content/uploads/2026/07/sencka-C4-91-1.png” alt=”senckađ”>
EDITION→
Global
•
USA
•
UK
•
AUNZ
•
CANADA
•
IRELAND
•
FRANCE
•
GERMANY
•
ASIA
•
EUROPE
•
LATAM
•
MEA
Edition : InternationalLanguage : English
HOME
NEWS
CREATIVE LIBRARY
IMMORTAL AWARDS
MEMBER COMPANIES
PEOPLE
JOBS
How LBB WorksPlans & PricingEditorial Toolkit
news
NEWS
CREATIVE LIBRARY
IMMORTAL AWARDS
MEMBER COMPANIES
PEOPLE
JOBS
Login or Register
Trends and Insight in association withLBB Events
Beneath the Build: Take a Peek Behind the Scenes of 5 Epic Cannes Activations
lbbonline.com
0
LIKE
ADD TO COLLECTION
14/07/2026
Share
Discover the strategy and problem solving that went into helping Amazon, DoorDash, Female Quotient, Snowflake and Canva show up in style on the Croisette at Cannes Lions 2026
Experiential marketers and agencies are probably the hardest working people at Cannes Lions, as we lay out here. This year, tech giants, media companies and brands invested millions in the hopes of standing out from the crowded Croisette and tempting festival-goers to spend a some time with them. And it was up to the experiential experts to leverage all of their creativity, innovation and logistical know-how to conjure up slick, interactive demo spaces, calm refuges and creative playgrounds. LBB’s Laura Swinton Gupta caught up with the agencies behind five such activations to uncover the why, what and how.
Female Quotient Beach
Seed head of production, Chloe Mayhew, head of production
The brief was to create the first-ever FQ Beach, a new beachfront destination that would expand The Female Quotient’s presence at Cannes while staying true to everything the brand is known for. It needed to feel open, welcoming and purposeful, creating space for meaningful conversations, genuine connections and a programme that people wanted to spend time with.
Every part of the experience was designed around that idea. Alongside a live stage hosting inspiring conversations with leaders from business, sport and culture, we integrated partner activations that added something valuable to the guest experience, from the Snapchat Charm Bar and #paid’s Content Cabana to Asana’s Rosé Cart, Walmart’s Walmarché and the Best Buy coffee pop-up.
What made the project special was that it never felt like a collection of sponsorships or standalone moments. Everything worked together to create an environment where people naturally wanted to stay, connect and come back throughout the week. Seeing FQ Beach become such a well-loved destination during its very first year was incredibly rewarding.
We were brought onto the project in March, which is relatively late when you’re delivering something at the scale of Cannes. That meant a condensed planning timeline, but our team has experience delivering complex live environments, so we were able to get up to speed quickly.
As is often the case with Cannes, the brief continued to evolve as the festival approached. New brand partners were added into the space, the programme developed and there were ongoing refinements right up to delivery, so a big part of the work was staying agile and making sure everything still felt cohesive.
One of the more interesting challenges was less about production details and more about tone. Cannes is an intense week, there’s a lot competing for your attention, and it can be exhausting just being there. So we were conscious of creating a space that felt like a break from that, rather than another thing shouting for attention. The feedback we heard most after the event was that FQ Beach felt like a genuine bit of respite, a calm and welcoming space, which told us we’d got that balance right.
Amazon Port – Rue Visionnaire
Wildlife co-founder and ECD, Scott Friedman
At Cannes Lions 2026, Amazon and AWS aimed to build upon the tremendous success of Wildlife’s AWS’s 2025 AI-powered Fragrance Lab activation, by creating an equally or more innovative and immersive experience demonstrating how AWS’ cloud and AI technologies are helping their customers transform.
For the project’s inaugural activation at Cannes Lions, the festival celebrating creativity, in front of an audience of media, entertainment, and advertising leaders, the brief carried real weight. The goal was to make people feel that innovation firsthand: to walk away inspired by what Amazon’s intelligent, agentic capabilities can do, curious to explore the technology for themselves, and ready to bring AWS AI into their own work.
This year’s Amazon Port activation space transforms into an immersive French village where every corner brings an Amazon story to life. Affiliate brand activations become boutiques, kiosks, and marketplaces – a cafe, flower market, pub, speakeasy, library and newspaper kiosk – each a distinct Amazon entity contributing to a larger community. The village concept is the larger idea connecting each activation, creating cohesion across the space, while authentic shopfronts, street details, and town square elements preserve the immersive illusion throughout.
In response we created Rue Visionnaire, an incredible agentic AI powered experience that allows anyone to be a visionary, create the business of their dreams and have a team of agents do the heavy lifting. In minutes our agentic interface creates not just a name, logo and tagline but also identifies locations for leases, business plans, marketing assets and a life-like storefront visual that guests reveal with a tap of their magic key. Beyond a set of physical takeaways, the key reveals ads for each business across other Amazon integrations with Twitch, Prime Video, Alexa+ and beyond. The result was more than 1500 businesses created and limitless inspiration made real in minutes.
