means to be truly client-centric, how innovation must translate into real impact, and the beliefs shaping dentsu. Through personal insight, case studies and visual storytelling, the session offers perspective on how collaboration, agility and culture can unlock meaningful outcomes for clients, today and tomorrow.
Questions this session will answer:
- How do you build sustainable growth through trust, and what does true client centricity look like in practice?
- How can innovation move from ideas to measurable outcomes that drive real business and societal impact?
- What role does culture play in creating competitive advantage, and how do you embed it across an organisation?
This session is part of the Cannes Lions Festival programming and is separate from the dentsu Beach House. You must have a Cannes Lions Festival pass to attend. For more details, please visit Cannes Lions website. You may purchase a pass here.
Thirty years ago, iProspect helped define performance marketing. We are not marking the anniversary by looking back. We are proving that the best is still ahead. The Acceleration Sessions are three named chapters, each a stand-alone moment, that collectively give the content portability beyond the day and turn the run-of-show into a continuation of our Still Accelerating global brand campaign.
- Chapter I, Legacy. The iP30 Fireside. Two organizations. Three decades. One inflection point. iProspect and Google have shaped performance marketing since the internet had a homepage. Legacy framed as a launchpad, not a finish line.
- Chapter II, Reinvention. Built to last. Built to lead. In 1995, eBay listed its first item. In 1996, iProspect ran its first search. Thirty years later, both brands are doing what most of their contemporaries did not survive to attempt: rewriting themselves in public.
- Chapter III, Velocity. Accelerating Speed. Accelerating Fandom. Formula 1 did not just grow. It became the cultural event-sport of the decade and rewrote what brand partnership in sport can be. McLaren is the operating system. This is what acceleration looks like at full throttle.
Join us beachside for an exclusive programme of leadership conversations, live panels, and a sunset happy hour designed for those of us shaping what comes next, as we toast 30 years at the forefront of brand and performance.
- 4:00 to 5:00 PM - Programming
- 5:00 to 6:30 PM - Happy Hour
Join us at the dentsu beach house for an evening of connection, conversation, and celebration. Guests will enjoy a live DJ set, exceptional food and drinks, and networking with industry leaders, innovators, and creative minds from across the media, creative, data and technology landscape.
From sunset through the evening, the dentsu Beach House will come alive with the energy, creativity, and influence that define Cannes, creating the perfect atmosphere to connect, collaborate, and celebrate together.
This session explores what it really takes to turn social strategy into cultural momentum. We're unpacking a new equation with community at its center, helping brands drive performance while shaping culture. We'll break down how paid, organic, real-world experiences and creator storytelling come together to create those rare "lightning in a bottle" moments. And why the brands winning today aren't using creators as megaphones - they're building with them.
Turn your inspiration into action and stick around for Creator Speed Dating following the session in the Beach Zone. Be sure to register your interest, as limited space is available.
Back in Cannes: the highly anticipated Creator Speed Dating returns in the place where creators and brands converge.
Join us on the beach immediately following the main stage morning panel on all things social and creator, as the experience shifts from discussion to direct engagement. What begins as conversation quickly moves into action: creators and brands are paired for a series of curated conversations designed to spark meaningful dialogue, unlock collaboration, and build relationships that last beyond the Croisette. Built for community and proven to drive real business outcomes.
What you’ll get? A value exchange between brand marketers and creators designed to unlock your most successful partnerships.
Join us beforehand at 10 am for The Social Equation: From Community to Culture, where industry leaders will explore the evolving intersection of social, creators, culture, and performance.
Limited space available.
Reach has run its course. The most interesting audiences today aren't being captured — they're choosing. They opt in. They pay attention because they want to, not because an algorithm decided for them.
dentsu convenes a conversation to map the shift and to bring the platforms, publishers, and brands defining it into the same room.
Why this, why now For two decades, media strategy optimized for scale. The signals now point elsewhere - toward depth, trust, and chosen engagement. A quieter audience, but a more committed one. The platforms growing fastest are the ones treating attention as earned, not extracted.
