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Every June, a few thousand people from the advertising and marketing world fly to the South of France, put on linen, and spend a week deciding whose work was the most creative. There is rosé. There are yachts. There are panels, and parties you can only reach by helicopter, and a small gold lion that some people will tell you can change your life. Cannes Lions is the industry’s own awards show, talking to itself, in the most beautiful setting it can find.
I wanted to know what people actually think of it. Not the press releases. Not the LinkedIn carousels with the sunset and the caption about “the best week of the year.” The real stuff. So I did what I usually do when I want an honest answer about anything. I went to Reddit.
What I found was funnier, sharper and a lot more human than I expected.
The thread that started me down this rabbit hole was posted to r/FatFIRE, a community of people who have made a lot of money and retired early, or are trying to. A new agency owner asked whether Cannes was worth the trip.
He did not ask it gently.
“One of the agencies I acquired is basically begging me to come to Cannes Lions next month,” he wrote. “Apparently it’s where the big deals happen, the creative energy is wild, and as the new owner I should show up and shake hands.” Then, in brackets, the tell: “(i don’t care).”
He went on to describe the whole thing as drinking “overpriced rose on a boat with ad people wearing linen,” and asked the question that became the unofficial title of the entire genre: “Is Cannes Lions worth flying in for? Or is it just Burning Man for ad execs with corporate cards?”
Reddit did not hold back.
The single highest-voted reply in the whole thread, sitting at 268 points, was one sentence long.
“Given the insufferable humblebrag nature of the post, you should fit right in.”
That one line got more support than every piece of sincere advice underneath it combined. A close runner-up, posted to a community of early retirees who did not much care about his linen problem: “Brother, we are retired.”
Once you start reading past that one thread, the same verdict turns up everywhere, phrased a hundred different ways.
“It’s a rosé fuelled circle-jerk,” one person wrote. “A ton of fun but it’s just a massive jolly, not some gathering of brilliant ideas. More like a job fair.”
“Advertising for advertisers to win advertising awards to brag to your advertising friends,” went another. “Nobody else outside the industry gives a fuck.” That one earned 20 points. The single most upvoted reply in its entire thread, at 57, was even blunter: “Giant excuse for senior execs to expense a trip to France.”
And my personal favourite, from someone who had clearly had the “creative energy” pitch one too many times: “If you want creative energy, go to Bushwick and sleep in an alley for a week.”
What I did not expect was that the most generous answers came from people who have actually been, and who love parts of it while seeing it completely clearly.
One former ad exec wrote the single best description of Cannes I have read anywhere. They laid out the pyramid of influence, from CMOs at the top down through platform execs, agency execs, ad tech and “on down to the lowly creators.” They described the thought leadership stages brands build “to make themselves look relevant,” and the best parties, the ones “only accessible via helicopter.”
And then, the honesty: “I have never successfully sold a deal at Cannes or opened a meaningful door at the fest. I have definitely failed to do it 1000x times. I also drank twice that much Rose.”
Another summed up the whole value calculation in one line: “Worth going on someone else’s dime, 100%. Not so much, if you’re paying.”
Here is the part that surprised me most. Strip away the FatFIRE crowd, and a lot of the Cannes conversation on Reddit is not cynical at all. It is people quietly helping each other get there and survive it.
In one thread, a woman in her 40s with two kids asked what on earth she should wear, worried she would “look like a Boden catalogue.” What followed was dozens of women trading specific, generous advice. Comfortable shoes, because “tramping up and down the croisette takes its toll in the heat.” A thin layer for the freezing air-con in the theatres. Linen, Sezane, Vinted, a personal shopper at John Lewis “as a research exercise.” One reply contained a list of actual M&S dresses with links. Somewhere in the replies, two strangers bonded over a shared approach to dressing and one of them said it had “literally changed my life.”
Not a single sneer in the whole thread. Just people being kind about a thing they were nervous about.
And then there are the hustlers. A whole genre of threads is young people, priced out by a pass that can run to thousands, asking how to get to Cannes for free. The answers are a masterclass in resourcefulness: win the Young Lions competition in your country, get a press badge by pitching a story to a local outlet, volunteer, find your country’s Cannes ambassador, stay in a hostel in Nice and take the train in. “You don’t have to buy a pass for the actual Cannes Lions event,” one veteran explained. “The whole town is full of stuff happening, a lot of which can be signed-up to for free.” Another, more honestly: “Just go, and don’t buy a pass.”
The sharpest threads are the ones about the Lions themselves.
Plenty made a sincere case for going. If you manage client relationships you should be there, several argued, because big clients are there and they like to know the top people at their agency care enough to show up. “That might mean over spending on rose and dinners,” one wrote, “but if they think you’re blowing them off then they might look for another shop.”
A creative director made the case that even a scam can matter. “Total money making scam,” they wrote, “that can add a zero to your paycheck overnight.” Their point was that you can think the whole thing is nonsense and still respect anyone who wins one: “If you win at Canne, I’ll admit it, as a creative director, you have my attention.”
But the people who had actually won were often the harshest. One Gold Lion winner showed up in a thread about the awards being a “money making rort” and agreed with the critics. “Our ad was a nice piece of art,” they wrote, “that went largely unnoticed by consumers.” Coarser ads that drove real sales, they said, got ignored by the judges. Another winner put it more bluntly still: “Lions are made of ice. They melt and lose relevance really quick. Try to use it as leverage to get a better position as fast as you can.”
The debate underneath all of it is an old one. Are we here to make beautiful things, or to make our clients money? Cannes leans hard towards the former. A lot of Redditors, including the award winners, think it should lean towards the latter. Several pointed to the Effies, the awards that measure whether the work actually sold anything, as the ones that should matter more.
For all the snark, the thread that stayed with me was the one with the least snark in it.
In a sea of cynicism, someone posted about heading to Cannes alone, no festival pass, on a two-month financial runway, to meet a big company that might invest in their startup. They admitted they would be sleeping in a rental car for half the trip and showering at a gym to save money. They were not bragging. They were nervous, and they were looking for “hope-cored, possibly equally broke, but real people” to meet for a morning run.
And Reddit, the same Reddit that had spent days eviscerating the humblebraggers, completely changed its tone.
“Sleeping in a rental car to close a deal at Cannes is genuinely the most unhinged bootstrapped founder move I’ve seen on this sub and I respect it completely,” one reply began. Others offered practical help: park outside the city, sign up for a gym day pass, hit one activation each morning, film interviews with people as an icebreaker. One person gently insisted they just book an Airbnb in Antibes and get some sleep, “functioning much better as a human.”
Nobody was performing. Somebody asked for help, honestly, and strangers showed up to give it.
After all of that, Reddit never really lands on a single answer, which is sort of the point. Go if someone else is paying. Don’t expect to close a deal. The awards are a scam, and also they can change your career. The south of France is lovely, and you should probably spend less time on the Croisette and more of it in Antibes. Half the value is the panels, half is the parties, and the other half, because Reddit does not always do maths, is just being somewhere warm with people you like.
What you don’t get anywhere in these threads is the brochure version. No “best week of the year.” No sunset captions. Just a few thousand opinions from people with nothing to sell you, arguing it out, occasionally being kind to a founder sleeping in a rental car.
I came looking for what people really think of Cannes Lions. I found that, and a fair bit more. The yachts get the photos. The honest stuff is a few scrolls down.
