Through The Participation Exchange, I’ve been exploring the power of participation and how it impacts marketing, media, and culture. In my forthcoming book Wired To Participate, I make the argument that participation is the human path forward in a world that is becoming more synthetic. And I trace how technology and media have been forecasting this since the dawn of the internet. So, when Cannes announced this year’s winners, I felt compelled to have a look at the winners through this lens. And the picture continues to be clear.

Participation had a very good year. About a third of the Grand Prix winners, eleven in all, run on the audience’s own action. In these campaigns, people aren’t watching from the outside or tapping a like. They are the ones making the work happen. That is a striking number, and I don’t think the industry has fully registered how far this has come.

The part that surprised me

What I didn’t expect was where it showed up.

Some Cannes categories are practically built for participation. Entertainment rewards fandom, PR rewards earned spread, Brand Experience rewards people doing things. Wins there are lovely, but they don’t tell you much. What caught my attention was participation winning in the rooms that have nothing to do with it, the categories that answer to sales, to media results, to hard business strategy.

600K Network won a Titanium Lion, the festival’s prize for the idea that fits no existing box (and a Grand Prix for Good besides). It printed a QR code on Venezuela’s election ballots and turned more than 600,000 citizens into a live vote-verification network, ordinary people scanning and transmitting the official count faster than the institutions could. The audience wasn’t the audience. It was the infrastructure.

The pattern held across the serious categories. In Creative Strategy, the prize for the thinking behind the work, the winner was The Pub That Refused to Die, which didn’t so much advertise Heineken as help communities take over and run their own failing local pubs. In Creative Commerce, which answers to sales, Wisła Kraków’s Lucky Fan Index gave every supporter a personal “luck” score tied to their attendance, something to track and defend, generated week after week by the fans themselves. And in Media, Uber Eats’ Build Your Own Super Bowl let 325,000 fans build their own Super Bowl ads inside the app, and the jury noted it converted straight into business growth.

Four categories with no particular reason to favor participation, and four winners built on it anyway. When it wins where the judges are watching sales and results, it gets hard to call it a fad.

It didn’t win everywhere, and that’s a good sign

Plenty of the top prizes went to work that has nothing to do with participation, and I was glad to see it. The Film Grand Prix went to Mother London’s gorgeous Super Bowl spots for Claude, pure craft made for an audience to enjoy. Even the running shoe that took Innovation, adidas’ Supernova Adaptive, carried the theme in its own quiet way, shaped over six years with the Down syndrome community. Participation is turning up all over, but it hasn’t swallowed everything, and it doesn’t need to.

What the winners had in common

The more I looked, the more it seemed like the same few moves, run in different ways.

The strongest work didn’t try to build a community from scratch. It found one that already existed and gave it something to do. Lucky Fan Index rode Wisła Kraków’s fandom rather than manufacturing it. 600K Network equipped a movement that was already there and hungry for a job. People show up hardest when taking part says something about who they are.

The spreading was built in, not begged for. The KitKat Heist turned 400,000 “stolen” bars into a public barcode hunt, where passing it along was the whole point, so no one ever had to ask.

And the best campaigns turned the brand’s problem into the audience’s mission. The Pub That Refused to Die never asked anyone to care about Heineken. It handed communities a fight of their own that happened to run on it.

What’s really going on

Step back, and something bigger is happening than “participation is popular.”

In every one of these campaigns, the audience quietly took over a job that marketing used to pay for. They became the production line (325,000 people made the ads), the distribution (the KitKat hunt spread itself), the media (every fan’s luck score an impression no one bought), even the fact-checkers (600,000 people ran the count).

For a century, the budget bought scale. You paid for reach, you paid for production, you paid to be seen. What these campaigns worked out is how to get the audience to supply the very thing the budget used to buy.

The timing isn’t an accident. As AI makes it cheap to produce endless content and fill every channel, the supply of messages is racing toward infinite. What stays scarce is human commitment, a crowd that actually shows up to verify, carry, and defend something. The more that machines can make, the more the genuinely human version is worth. There was something fitting in the Film prize going to a set of ads for an AI this year, while the sales and media prizes went to work built on people.

Now stop and read that last line again.

How?

Every Grand Prix winner was looked at the same way, on four plain questions:

• Did the audience help make or author the work?

• Was people sharing it the real engine of its reach?

• Did it live through a community that already existed?

• Did ordinary people’s actions deliver results far beyond the media behind them?

Add it up, and about a third of the slate clears the bar for genuinely audience-run work. For most of its history, marketing asked a simple question: how many people did we reach? On this year’s evidence, a more interesting one is taking its place. How much of the work did people become?

Before there were brands, there were ceremonies.

