The indie HQ at the Lions.

A soft landing after long journeys. Gates open at 10am. The garden stays open through 3pm — drift in whenever the trip lets you.

Chair massages, 11am–2pm. Two chairs, fifteen-minute massages, first come / first served.

Fragonard. A little bit of the south of France on the senses — perfumes and scents from the Grasse house just up the road.

Food, coffee, and plenty of water. Eat well, hydrate hard. The week is long; the welcome is built to set you up for it.

Step inside an open-book creative audit with OBERLAND and Strong Roots. This session skips the glossy reels to expose the raw, behind-the-scenes reality of how purpose-driven brand building was actually engineered. We dissect the exact internal tension points the team wrestled with — backing climate-conscious messaging with authentic corporate action, scaling purpose to a mass-market consumer who just wants a quick dinner, and where the line sits between authentic environmental purism and commercial reality.

Discover how true brand-agency alliances establish internal measures of integrity, navigate conflicting viewpoints with deep mutual respect, and hold each other accountable to the true ethos of the brand.

We have officially hit peak sports culture. From luxury fashion takeovers on the pitch to hyper-local NIL deals, every brand on earth is trying to draft off the raw passion of sports. But when every brand is sports marketing, we gotta up our moxie or risk a brand muscle spasm. The noise is deafening, and consumers are developing a fierce immunity to superficial sponsorships.

We will analyze the shifting economics of sports media, separate genuine cultural impact from empty impressions, navigate the decentralized communities driving sports internet culture and lay out the exact structural shifts that must be in your strategic consideration set right now as the industry begins its countdown to the LA Olympics in 2028. Come find out how to ensure your brand isn't just paying to be a spectator, but actually shaping the culture of the game.

Let's zoom in on partnerships like Uber Eats + Special US and Ro + Young Hero to talk creative chemistry. We will look at how to structure feedback loops so they optimize ideas rather than dilute them, how to leverage an agency's external agility alongside an in-house team's intimate brand knowledge and how to build a unified creative front that can pull off everything from surreal visual comedy to high-stakes healthcare conversations on a global scale.

Rather than power struggles or a self-fulfilling prophecy for scope contractions, these teams will unpack practical examples of the magic that can happen when the deep, institutional intuition of an in-house team collides with the radical, unvarnished perspective of an independent shop.

Brands using weightlessness isn't new. From OK Go's music video to Red Bull's stratosphere drop, space has historically served as a backdrop for isolated, one-off marketing stunts that buy a fleeting moment of hype. This session explores the pragmatic shift from temporary stunt to a permanent media platform — treating microgravity not just as a backdrop for a 30-second commercial, but as an ongoing, repeatable multimedia performance architecture that brands can structurally sponsor and co-create with over time.

At a moment when space is once again entering the cultural mainstream, driven by advances in commercial spaceflight and milestone missions, this conversation offers a deeply grounded look at the practical realities of bringing brands into an entirely new category. We will interrogate the real-world challenges faced in generating credibility, earning media interest and building commercial momentum around a medium that is still being defined.

Discover how to communicate value when there is no established playbook, what makes an enterprise willing to invest in an emerging platform over a safe activation and how to build long-term cultural relevance on the next frontier.

As massive brand budgets transition from experimental funds into foundational creator-led investments, the pressure to prove performance has never been higher. But in a fragmented landscape, how do you separate fleeting internet hype from genuine commercial conversion?

Join media architects Stella Rising and data authority Nielsen for a fireside chat on the changing math of creator media buying. Armed with fresh market data, this session breaks down the performance metrics and intelligence that often eludes corporate spreadsheets. The panel will dissect the real-world trends shaping the space: one-off activations versus long-term loyalty, the converting power of niche micro-creators versus macro-reach, and the specific content durations triggering specified outcomes.

If you are ready to move past vanity metrics and vet creator partners with real rigor, pull up here.

The best marketing campaigns don't start in a creative brainstorm — they start with a CMO who has total authority inside their organization. Yet Worldwide Partners' landmark global Uncensored CMO research reveals a frustrating reality: marketing leaders are consistently struggling to communicate their needs and flex their strengths within the C-suite.

If indie shops want to protect radical ideas, they must first learn how to empower the person responsible for unlocking capital and creative runway. By understanding the unsaid pressures of the C-suite exposed in the research, agency talent can help CMOs shift from defensive spend-justifiers to offensive business drivers who shape product, strategy and scale. Learn how to build the kind of trust that commands ultimate institutional buy-in.

Consumer routines — monotonous or magic? When Liquid I.V. wanted to own the afternoon energy dip, a standard distributed media flight wouldn't do.

This fast-paced session zips into the synchronization of "I.V. O'Clock" that coordinated a complete 30-screen Times Square billboard glitch with the descent of a robot fleet delivering a Liquid I.V. refresh to spin the 4:00 p.m. slump into a new daily hydration ritual. Come forget your own afternoon fatigue and hear how media and creative struck together for high-impact experiential that will challenge how you think about your next 360 marketing moves. This session doubles as an actual I.V. O'Clock break!

A bag of broken glass will still cut people if it gets a shiny marketing campaign, but so many brands refuse to shake their foundations when something's not working for consumers. True authenticity means being brave enough to look in the mirror and admit when you've lost your way.

Sit down with Burger King and BarkleyOKRP for a raw look at how they engineered a new era of radical, self-aware humility. Let's survey a brand turnaround in motion — the remix of an old jingle for the TikTok algorithm, the firing of their decades-old mascot during the Oscars, and the brand president's personal phone number being broadcast to solicit unfiltered customer complaints.

This high-candor session interrogates the "Reclaim the Flame" strategy, dissecting the commercial tension of admitting you fell off to your audience. Discover the strategic math behind turning public vulnerability into double-digit sales growth, and learn why long-term cultural relevance requires firing your icons to hand the crown entirely to your guests.

