Participation Had a Very Good Year at Cannes
I look at everything through a participation lens. This year I turned it on the Cannes Grand Prix winners, and what I found was genuinely encouraging.
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?
The Eleven
The eleven Core Participatory Grand Prix winners referenced above, with links to the official Cannes Lions announcements and case coverage. Original Forever won two Grand Prix (Entertainment and Entertainment for Music), which is why it appears twice and the count reaches eleven.
600K Network — Comando Con Venezuela — Grand Prix for Good + Titanium. Cannes Lions · Contagious
The Thousand Sponsors of Muni — Club Deportivo Municipal — Entertainment for Sport. Contagious · AdNews
Could Have Been a Heineken — Heineken — Social & Creator. Contagious · Lions Daily News
Expedition Impossible — Columbia Sportswear — Brand Experience & Activation. Contagious · Lions Daily News
Build Your Own Super Bowl — Uber Eats — Media. Contagious · MediaPost
The KitKat Heist — KitKat / Nestlé — PR. Nestlé · The Drum
Copycats Welcome — Clash Royale — Entertainment for Gaming. Contagious · Ogilvy
Lucky Fan Index — Wisła Kraków FC — Creative Commerce. Contagious · Lions Daily News
The Pub That Refused to Die — Heineken — Creative Strategy. Contagious · Adweek
Original Forever — Adidas × Oasis — Entertainment. Contagious · Variety
Original Forever — Adidas × Oasis — Entertainment for Music. Meio e Mensagem · Variety