Work We Loved at Cannes Lions 2026

Credit: Ronke Jane Adelakun | @ronkehartcreative

We've just come back from a week in the south of France, bearing witness to the very best of creative advertising. These are the ones that stopped us in our tracks. Some made us cry, some made us laugh, one made us root for a baby to poop on a Birkin but they all stayed with us. Here's this year's standouts, and the agencies behind it.

Bullet Machine

Client: La Unión Newspaper and Article 19 | Agency: GREY, Mexico City

A family is asleep when gunfire tears through their home. As the mother drags her children to safety, she finds her husband at his laptop, typing. Every keystroke opens new bullet holes in the walls. He tells her "it has to be known" and keeps writing.

This is the most visceral thing we saw at Cannes this year. It's not really about a bullet, it's about the silence that swallows Mexican journalists whole, 176 killed and 31 disappeared since 2000, and how that silence gets engineered by people in power who would rather bury the truth than answer for it. A statistic can't make you hold your breath. but this film does. The fact that a journalist's own paper, Diario La Unión, whose founder was murdered for exactly this kind of reporting, co-authored the work, gives it a weight that no agency pitch deck could manufacture.

Code for the Protection and Inclusion of Black Consumers

Client: L'Oréal Luxe | Agency: BETA COLLECTIVE, São Paulo

L'Oréal Luxe turned a legal loophole into a weapon against retail racism. Brazil has the largest Black population outside Africa, 52.6% of its upper-middle class is Black, and 91% of affluent Black shoppers still face racism in luxury stores. Brazil's consumer protection code, mandatory in every shop for 35 years, says nothing about racial dignity. So L'Oréal Luxe wrote its own code, naming 21 specific racist mechanisms most brands pretend don't exist, and got 18 major retailers including Sephora and Carrefour to adopt it across 3,500+ stores.

We loved this because it doesn't stop at a statement. It's now sitting on the counter of the stores you shop in, training staff, getting audited, and it's already cut racist incidents by nearly 35% while lifting sales of deeper-shade foundation by 47%. This is what it looks like when a brand treats making Black consumers feel safe as core business strategy rather than a nice-to-have campaign line.

Your Way Out

Client: Coinbase | Agency: ISLE OF ANY, New York

A downtrodden video game hero realises he's being controlled and fights his way out, and somewhere in the middle of the fight, the game world dissolves into the real one. Shot almost entirely in-camera with printed 2D costumes and low-poly masks, it aired during the Oscars and made viewers feel like they'd been dropped into an actual game mid-ad break.

The craft is what got us. Building a video game in real life with practical sets and trained-to-move-like-an-NPC performers is a genuinely difficult thing to pull off, and they pulled it off completely. It's also just a smart piece of strategy: using game language to talk about a system controlling you, then having your hero break free of it, works because it never once feels like it's explaining itself to you.

No Project Without Drama

Client: HORNBACH | Agency: HEIMAT\TBWA, Berlin

A woman's bathroom pipe bursts and floods the room, and what follows is an odyssey of a DIY renovation gone completely sideways, done entirely by her own hands. Built with almost no CGI, every collapsing wall, wave and thunderclap was made physically, by real people, scored by a choir that carries the whole thing like a Greek tragedy.

What got us was how much this film makes you feel in under three minutes. The choir builds the panic before you've even registered what's going wrong. You feel her frustration in your own chest, the smashed fingers, the impossible bathtub, the sheer indignity of doing this alone. And then the pride at the end lands just as hard, because you've been dragged through the whole mess to get there with her. That's the real craft here, not the absence of CGI, but a piece of film that compresses every emotion of a DIY disaster into three minutes and makes you live all of it.

Expedition Impossible

Client: Columbia Sportswear | Agency: ADAM&EVE\TBWA, London

Columbia challenged flat earthers to prove the earth is flat and win the entire company. The CEO announced it live on television. A full-page open letter ran in The New York Times. Mobile billboards parked outside Wall Street.

This is comedy built entirely on commitment rather than a punchline. Nobody mocked flat earthers, the brand just met their absolute conviction with its own absolute conviction about product durability, and let the collision do the work. The engagement it pulled from an genuinely fringe online community, on their own turf, on their own platforms, is the part that impressed us most.

Original Forever

Client: adidas | Agency: JOHANNES LEONARDO, New York

adidas Originals reunited Liam and Noel Gallagher on screen for the first time in 16 years, created the official look of the Oasis reunion tour, and put up a giant mural in Manchester as part of it all.

As Mancunians, we're always going to have a soft spot for anything that puts our city front and centre of a global cultural moment, and this did exactly that. But it earned the love beyond hometown pride too. adidas didn't bolt itself onto Oasis's reunion the way a dozen other brands tried to, it behaved like it was actually part of the band, because decades of Gazelles and bucket hats meant it already was. That's the difference between a sponsorship and a partnership people believe in.

Expensive Sh*t

Client: Huggies | Agency: MCCANN NEW YORK

Huggies put 18 freshly-fed babies on top of nearly $500,000 of luxury goods and live streamed the whole thing for an hour, unscripted, on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Live.

This is the kind of brand confidence you can't fake. No safety net, no redo, just a straightforward bet that the product would hold. Parents tuned in rooting for their own baby to be the blowout threat, which tells you everything about how deeply this tapped into a real, universal parenting anxiety. It's funny, it's a genuine risk, and it converted trust into purchase intent in a way a traditional product demo never could.

