Cannes is asking bigger questions this year. DEPT®’s Secret Garden is where senior leaders gather to work through the answers.
Cannes Lions has long been the industry’s stage for celebrated campaigns. But this year, the festival is pointing at something more consequential: Campaigns are no longer enough.
The introduction of the Creative Brand Lions signals a shift away from individual executions toward a broader approach: how brands stay visible and relevant over time. It’s a recognition that growth is no longer driven by standout moments alone but by whether a brand consistently shows up across a landscape that keeps changing underneath it.
That landscape has changed more in the last two years than in the previous 10. Consumers are no longer following a predictable path from search to website to purchase. They ask AI for answers, discover brands through creators, and let communities shape their decisions before ever engaging directly. By the time a brand enters the picture, much of the decision has already been made.
For most companies, that creates a gap between what they’re optimizing for and how growth actually happens now.
DEPT®’s Secret Garden returns to Cannes this June as a deliberate counterpoint to the festival’s pace and scale. It’s invite-only, tightly curated, and designed for a small group of senior leaders from marketing and technology. The format is built around focused panel discussions and smaller, more informal gatherings, including private dinners, because the conversations worth having rarely happen on a stage.
Participants include executives from Coach, Philips, Mastercard and eBay, and Intuit, alongside partners such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, TikTok, Adobe, Ad Council, and the World Federation of Advertisers. The setting is intentional: leaders comparing notes on what’s working, what isn’t, and how they’re adapting to a customer journey that no longer behaves as it used to.
The discussions are grounded in a shared tension. Over the past two years, investment in AI has largely focused on speed and scale—more content, more automation, more process. While efficiency has improved, growth has not kept pace. Visibility is no longer secured through output alone. It is shaped upstream, across systems and platforms that brands do not fully control, and it’s increasingly influenced by AI agents making decisions before a human is ever involved.
This is what DEPT® describes as growth invention: rethinking how growth is generated when discovery happens across AI systems, creator ecosystems, and community-driven platforms as much as through brand-owned channels. It is not simply a creative challenge but an organizational one.
And it’s the question that will run through every conversation at the Secret Garden this June.
For many attending Cannes this year, that conversation may prove more valuable than any single piece of work on the shortlist.
The challenge ahead isn’t just to create something that stands out. It’s to ensure a brand is present where decisions are actually made.
Registration for DEPT® Secret Garden Vol. 2 is open to a limited number of C-level leaders. Find details and access requests here.
Note: This content was created by DEPT®.