Gaming Has Arrived at Cannes. Now Comes the Hard Part.
Two days on the Croisette, one very clear signal — and one very expensive problem still standing in gaming's way.
I have never seen so many gaming people at a beach party.
That was my number one takeaway after two days at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week. Roblox. Electronic Arts. Discord. Microsoft. Twitch. Roku. The gaming industry showed up at Cannes loud, well-funded, and with a very clear agenda.
The message from the gaming side was unambiguous: games are the marquee avenue for brands to reach and engage consumers. Full stop.
The harder question — the one that hung over every panel, every rosé-soaked beach activation, every deck full of engagement stats — is whether brands are actually ready to act on that message. Based on what I saw and heard this week, the answer is: sort of.
The Gaming Industry Came to Cannes With Intent
For years, gaming companies have had to fight for a seat at the table when it comes to advertising conversations. The dominant narrative in brand marketing has been built around social, search, and streaming. Gaming was treated as a niche: a vertical, not a platform.
Cannes 2026 felt like a turning point, at least in terms of positioning. The roster of gaming companies present at a festival historically dominated by agencies, broadcasters, and CPG brands was striking. These companies were not there to collect swag bags. They were there to sell.
Roblox has been making the rounds with brand partners for years now, but the pitch has matured significantly. EA showed up with a more muscular advertising narrative tied to its live service properties on the back of its recently announced advertising deals with Visa, Red Bull, and Peacock. Discord continues to position itself as the connective tissue between gaming communities and brand touchpoints. Microsoft, through its gaming portfolio, is an increasingly serious player in attention-based advertising (we’ll see how much veracity the rumored sales of XBOX has).
The common thread in all of these pitches: gaming commands time, attention, and community at a scale that legacy media channels are struggling to match. The average gamer spends more time in-game per week than they spend watching linear TV. That is a primary media behavior, not a niche.
Brands Are Listening. But There Is a Gap.
Here is what I also observed this week: brand leaders are getting the message, but there is still a significant disconnect between what they think gaming is and what gaming actually is.
When many CMOs and brand strategists picture a gamer, they still picture a teenager in a basement. The reality is that gaming audiences span every demographic. The fastest-growing segment of new gamers in the US over the past five years has been adults over 35. Women now represent close to half of all gamers globally. Gaming is not a subculture. It is culture.
This misunderstanding shapes how brands approach the space. They treat gaming as an awareness play at best, a stunt at worst. They talk about “entering gaming” as if it is an exotic market rather than a core consumer touchpoint. The companies I spoke with in Cannes know this perception problem exists, and they are working hard to correct it. But perception shifts take time.
The Measurement Problem Is Real, and It Is the Actual Blocker
If the perception gap is a long-term challenge, the measurement problem is the immediate one. And it came up repeatedly this week.
Any brand marketer who puts a dollar into Meta gets a confident, granular projection of what their return will be. Click-through rates, conversion data, attribution modeling — all of it packaged into dashboards that make the ROI story feel concrete and defensible.
Put that same dollar into a gaming environment, and the conversation changes completely. The return prediction becomes, as I said on LinkedIn, a dance-off between jazz hands and sticking a finger in the air.
This is not a knock on gaming. It is an honest assessment of where the industry is right now. The measurement infrastructure that advertisers rely on — the standardized metrics, the cross-platform comparability, the attribution frameworks — does not yet exist in gaming at the same level of maturity as it does in digital advertising. To add insult to injury, games keep attempting to demonstrate ROI based on the metrics that favor social media platforms. Individual games can’t match the scale of an Instagram. But games provide something social media will never be able to do - deep, active engagement. The gap persists because gaming tries to play someone else’s game.
And that gap is costing the industry real money. Not because brands do not want to invest in gaming, but because brand and finance leaders need to justify spend to boards and procurement teams. “Gamers love our activation” is not a budget line. An ROI multiple is.
This is the single biggest unlock for gaming as an advertising platform: the moment the industry rallies around a set of standardized, defensible metrics, the advertising dollars will follow at a scale that will surprise everyone.
What the Broader Cannes Conversation Tells Us
Cannes is always useful as a barometer of where the industry’s collective head is at. A few broader themes from the week that directly intersect with the gaming opportunity.
Fragmentation is accelerating, and brands know it. Consumer attention is more distributed than it has ever been. The idea that a brand can reach its entire target audience through one or two dominant channels is increasingly a legacy assumption. This fragmentation creates both a challenge and an opening for gaming — it is one of the few environments where brands can still find deep, sustained attention rather than fractional, scrolling attention. But gaming needs to make the case for itself clearly, or it will just be one more line item in an already overcrowded media plan.
Experiences matter more than messages. The phrase “the best advertising is no advertising” came up in more than one conversation I was part of this week. Consumers, particularly younger ones, have developed extraordinary tolerance for ignoring traditional ad formats. What they do not ignore is an experience that earns their time. Gaming, by definition, is an experience-first medium. That should be a structural advantage. Brands that understand this will invest in game-native experiences rather than forcing display ad logic into interactive environments.
The bot problem is becoming undeniable. This month marked the first time in internet history that more bots are online than humans. For brand marketers who are already skeptical about digital attribution, this is a significant concern. Gaming environments offer something increasingly rare: verified human attention. Players are actively engaged, not passively scrolling while bots inflate impression counts.
What This Means for Brand Leaders
If you are a CMO, VP of Brand, or marketing strategy leader, here is the practical frame I would take from Cannes this week.
Gaming is not a test-and-learn sandbox anymore. The scale is real. The audience is real. The attention is real. The question is not whether to invest in gaming, but how to build the internal capability to evaluate and execute on that investment thoughtfully.
Push your gaming partners on measurement. Ask them the hard questions about what success looks like, how it is tracked, and how it compares to your existing channel performance. The good partners will have answers. The ones who cannot get specific are not ready to steward your investment.
Think experiences before ads. The brands I saw generating genuine excitement at Cannes were not the ones talking about banner placements inside games. They were the ones who had built something worth playing, worth sharing, worth talking about.
And pay attention to the consolidation happening in this space. The platforms, publishers, and tech companies showing up at festivals like Cannes are not just making awareness plays. They are building the infrastructure that will define how brands access gaming audiences for the next decade. Getting into those conversations now, before the standards are set, is a significant competitive advantage.
Gaming’s Cannes moment has arrived. The industry showed up, made the pitch, and planted the flag. The brands that move from listening to acting in the next twelve months will be the ones writing the case studies everyone else will be studying in 2027. And I’m willing to bet we’ll see a lot more beachfront property occupied by gaming heavyweights next year.
What do you think? Are your teams starting to take gaming seriously as a media channel, or does the measurement gap still make it a hard sell internally? Let me know in the comments.
Technically Entertaining covers the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment strategy for business leaders. If this was useful, share it with someone who needs to hear it.