Cannes Lions 2026: The Missing Conversation About AI and Creative Effectiveness

Cannes Lions 2026 runs June 22–26 in Cannes, France. The world’s best creative minds are gathering to celebrate the campaigns that moved culture and drove brand value. Adrienne, eLLMo’s CEO and Co-Founder, is there. And if the pre-festival agenda is any signal, AI is the dominant theme — Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind is a keynote speaker, and nearly every panel and roundtable is wrestling with the same question: what does AI mean for the creative industry?

Here’s the question Cannes doesn’t ask directly: does award-winning creative actually convert the buyer it was made for? Cannes celebrates effectiveness — the Grand Prix Effectiveness Lion exists for exactly this reason — but the measurement happens after the campaign runs. The missing conversation happens before you spend: what does the buyer experience when they land on the page that campaign sends them to? Creative that wins a Lion but sends buyers to an unconverted landing page isn’t doing its job.

AI is being discussed at Cannes primarily as a creative production tool — faster copy, generative imagery, AI-assisted ideation. That’s real, and it’s valuable. But the more transformative AI use case for brand marketers is on the demand side: what does an AI buyer panel tell you about whether this creative actually converts before you commit the production budget? For brands with CTV campaigns on the slate, that question is especially urgent — a CTV storyboard can be pressure-tested against a simulated ICP panel before a frame is shot. The same applies to paid social concepts, native display, and landing pages. You can generate 100 ad variations with AI today. You can also simulate how a panel of your actual ICPs responds to each one, before you spend a dollar on production or media. Most brands are doing the first. Almost none are doing the second.

The gap matters because creative effectiveness and conversion effectiveness are not the same thing. A campaign can be emotionally resonant, culturally relevant, and beautifully crafted — and still send buyers to a page that fails the moment they arrive. The hero copy speaks to the wrong job-to-be-done. The trust signals don’t address the buyer’s specific anxiety. The CTA is there but the product story hasn’t earned it yet. These aren’t creative failures — they’re buyer simulation failures. You can’t fix them with better creative. You fix them by simulating the purchase decision before the campaign runs.

eLLMo Simulation sends a curated panel of simulated buyers — each with their own habits, purchase motivation, and customer profile — against your landing page, CTV video ad storyboard, paid social creative, or product story. Each simulated buyer returns first-person findings: what stopped them, what built trust, what they wanted to see that wasn’t there. It’s not a focus group and it’s not a survey. It’s behavioral simulation of the purchase decision at the individual level, before you spend on production or traffic to find out the hard way.

The brands leaving Cannes with a competitive edge won’t just be the ones who saw the best creative. They’ll be the ones who ask the next question: how do I know this creative actually works for the buyer I’m targeting, before I run it? That’s the question buyer simulation answers. And it’s available now — not in a future AI roadmap, but in a platform DTC brands and agencies are using today to de-risk their spend before every campaign launch.

If you’re at Cannes and want to talk buyer simulation, Adrienne is there. The conversation about AI and creative effectiveness is just beginning — and the most important part of it hasn’t made it to the main stage yet.