Cannes Lions 2026 just opened. This year's festival, running June 22 to 26, is the first since the awards body stripped twelve Lions from a single agency after discovering that AI-generated content had been used to simulate real-world events and fake campaign outcomes in a case study. One Grand Prix, three golds, four silvers, three bronzes — all gone. The agency's chief creative officer resigned. Cannes introduced mandatory AI disclosure rules and announced AI-detection processes for future entries. And the industry responded, as it tends to, with a mixture of outrage, hand-wringing, and the quiet sense that everyone knew this was happening and nobody had quite got around to doing anything about it.

The fraud itself is fairly simple to describe. A case study film is an agency's evidence that a campaign did what it claims to have done. It's the artefact that goes to the judges, that wins or loses the award, and then gets shared across the industry as proof of effectiveness. If the case study fabricates its own evidence using AI (faking the coverage, the results, or the real-world impact) then what's being awarded isn't a campaign. It's a fiction. The award, in that case, isn't for doing good work. It's for producing a convincing enough story about having done good work.

The uncomfortable truth that the industry is dancing around is that the incentive structure that produced this fraud has been in place for decades. A Cannes Lion changes an agency's commercial trajectory. It attracts clients, justifies fees, elevates careers. The award is worth more than the work it was supposed to celebrate. When the prize is so valuable and the verification is so weak, no-one needs AI to create the conditions for fraud — but AI does make the fabrication cheaper, faster and harder to detect. The technology industrialised the problem rather than just create it.

I've been in enough rooms where award entries were being prepared to know that the gap between what a campaign achieved and how it's described in a case study has always been….malleable. Results get selected for their persuasiveness. Numbers are chosen carefully. The narrative is drafted and crafted. None of that is necessarily dishonest, as good communication involves presenting evidence in its most compelling form, but there's a spectrum; and AI has made it much easier to slide toward the ill end of it without anyone noticing until the nice sparkly Lion figurines are already on the shelf.

What Cannes has now introduced in terms of mandatory AI disclosure, detection tools, a code of conduct requiring signatories to confirm their entries are factually accurate — is the right response. But it's a response to a symptom rather than the cause. The underlying question is what the awards are actually for. If they're for celebrating real creative work that produced real results for real clients, then the verification infrastructure needs to match that ambition. However if they're for celebrating the craft of persuasion (including and perhaps specifically aimed at the persuasion of awards judges), then perhaps what happened was just someone playing the game with better tools.

There's a version of this that's straightforwardly about integrity, and I think that version is the right one.

The industry benefits from awards that mean something, and awards mean something only when they're trusted. Once the possibility of fabrication is on the table, then the value of a Lion becomes contingent on whether the judges happened to catch it, which isn't a foundation anyone wants to build a career on.

But there's also a version of this that's a genuine opportunity.

The moment Cannes starts rigorously verifying that case studies reflect reality is the moment it becomes a much more valuable signal about what actually works in marketing. Not what can be made to look like it works in a slickly edited four-minute film with an energising soundtrack.

What actually, verifiably works.

Now that would be worth flying to the South of France for.