Cannes Lions 2026: Six Shifts That Will Define Advertising This Year

TL;DR

What to expect from this article

Six shifts that came out of Cannes Lions 2026, covering the move from share of voice to share of answer, discovery and purchase collapsing into a single conversation, display creative becoming a brand building tool, shoppable sports formats, brands crossing category lines, and why authentic talent partnerships outperform paid endorsement. It closes with what each shift means for brands selling on Amazon.

Key takeaways

Being found is being replaced by being chosen. When an assistant returns one recommendation instead of ten results, there is no page two to rank on.

The gap between intent and purchase is closing. Conversational and interactive formats let a customer move from curiosity to checkout without leaving the experience.

Capability is spreading downward. Automated creative generation is removing the production barriers that kept premium formats limited to the largest advertisers.

Intro

Four days on the Croisette, and one throughline connecting almost every conversation.

What stood out this year was how practical the themes were. The conversations centered on mechanics, how customers find products, how they decide, and how quickly a decision turns into a purchase.

For anyone running an Amazon business, that makes it worth reading closely. Below are the six shifts, followed by what each one means in practice for brands selling on the marketplace.

Share of voice is becoming share of answer

The metric is changing. A customer no longer searches for a moisturizer for dry skin and scans ten results. She mentions the cold weather to an AI assistant and gets one recommendation, chosen from her history, her preferences, and what she almost bought last week.

There is no page two in that conversation. Brands are now competing to be the answer, not to be found.

That is a harder game than ranking. Position ten still gets some traffic. Being the second best answer in a conversation that returns one product gets nothing. It raises the cost of being merely competitive and raises the value of being the obvious choice for a specific need.

Discovery and purchase are collapsing into one conversation

Amazon introduced Alexa plus Agentic Ads, closing the gap between intent and action. A customer can go from curiosity to completed purchase without leaving the conversation.

The foundation for this is already in place. According to Amazon Ads, Rufus was used by more than 300 million customers last year, which means conversational shopping is not a pilot behavior waiting to be adopted. It is an existing habit at scale.

What changes for advertisers is where the decision happens. When discovery, comparison, and checkout compress into one exchange, the traditional funnel stages stop being separate moments you can advertise into individually.

Display creative is becoming a brand building tool, not just a performance one

Responsive eCommerce Creative dynamically generates and optimizes ads based on placement, device, shopper intent, and objective. Amazon Ads reports that advertisers using it have seen up to 37 percent higher click through rates and 26 percent better conversion.

The more consequential part is not the lift. It is who can now access this. The production barriers that kept smaller brands out of premium formats are disappearing quickly, because the cost of producing many creative variants is no longer a headcount problem.

Display has spent years being treated as a performance line item. Formats that adapt to context and objective make it usable for brand work again, without the tradeoff between customization and scale that made that impractical before.

Sports fandom is getting deeper, and shoppable

Interactive formats now run across Thursday Night Football, NBA on Prime, and Champions League. Viewers explore products, add to cart, and send to phone without leaving the screen.

Brand awareness is quietly turning into measurable action. That matters because live sport has always been the clearest example of advertising that everyone believed worked and nobody could attribute. Making the format shoppable turns an assumed effect into a recorded one.

Your category is a suggestion, not a boundary

The most interesting growth stories at the festival came from brands entering spaces they were not designed for.

Every panelist made the same observation, that the signal to move came from a customer rather than from a competitor analysis. Priyanka Chopra Jonas described the biggest myth as the idea that you need permission.

For marketplace brands this is less abstract than it sounds. Search and review data show you what customers are already using your product for, which is often not the use case you built it around. That evidence is usually sitting in the account before it appears in a strategy deck.

When talent genuinely trusts a product, audiences follow

Shaquille O'Neal made a simple point. He only partners with products he actually uses, and his audience can tell the difference.

Authenticity here is not a campaign tactic. It is the whole asset. The implication for brands running creator programs is that fit matters more than reach, because an audience that detects a transactional endorsement discounts everything that follows it.

What this means for Amazon brands

Strip away the festival framing and the practical implications are fairly concrete.

Retail readiness gets more valuable, not less. If an assistant surfaces a single recommendation, the inputs that decide which product earns it are the ones you already control. Conversion rate, review quality, pricing, availability, and catalog accuracy stop being hygiene and start being the qualifying criteria.

Measurement windows need to widen. Formats that compress discovery and purchase into one exchange make last click reporting even less informative than it already was, because the exposure that created the decision and the click that recorded it increasingly happen in the same place.

Creative volume becomes a capability rather than a budget line. If variants are generated and optimized automatically, the constraint moves from production capacity to having something worth saying and knowing which audience it is for.

And the advantage of being early is smaller than it looks. Every one of these shifts rewards brands whose fundamentals already work. A brand with weak conversion and unstable inventory does not become competitive by adopting a new format faster than its category.

Conclusion

The throughline across all six shifts is that AI is making full funnel advertising simpler and putting capabilities once reserved for the largest advertisers within reach of everyone else. Authenticated signals are replacing approximation with precision. Creative tools are removing the old tradeoff between customization and scale.

The brands moving fastest are not the ones adopting the most tools. They are the ones rethinking how they show up wherever their audience already is.

For Amazon sellers specifically, that is less a call to chase formats and more a reason to fix the things those formats will expose. The mechanics changed. What decides whether they work for you did not.