Protect the Peanut

Client: M&M'S | Agency: DROGA5, part of Accenture Song, São Paulo

When Reddit complaints piled up about a rancid taste in Peanut M&M'S, Mars didn't just apologise. They partnered with the University of Georgia to breed climate-resilient peanut varieties, made the science open-source for the entire industry including competitors, then tracked down the original Redditors to let them taste the fix.

What we loved here is the scale of the ambition behind what looked, on the surface, like a small complaints problem. Turning a candy quality issue into actual agricultural science, then giving that science away for free to competitors and peanut butter brands alike, is the kind of long-view thinking that rarely survives a quarterly review. Complaints dropped 90% and sales grew over $1B, so the patience paid off.

The Swedish Prescription

Client: Visit Sweden | Agency: PRIME WEBER SHANDWICK, Stockholm

Sweden has no Eiffel Tower, no Colosseum, nothing to compete on in a tourism category built around iconic landmarks. So Visit Sweden stopped competing on landmarks entirely and repositioned the country as something doctors could prescribe for stress and burnout, complete with a real downloadable prescription.

This is one of the smartest strategic reframes we saw all week. Instead of trying to manufacture a monument Sweden doesn't have, they turned the absence of one into the whole point, backed it with real doctors and real research, and made travel itself the treatment. The fact that it's genuinely research-backed rather than just a clever headline is what makes it land.

Supernova Adaptive

Client: adidas | Agency: TBWA\CANADA, Toronto

adidas built the first performance running shoe designed with and for the Down syndrome community, after learning that differently shaped feet and dexterity differences had shut millions of people out of competitive sport entirely.

Three years of wear-testing, prototyping and dialogue with the disability community went into this, and you can feel that patience in the result. It's not a lifestyle shoe repackaged as inclusive, it's a genuine performance product built from the ground up around a need nobody else in the category had bothered to solve. 42% of buyers were new to adidas entirely, which says a lot about how much unmet need was sitting there waiting.

Clean My Name

Client: Cif | Agency: DROGA5, part of Accenture Song, São Paulo

In Brazil, having debt is called having a "dirty name." People started tagging Cif, the brand that cleans over 100 surfaces, asking if it could clean their name too. Cif and Serasa, Brazil's biggest credit renegotiation platform, made the joke real, unlocking over R$2 million in debt relief through a special-edition product.

This is a proper collision of two things that had no business going together, cleaning products and debt relief, made to work because Cif took its own audience's joke seriously instead of laughing it off. Over 4 million Brazilians had their credit cleaned through the renegotiation event this triggered, which is a genuinely unexpected place for a cleaning brand to end up making a difference.

Nigrum Corpus

Client: IDOMED & Instituto YDUQS | Agency: ARTPLAN, São Paulo

Instead of a campaign, ARTPLAN and IDOMED built a real medical textbook. Twenty fictional diseases, built from over 680 hours of patient testimony and 485 hours of research, translate racial bias in Brazilian healthcare into a format doctors are actually trained on.

This is the work that has stayed with us the longest. Black patients make up more than half of Brazil's population and are still routinely misdiagnosed, undertreated and dismissed, and this project didn't just point that out, it built the intervention directly into how future doctors learn to diagnose. It's now part of the World Health Organization's collection. Turning an injustice into a clinical case study that medical students actually study is about as direct a route to systemic change as advertising gets.

Three Words

Client: AXA France | Agency: PUBLICIS CONSEIL, Paris

AXA added three words, "and domestic violence," to all 2.5 million of its home insurance contracts in France, giving victims access to emergency relocation the same way a fire or flood would trigger it. No extra cost, no opt-in, retroactive to everyone already covered.

One in five women will experience domestic violence in their lifetime, and 89% of femicides happen at home, yet the moment a victim decides to leave is also the most dangerous point in the entire relationship, because there's often nowhere to go. AXA built the solution into a contract every household in France is legally required to have. 1,576 people were supported in the first year. We loved this because it didn't have to happen. AXA chose to redesign an entire internal operation, over 16 months, to protect people who weren't even asking them to.

I Think of You Dying

Client: Life360 | Agency: ALTO, New York

A mother sings a sweet Mother's Day song to her daughter that spirals into a musical number about every gruesome way she could die the second she leaves the house. Alligators. Wood chippers. Organ harvesting. All of it darkly, ridiculously funny.

Everyone who has ever spiralled while waiting for a text back from a child, family member of friend to say that they're home safely will recognise themselves in this immediately. Parents apparently spend 37 hours a week worrying about their kids, which is basically a second job, and this film has the guts to make that anxiety the joke rather than something to be embarrassed about. It reframed a tracking app as a comfort rather than a Big Brother tool, and it did it by being genuinely, properly funny.

Can I Get a Six Pack Quickly? (A Time and a Place)

Client: Claude, Anthropic | Agency: MOTHER, London

Four darkly comedic films imagined a near-future where ads infiltrate AI conversations at their most vulnerable moments, a therapy session interrupted by a dating app ad, a founder's business plan mined to sell financing. It all built to a Super Bowl LX spot making the case that some places just shouldn't have advertising at all.

This one feels genuinely future-facing given where AI conversations are heading. It's a rare thing to see a tech company spend Super Bowl money not to sell you a feature but to draw a line around what it refuses to do, and to make that line funny rather than preachy. It doubled Claude's share of voice and sent downloads up 305%, so clearly the bet that people care about this landed.

Sources: full case studies for each piece of work are available via LovetheWork.