The rise of opt-in media Self-selected audiences are reshaping the media landscape. In contrast to platforms that funnel users into algorithmic bubbles, a new generation of platforms led by Substack is built on intent: readers actively choosing what they engage with, and staying because the value is real.
New models, new metrics As the currency shifts from impressions to intent, success has to be redefined. Depth of attention replaces breadth of exposure as the signal that matters.
What intimacy means for brands For brands, the shift requires moving beyond interruption - showing up in ways that feel native, relevant, and trusted. dentsu will share an early blueprint through its media++ approach.
Presentations by companies renowned for their creativity in Japan.Each brand engages sincerely with the stakeholders they value most while pursuing communication and branding activities as a corporate entity or product brand.
How do these brands identify the aspirations of their key stakeholders and translate them into tangible brand expressions or effective communication strategies?
This session delves into Japan’s unique “stakeholder-centric” creativity through practical examples from each brand/company.
The industry has spent years conflating loyalty with frequency. High-frequency brands build points programs. High-consideration brands build communities. And the two almost never share a stage. This session changes that – and surfaces the most important insight in Modern CRM: the underlying principle is universal, even when the mechanics are completely different.
Breitling is a 140‑year‑old Swiss luxury watchmaker where the customer relationship doesn’t start at purchase—and often lasts decades beyond it. Over several years, the brand has modernized its omnichannel CRM, from boutique clienteling and marketing automation to digital product passports, composable commerce, real‑time insight, and SMS and WhatsApp engagement. All of it is anchored by a unified customer profile that connects every interaction into a single, living view. Breitling’s challenge isn’t driving frequency—it’s building devotion: staying relevant, personal, and present across years between transactions and a lifetime of ownership.
Different categories. Different purchase cycles. Different definitions of what loyalty even means. But we see the same fundamental truth: brands that treat first party data as a media asset, not just a retention tool, are the ones winning the algorithmic era.
Our industry has confused volume with value and aesthetic consistency with consistency of belief, fueling AI sameness, decision saturation, and most importantly, an in-flood of low-quality micro-decision moments with each scrolling session. This panel reframes the challenge: if content is no longer the differentiator, what closes the gap between discovery, knowing, and deciding with conviction?
Drawing on Asia’s largest culture-to-commerce study (From Culture to Commerce: Innovating the Path from Belief to Basket, survey, Q4 2025) and insights gleaned from more than $2B in real investment decisions, we’ll unpack the behaviours and briefs that keep brands stuck. and show how to treat culture not as a channel to appear in, but as a compounding system to operate within, all driving towards helping consumers decide faster, with more confidence, in a single moment.
What the audience will takeaway: a set of decision-first provocations and briefing principles to build distinctive cultural authority that converts, not just content that performs.
The industry has spent years optimising for clicks, impressions and short-term returns. But in the race for efficiency, something critical has been lost: media quality and a focus on brand equity.
Drawing on dentsu’s landmark Brand Reset study, this session explores how attention really works in today’s next-gen video environments and why where advertising appears now, matters as much as what it says.
Bringing together dentsu, platform leaders and a cultural voice, with a deep knowledge of the power voluntary attention holds, this panel will unpack how different environments, from social feeds to streaming platforms, shape attention, memory and growth.
Together, they will explore how brands can move beyond fragmented optimisation and design media experiences that drive both immediate impact and long-term brand equity.
Join Dentsu Creative, Tag and Ashik Ashokan from LIONS Advisory for the Festival Forecast, an insight-packed presentation exploring the trends of the week – from conversations on the Croisette, to keynotes on the Lumiere Stage. This flagship talk is a booster shot of creative inspiration that will include the exceptional work on show at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the themes that are emerging, and the questions to ask yourself as you look ahead, followed by a Q&A with Dentsu Creative's Global Chief Creative Partner, John Mescall, moderated by Paul Kemp-Robertson, Chief Content Officer at LIONS.