The Contagious team returns from Cannes Lions 2026 to deliver our sunburnt take on the awards, the talks and what it all means for the industry.

Hot from the Croisette, we find out whether How Brands Grow is a brutally boring read, why the UN needs marketers more than ever, how the industry's best work is turning problems into opportunities, and how creative treasure can be found everywhere - from a dot-matrix printer receipt to a 12-tonne chocolate heist.

Along the way we delve into:

1. How to navigate the AI bifurcation without losing your humanity
2. The psychology behind humorous responsibility
3. Why lived human experience is becoming marketing's biggest moat
4. How the biggest award winners turned problems into creative opportunities
5. Why the marketing funnel is giving way to communities, conversations and participation
6. How to tell if your CEO has no imagination

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.

Budgets will be wasted. Brands will be ruthlessly filtered out. The real game starts after full time.

James Kirkham, founder of Iconic and ex-head of Copa90, joins Contagious to unpack why the 2026 World Cup is fundamentally different to previous tournaments - and what brands need to do about it.

This episode explores the new playbook for World Cup marketing, where winning isn’t about owning the biggest moment, but creating the conversations, emotions and cultural ripples that keep spreading long after the final whistle. .

We’ll explain:

• Why the best metric right now is goosebumps
• The reason creators are better value than athletes
• How Gen Z are different to previous generations of football fans
• Why group chats are the new stadiums
• The power of conversations that happen after the game
• Why the Village People were the canary in the cultural coalmine

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.

In this episode, Contagious investigates what happens when content supply completely outstrips human attention, and how brands can win in a world dominated by infinite scroll, clip farms, AI slop and algorithmic overload.

Along the way, we’ll explore why Universe 25’s infamous rodent utopia experiments feel eerily relevant to modern media, why today’s attention panic may simply be history repeating itself, and why the real problem might not be shrinking attention spans but a zero tolerance reaction to boring content.

We’ll explain:

• How brands cut through in a world of infinite noise
• The rise of workslop and clip-farm culture
• Why repetition, memes and cultural ad stock drive effectiveness
• How TV became a mood light for distracted audiences
• The difference between delivered abundance and accessible abundance
• Why choice paralysis is becoming a major media problem
• Why craftsmanship and human creativity still break through online
• How a TikTok witch helped create cultural impact for an underwear brand

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.