Cannes Lions has overhauled its awards for the AI era, and the two biggest changes pull in the same direction: reward the substance behind creative work, and punish anyone who hides how it was made. The festival, which runs from 22 to 26 June, announced a new Creative Brand Lion that judges the systems and capabilities inside a brand rather than a single campaign, alongside a tightened integrity regime that makes disclosing AI use a condition of entering.

As the most closely watched awards in the industry, Cannes sets norms well beyond the companies that enter. For marketers, the message in this year’s rule changes is twofold: repeatable creative capability is now the thing worth prizing, and AI belongs in the open, credited and crafted, not slipped in unannounced.

An award for capability, not campaigns

The Creative Brand Lion, announced in November and sitting within a new Brand Track, rewards something awards have traditionally ignored: the cultures, systems and capabilities that let a brand produce strong work consistently, rather than the single standout execution. It prioritises long-term impact and measurable business outcomes over short-term campaign performance.

LIONS chief executive Simon Cook framed the shift as a change of question — after decades of rewarding outputs, the festival is now asking what inputs make breakthrough ideas possible, and spotlighting the brands building the capabilities that let “commercial creativity thrive”. For a B2B marketing team, that is a useful piece of validation. The unglamorous work of building an in-house creative engine — how teams collaborate, how fast feedback moves, how measurement ties back to the business — is exactly what the industry’s flagship award has decided to start celebrating, at a moment when tighter budgets make the case for one-off campaign spending harder to win.

AI must now be disclosed, not hidden

The integrity changes are a direct response to last year’s festival, where several winners had awards withdrawn after undisclosed use of AI came to light. For 2026, entrants face a mandatory code of conduct, compulsory disclosure of AI use, content-detection tools to flag manipulation, and a review panel of AI and ethics experts. Companies that knowingly submit false or misleading work can be banned for up to three years, and Cannes has given itself the authority to withdraw an award at any stage, including after it has been handed over.

The festival is not turning against AI — quite the opposite. It is also introducing AI Craft subcategories across its craft-led Lions, recognising work where human creativity and AI produce something neither could alone, with entries required to show that the core idea or its execution would not have been possible without the technology. Taken together, the two moves draw a clear line: AI used openly and in service of the idea is something to celebrate; AI hidden to pass machine work off as something else is something to punish.

What it signals for B2B marketers

Few B2B teams will enter Cannes, but the norms it sets tend to travel. The Creative Brand Lion is a signal to stop measuring a marketing function only by its last campaign and start valuing the capability that produces good work repeatably — a framing that suits B2B, where brand is built over long cycles rather than in single bursts. It is permission, in effect, to invest in the system rather than chase the stunt.

The disclosure regime carries an equally portable lesson. As AI moves deeper into creative production, the brands that will hold trust are the ones open about where they used it and able to show the human craft and judgment around it. The festival is codifying, for its own entrants, a standard that audiences and clients will increasingly expect of everyone: use AI, say so, and make sure a person stands behind the result.

The festival opens on 22 June. The open questions it leaves are practical ones — whether detection tools can keep pace with AI that is getting harder to spot, and whether something as diffuse as a brand’s creative capability can really be judged on a stage built for campaigns — but the direction it has set for the industry is already clear.