Before markets, before media, before any of the infrastructure we’ve built to connect people to things and things to meaning, humans gathered. Around fire. Around food. Around the dead and the newborn and the changing of seasons. They marked transitions with shared acts. They turned strangers into kin through repetition and presence. They brewed fermented drinks and passed them between hands and in doing so said something that had no words yet: we are here, together, and this moment is worth marking.

Ceremony is the oldest participation technology we have. Not a metaphor, a technology. A designed system for creating shared meaning that every culture on earth, without coordination, without contact, without any common ancestor of instruction, arrived at independently. The Japanese tea ceremony and the West African kola nut ritual and the South American mate circle and the Germanic beer hall and the Mexican ofrenda — none of these borrowed from each other. All of them solved the same problem the same way. When you need people to feel that they belong to something larger than themselves, you design a ritual, and you invite them in.

This is not a historical observation. It is a description of what humans are still doing, right now, whether we call it that or not.

Every tailgate is a ceremony. Every Thanksgiving table is a ceremony. Every bar where the same group of friends occupies the same corner every Thursday is a ceremony. The form changes, the function doesn’t. We are wired, at the level of neurochemistry, for the rituals that make participation visible. We release oxytocin, the hormone of belonging, when we are in the presence of shared acts. Our mirror neurons fire when we watch others move in rhythm and pull us toward joining. The drive to gather and mark and celebrate is not a cultural habit. It is a biological instruction.

I’ve been writing about participation as the original human operating system for nearly three years now. The argument I keep returning to is that the most durable brands aren’t the ones with the largest audiences. They’re the ones that have earned the largest groups of active participants. The ones that figured out how to make showing up feel like it means something.

What I haven’t said clearly enough is that this isn’t a new insight brands need to discover. It’s an ancient truth they need to remember.

And then, a year ago, two of my co-founders at The Many decided to make a beer.

Not a craft beer. Not a flavored beer. Something more specific than that. Jens Stoelken — who grew up in Germany where beer is heritage before it is beverage — traveled to Kyoto and encountered a matcha beer at a small brewery and recognized something that most people would have dismissed as a novelty. He saw a signal. The botanical wasn’t a gimmick. It was a cultural ingredient carrying centuries of ritual in its DNA. Matcha comes from the tea ceremony. It was never just a flavor. It was the medium of a gathering practice.

He came home and built Ceremony Botanical Brewing around that instinct, together with Blake Marquis, who named the brand and designed every element of its visual identity and packaging. The name Ceremony wasn’t a marketing decision. It was a recognition of what the thing actually was. The botanicals Jens chose are not trendy ingredients. They are ingredients that cultures selected, over hundreds of years, because they belonged to occasions. Hibiscus moves across three continents under three names — aguas frescas, bissap, karkade — and everywhere it appears, it appears at gatherings. Mate is passed in a gourd between people. That is the entire ritual. Receiving from someone else’s hands and passing it forward.

Every botanical was chosen by a culture, across time, to mark the moments that matter.

And then Jens put them in beer. Which is itself among the oldest ceremonial creations humans have made. The Sumerians wrote hymns to Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing. Egyptians placed beer in tombs as an offering. Germanic tribes sealed bonds by passing it at communal tables. The first beers weren’t made to quench thirst. They were made because humans needed a reason to gather and something to share when they did.

Ceremony inside ceremony. Ritual all the way down.

I want to say one more thing about why this matters right now, in this particular moment.

We are entering an era in which the question of what is human and what is synthetic is going to define our culture. What a person made versus what a machine generated. What it means to actually be in a room together. What counts as a real experience and what is a produced simulation. These questions are already in the air and they will only get louder. People will be looking, without always knowing that’s what they’re doing, for things that are unambiguously human. Things that cannot be machine-generated. Things that require a body, a place, other people, and the irreducible act of showing up.

A botanical chosen by a culture over centuries. Fermented by hands. Opened at an occasion. These things cannot be automated. The ritual that happens when people gather around them cannot be produced. Ceremony didn’t plan to launch a beverage that stands as a counterpoint to artificial intelligence. But it did. Because what it is, at its root, is a celebration of the thing that makes us human: the ancient, biological, universal need to gather around something meaningful and say, together, that this moment counts.

On April 4, at 4:30 in the afternoon, Ceremony Botanical Brewing is hosting a free public event at Hi Sign Brewing in East Austin, 730 Shady Lane. Live music. A local artist. The first pours of the Matcha Botanical Pilsner and the Hibiscus Botanical Ale. An open door.

If you’re in Austin, please come. Not because it’s a product launch. Because it’s an invitation. The participation is the point.

That’s always been the point.