1598 businesses were created at the Rue Visionnaire using 19 different AWS services and products. In total over 35,000 agentic assets were created and over 6,000 custom ads for every business.
DoorDash
Jack Morton SVP client services director, Maureen Mellios
Planning for DoorDash’s 2026 Cannes Lions presence began well before the creative process officially kicked off. Jack received the Cannes brief from DoorDash in October 2025. At that point, our team had already been working with a broker to secure a new location on the Croisette, as DoorDash had outgrown its original footprint from the 2025 Cannes Lions.
From October through December 2025, the team’s focus was on defining the project’s scope, securing the venue, and developing the overall budget. The formal creative brief followed in January 2026, launching an intensive design and production process led by Jack Morton. From initial concept through the final execution at Cannes, every touchpoint within the space was intentionally curated to reinforce the DoorDash Ads narrative and create a cohesive brand experience.
DoorDash’s goal for 2026 was to significantly elevate its presence at Cannes. One of Gauger’s original concepts featured a dramatic chandelier constructed from glass DoorDash bags suspended from the ceiling. However, as fabrication planning progressed, structural assessments revealed that the installation would exceed the venue’s ceiling weight limits. Rather than compromising the creative vision, Jack Morton quickly reimagined the centerpiece as an oversized DoorDash bag displayed on a rotating pedestal in the center of the room. The installation became the focal point of the space and was selected to be shipped back to DoorDash’s headquarters in San Francisco as a permanent display.
Another significant design challenge involved creating life-size DoorDash bags that conveyed movement without resembling a traditional hanging mobile. After an extensive search for the right fabrication partner, Jack Morton identified a local Cannes seamstress who hand-crafted each bag. The custom fabrication achieved the desired sculptural quality while preserving the playful movement and premium aesthetic that complemented the overall environment.
Snowflake
Wonder head of client services, Lucy Montgomery
This year, we delivered a dual-presence activation for Snowflake, balancing exclusive, targeted hospitality with broader engagement. We transformed a private Cannes residence into the ‘Snowflake Chalet’, an intimate meeting space away from the crowds, featuring high-impact branding visible directly from the Croisette. In tandem, the ‘Snowflake Snowplough’ ice cream truck took over the Parvis, driving brand awareness and providing much-needed refreshments in the Cannes heat.
Making Cannes a success requires a year-round commitment, starting almost a year in advance to secure prime real estate at a viable price point. Pre-production scoping begins in the autumn before shifting into granular technical production by January, depending on the scale of the project. This year brought highly specific production challenges, particularly around heavy logistics, where securing essential infrastructure like cranes, dedicated parking permits, and loading zones demanded significant foresight, budget, and local knowledge. And teams had to navigate strict oversight, ensuring all external branding passed a rigorous sign-off process with Cannes officials.
Canva
Jimmy Knowles, global head of experiential
[The] driving ambition for us was inclusivity. That is the most important thing. In a space like Cannes that is typically about exclusivity, it’s about what list are you on, who do you know, who invited you here… We wanted to create a space that felt so inclusive and that really felt like it was powered of, by, and for our communities. So we took so many cues from what we learned in previous years and listened to our community. It’s the exact same way that we build the Canva product, right? We listen to the wishes and the hopes and the dreams from our community, the tools that they really want, and then we go and we build it, we do the thing.
That’s the same approach that we take to experiential. We listen to the feedback that we get throughout the day, throughout the week here and we use that to fuel what next year looks like, how we can make things better, more efficient, easier, more inclusive, all the things.
Inclusivity is the name of the game for everything that we’re doing. And you see that in, we hosted a pride party on the Thursday, which I’m very proud of. At a moment where a lot of companies are leaning out of DEI and pulling back and being shy about how they celebrate pride and diversity and inclusion, we are fully leaning into it, and I’m very proud to work for a company like Canva that is embracing that and that is allowing the community the space to celebrate properly. It’s in us bringing together the experiential brunch on Thursday to celebrate experiential marketers and to give them a moment of celebration and recognition.
Trends and Insight in association withLBB Events
More News from LBB Editorial
Church’s Texas Chicken Goes Door-to-Door in Response to Colonel Sanders’ House Sale14/07/2026
The Heat Is On: Why Experiential Agencies Have the Toughest Job at Cannes Lions14/07/2026
Why Nike, Marie-Philip Poulin, and Dillon Brooks Gave Visitors to Canada an Ominous Welcome14/07/2026
ALL THEIR NEWS
Work from LBB Editorial
Canva Cannes Lions 2026 Photo GalleryCanva
14/07/2026
Silly Little Plastic CatBack Market
14/07/2026
On Shinola Time – PicturesShinola
14/07/2026
ALL THEIR WORK
SUBSCRIBE TO LBB’S newsletterEnter your email
FOLLOW US
Events
DPA + SLA (+ US Add.)
About Us
Contact
Editorial Toolkit
Help & FAQ
Privacy Policy
Main Terms & Conditions
Newsletters
Create your own LBB icons
How it works
Plans & Pricing
LBB’s Global Sponsor