Pedigree continues to make or break modern marketers. We spend decades collecting gold-star resumes at legacy empires, learning to love three-year roadmaps, multi-million dollar safety nets and tried-and-true category philosophies. But if you try to steer a high-growth disruptor using a heritage compass, you will drive the entire company straight off a cliff.

This is not a polite panel. It is an open confession about the terrifying reality of running counter to everything you know — in a category where you have limited previous experience — to find the foundational building blocks of branding that are too often overlooked. Learn how creative empowerment stems from healthy skepticism as executives share how they checked their biases at the door, threw out playbooks penned in previous positions and leaned on cohesive media strategy to broker internal confidence and trust boosts with today's consumers.

Every marketer wants more effective creative. The challenge is that the very systems designed to improve work can sometimes sand off the edges that make it memorable in the first place.

As Kraft Heinz continues its focus on creative effectiveness through their ACE framework, this conversation will explore how leading brands build evaluation tools that strengthen creativity rather than constrain it. We'll discuss how to define a scorecard that creates alignment across teams and agencies, establish a shared language for feedback, and ensure great ideas aren't lost in the pursuit of consensus.

The goal isn't just better scoring. It's building a process that consistently produces work that's both creatively exceptional and commercially impactful.

In heavily commoditized categories where consumers are paralyzed by endless choice, many brands mistake cosmetic distinction — a flashy color palette or a loud stunt — for true structural differentiation. If you only solve for getting noticed, you are just adding to the digital noise. Right?!

The panel will debate the sharp strategic divide between being distinct in the feed versus being fundamentally different at the point of purchase for the overwhelmed and overstimulated masses.

When proprietary data mining uncovers emotional whitespace before a single brainstorm begins, it doesn't replace human imagination — it liberates and focuses creative energy. This session challenges skeptics by demonstrating how data empowers craft and artistic freedom rather than restricting it. Precision analytics act as a springboard and guide against conceptual churn and subjective assumptions, allowing creative teams to push boundaries with renewed commercial conviction while giving creativity itself a new level of measurable clarity.

In this forward-looking conversation, FIG lets us under the hood of StoryData, their bespoke tool used to guide strategic and creative excellence across their client roster. The discussion explores how mapping narrative attributes systematically de-risks radical ideas, giving CMOs the foundational air cover required to greenlight unexpected work.

Watch the methodology in action through live analysis of past Cannes winners to predict this year's top honorees, demonstrating how creative intelligence can actively protect and elevate the integrity of the work.

You can't swipe past a towering billboard, close out a brilliant print insert or mute a massive physical activation. While the industry obsesses over the digital feed, let's take a beat to celebrate creativity happening on the streets. Put your phone down for a quick, high-octane news break dedicated entirely to physical execution.

This interactive session is a showcase of pure creative envy. We are turning the microphone over to the audience to highlight the real-world activations, genius print formats and massive out-of-home installations that made you stop in your tracks and wish you had made them. Come share the work that proved ink, paper and concrete are still the ultimate canvases for major human impact. We'll be sourcing viewpoints and stories live.

While the macro conversation fixates on cost-cutting and automation, forward-thinking leaders are using AI to solve a much older problem: how to upskill and support talent at scale.

If mindsets are negative before fingers hit keyboards, you can expect lackluster outcomes. We'll examine the new blueprint for creative career growth, from solo operators wielding enterprise-level impact to teams redefining what it means to collaborate and stretch in their day-to-day duties. Our panelists will break down the exact strategies, mindsets and experiments that are turning AI from a source of existential dread into a massive injection of creative energy.

Modern discoverability is a volatile mix of behavioral feeds, visual search and real-time commerce that dictates how brands get found. This shift changes everything — not just on the screen, but on the streets, directly shaping retail footprints and local market activation.

Google and top-tier brands know that navigating this chaos requires highly evolved media muscle. This session dives into how AI is actually supercharging media buyers rather than replacing them, giving teams the powerful tools needed to decode non-traditional intent and buy media that stays hyper-relevant.

Come for the hard performance data behind the new discovery algorithms, and learn how to equip your org to excel in the digital and IRL spaces made for manifesting.

The explosion of AI in UI/UX and design has unlocked a breathtaking paradox: we can now achieve flawless, high-fidelity execution at a speed never before imagined, yet we risk losing the very thing that makes design matter — human feeling. As creators, where do we draw the line between making as ourselves and letting AI run the machine?

This session dives straight into the friction points of the modern creative process. We'll explore the quiet resistance brewing among both makers and consumers who crave authenticity over automated perfection, and tackle the massive governance challenge of keeping cross-functional teams aligned when the toolset is constantly shifting. Most importantly, we'll look at the responsibility hidden in the in-between: how to scale innovation without losing our creative souls or ignoring the sustainability footprint of the tech itself.

Join a panel of visionary design leaders and builders as they debate how to build the ethical, emotional and practical guardrails needed to guide the next era of imagination.

The greatest threat to indies isn't failing — it's succeeding so much that you slowly morph into the exact bureaucratic, commoditized model you founded your shop to escape. When indies start competing purely on price, copying traditional structures and accepting transactional client behavior, the entire industry loses its edge. So how do we set a higher bar of creative worth?

Roll up your sleeves. In this hands-on workshop, everyone gets a voice in writing a new mandate for modern adland. Together, we'll define the new boundaries of brand collaboration, map how to defend unique creative cultures at scale and establish what must be demanded from clients to ensure independence remains a premium asset, not a discounted alternative.

Everything shared will directly inform a post-festival Blueprint Report — a definitive action plan for indies to reclaim their narratives, raise the bar and protect their worth.

[Second chance at Monday's workshop.]