Paul Coxhill on Running Cannes Lions, the Return of Brand, and AI’s Creative Limits

There’s a moment every June when the French Riviera transforms into a festival that draws 20,000+ people across marketing and media. Restaurants get rebranded. Beaches become branded activations. Yachts line up in the harbor hosting cocktail hours for ad tech firms.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, over 20,000 people converge on the city of Cannes for a festival that started 73 years ago as an advertising awards show spun out of the Cannes Film Festival.

Paul Coxhill is the person who has to make sure it all actually works. As COO of LIONS, Coxhill oversees not just Cannes Lions but a portfolio of brands including the Effie Awards, WARC, and Contagious—spanning events, advisory, learning, and digital subscriptions. But Cannes Lions is the biggest part of the LIONS business and pulling it off each year is a masterclass in stakeholder management at scale.

The project management behind the magic

How does an event this massive actually get organized? Talented people, detailed plans, and relationships cultivated year-round.

LIONS maintains a permanent team in Cannes that works continuously with the mayor’s office, local government, security forces, hotels, taxi companies, and even the airport. “When you're doing something as big as this, it's a government-level conversation,” says Coxhill.

The annual cycle follows a disciplined rhythm. KPIs are set each year based on lessons from the previous edition. A thorough post-event review kicks off the Monday after the festival closes, running through July and August. By September, the team is committing to what’s in and what’s out for the following year, building project charters and resourcing plans accordingly.

Not everything happening in Cannes during festival week is under LIONS’ direct control. Brands independently rent beach spaces and restaurants; yacht parties pop up.

Coxhill’s team manages this through an affiliate partner model: coordinating content schedules so nothing clashes, applying safety and quality standards, and ensuring delegates get a cohesive experience even across spaces LIONS doesn't own. They’ve even introduced “care points” around the city so that attendees who need support can find it, whether or not they’re inside the official festival perimeter.

Brand is back, and AI is the reason

For years, the industry trend has tilted heavily toward performance marketing. But Coxhill pointed to an emerging irony: AI-driven discovery is actually making classic brand marketing more important.

When someone asks an LLM to recommend a product in a category, that model pulls from sources like Reddit threads, Wikipedia entries, and review sites to decide which brands make the list. Having a clear value proposition, strong brand recognition, and consistent quality content is what gets you surfaced.

“The role of classic brand marketing, having a clear value proposition, being really closely linked to what your customers are after, producing great content that reinforces that proposition, those are all things that help GEO discovery and put your brand on the map,” says Coxhill.

Measuring creativity's business impact

A recent study with Interbrand analyzed 50 brands that had entered Cannes Lions and looked at the impact of winning a Lion on share price and EBIT. Coxhill said the study found an average uplift of 2.7% on EBIT, underscoring the link between creativity and measurable business performance. But he was quick to emphasize that sustained creative success is a system.

Coxhill pointed to AB InBev as a great example. The brewing giant has built a central marketing capabilities team, developed an internal creative evaluation ladder, and trained its entire global organization on it.

They've won Creative Company of the Year three times and took home the inaugural Creative Brand Lion this year. For Coxhill, that is where creativity and project management connect. A single creative breakthrough can happen by chance, but repeatable creative impact requires structure: clear KPIs, strong systems, disciplined execution, and teams set up to deliver outcomes over time.

AI's creative ceiling

On AI’s role in creativity, Coxhill referenced a talk by Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, who partnered with film studio A24 to create movies, blending AI and human creativity. Even one of the world’s leading AI pioneers insists that the human creative component remains critical.

“At this stage, I think we have not see AI quite yet get to the capability of creating original ideas.” Coxhill adds that even if AI reaches that point “you still need taste.”

His concern is that if AI becomes omnipresent without human guardrails, everyone ends up producing the same outputs. Coxhill argues that the differentiator is still human judgment, discernment, and the willingness to steer the machine somewhere unexpected.

His advice to knowledge workers worried about disruption? Lean in, not out. Use the tools. Embrace entrepreneurialism. And to businesses feeling the pressure: stay true to your mission.

Put next to each other, the themes aren’t really separate. Running Cannes Lions, getting a brand noticed by an AI model, and building a culture that wins creative awards year after year are all the same problem wearing different clothes: none of them survive on talent or luck alone. They need a repeatable system behind them, the kind of structure PMI trains people to build.

Tags: Project Management | Leadership | Innovation | Artificial Intelligence | Strategy

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