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Thought Leaders in association withLBB Events
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Cannes 2026: When Brands Stop Interrupting Fandom and Start Earning a Role Inside It
10/07/2026
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10/07/2026
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Roscoe Williamson, global strategy director at MassiveMusic, on why this year’s standout work showed that culture isn’t something brands create, it’s something they earn the right to join
Something was very hard to miss at this year’s Cannes Lions
Sport is having a moment in brand culture
The launch of LIONS Sport gave it a more official place in the festival conversation. Sport Beach felt bigger and more established than ever. Athletes seemed to be everywhere, not just wheeled out as famous faces, but increasingly positioned as creators, founders, media platforms and cultural businesses in their own right
And with the World Cup now giving us one of the biggest real-time cultural platforms on the planet, it feels like a good time to ask what brands should actually be learning from all of this
Quite simply, the most interesting sports and fandom work at Cannes did not feel like traditional sponsorship
It was not brands simply borrowing athletes, clubs and reach in the hope that some of the magic rubbed off. No, the better work understood something more useful: fans already have their own rituals, superstitions, in-jokes, symbols and emotional logic. Honour and integrate these, and you have a much better chance of being welcomed in
Essentially, the brand’s job is not to interrupt that culture. It is to find a useful role inside it
That feels like one of the bigger creative lessons from this year’s work, and it travels well beyond sport
For anyone working in brand, entertainment, music, sound or culture, sport is a very useful mirror. It shows us what happens when people do not just consume a brand world, but help create and protect it
A few pieces of work from Cannes brought that acutely into focus
‘Lucky Fan Index’ for Wisła Kraków was one of the smartest examples. The club used attendance data and match statistics to give fans a personalised “luck score”, based on the very real, very ridiculous and very human belief that your presence might somehow influence the result
That could have become a cold CRM mechanic. A classic “we used data to drive engagement” case film, complete with blue interface shots and dramatic typing
Instead, it became mythology of sorts. The club used data to deepen something fans already half-believed. It made superstition feel real and official, and gave emotional proof to the idea that “when I’m there, something changes.”
That is a much richer use of data: using technology to make fandom feel more personal, more irrational even, and definitely more alive
A lot of modern marketing makes culture more measurable, but less magical. Lucky Fan Index suggests a better direction: measurement that adds to the myth, rather than draining it
Another brilliant case was ‘The Thousand Sponsors of Muni’. After Club Deportivo Municipal lost its main sponsor, the idea turned the club shirt into space for 1,000 local micro-sponsors, many of them fan-owned businesses
A nod to the Million Dollar Homepage, now well and truly part of internet history, what I love about this is how simply it reframes sponsorship
Less one big brand buying visibility. More lots of smaller, local business supporters helping the club exist. The shirt becomes less of a media surface and more of a community tapestry
This feels closer to how fandom actually works. Messy, local, proud, generous, often chaotic. Always held together by people who care far more than is reasonable
Again, the lesson travels well beyond football
We often talk about fandom as an audience. But the better question is: how can fans help carry the culture? What would it look like if fans were not just viewers, buyers, streamers or attendees, but visible contributors to the thing itself?
Then there is ‘UVA, UVA, bombón’ from de la Cruz Ogilvy and Uva App
This was not a sports campaign in the traditional sense, but it is absolutely a fandom and culture case. It took the Super Bowl halftime show, Bad Bunny, a lyric in Tití Me Preguntó and the fact that “uva” was already sitting there in culture, waiting to be used
Ahead of the game, Uva App told people that if Bad Bunny performed the track and sang the “Uva Uva Bombón” lyric, it would unlock a live in-app offer. When he opened with the song, the promotion triggered in real time: selected products dropped to $1 for the duration of the performance or until they sold out. They sold out before the halftime show had even finished
That is what makes it interesting
It was a delivery app turning a passive viewing moment into live participation. It was also a local Puerto Rican brand finding a way into one of the biggest global entertainment moments on the planet without pretending to be bigger than it was
And from a sound and culture perspective, it reminds us that not every sonic asset is a piece of music. Sometimes it is a phrase. A lyric. A meme. A line people repeat because it has rhythm, timing and social energy
The strongest part of the case is its agility. It did not try to manufacture a moment. It spotted one, understood the local context and moved before the energy disappeared.For brands, that is a serious skill. Knowing when to move. Knowing when to leave it alone. Knowing when a cultural moment has enough energy to be useful, but not so much that the brand flattens it by touching it
That is harder than it sounds. Plenty of brands arrive at culture like someone turning up to a house party with a ring light and a campaign hashtag. UVA felt more like someone already in the room, hearing the joke at the same time as everyone else and knowing exactly what to do with it
I’d also put ‘Original Forever’ by Adidas and Oasis, created by Johannes Leonardo New York, into this conversation. It is not a sports case exactly, but it sits right in the overlap between music, fashion, fandom and British cultural memory
What made it work was not simply that Adidas partnered with a famous band. It worked because Adidas and Oasis already belonged together in people’s heads. The shoes, the terraces, the parkas, the reunion, the swagger
It felt less like a partnership being announced and more like a memory being reactivated.That is a strong model for cultural partnerships. Too many brands still approach music, sport or entertainment as something to rent: a track, an artist, an athlete, a fanbase, a moment. The stronger question is: where does the brand already have permission to be? What scenes, rituals or memories does it have a credible relationship with?
If that permission is not there, people can feel it. Usually immediately
And finally, ‘Coquí Alarmed’ connects neatly to all of this. Hyundai and BBDO Puerto Rico replaced a standard rental car lock sound with the call of the coquí, the tiny frog whose voice is deeply woven into Puerto Rican identity
It is not a sport, but the lesson is the same
The most powerful sound in the system did not belong to the brand. It belonged to the culture. The brand’s role was to respectfully elevate it and give it a new job to do
That question feels increasingly important:
What sound, phrase, ritual or behaviour already belongs to people?
And how can a brand elevate it rather than replace it?
That is where sport, music and culture overlap most clearly. They are full of things people protect because they mean something. Chants. Songs. Nicknames. Walk-out tracks. Local phrases. Club rituals. Fan superstitions. Artist lore. Shared jokes. Sounds and symbols that seem small from the outside, but carry huge emotional weight from the inside
With the World Cup 2026 now in full swing, this feels especially relevant. These tournaments are not just media events. They are huge temporary cultures, experienced through creators, watchalongs, fan journeys, memes, rituals, songs and collective emotion
For brands, the temptation is always to ask: how do we get seen here?
The better question is: what role can we play that fans might actually welcome and believe is authentic?
The best work from Cannes this year seemed to understand that
It did not treat fandom as a media buy. It treated it as the culture itself
For brands, there is enormous value in sport, music and entertainment culture, but only if they approach it with enough respect to understand what is already there. The best ideas do not invent fandom from scratch. They give existing fandom a new role
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