Cannes Lions Festival
Live-streaming the Cannes Lions Festival to a global digital audience,
at broadcast standard
Four years of daily live broadcasts from the Cannes Lions Festival floor, built so a digital ticket felt worth as much as being in the room, for a client whose own team had never worked live.
Live-streaming the Cannes Lions Festival to a global digital audience, at broadcast standard
Snapshot
Client: Ascential (now part of Informa Group), organisers of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity
Sector: Global marketing awards and live events
Delivered: Daily live streams running ten hours and more, across four Festivals (2018, 2019, 2023, 2024)
Standout result: Digital ticket sales grew year on year, and the client's team learned live production from scratch and now runs it in-house
The situation
The brief was more complex than a single celebratory film. Three distinct purposes needed to be served by one production.
The first was internal communications: a film that marked the occasion for the institution itself, documenting the breaking-ground ceremony with the academics and engineers present.
The second was donor engagement: a persuasive, broadcast-quality piece that Imperial College could take to outward-facing events and use to make the case for investment. The narrative needed to point forward, positioning the new School of Public Health as the future of the field and giving potential donors a reason to be part of it.
The third was archive: high-quality material to be stored and drawn on for future productions and campaigns, including additional filming at the nearby Centre for Air Pollution with lead scientist Frank Kelly.
One production. One shoot window. All three purposes had to be served.
The outcome
Digital ticket sales grew year on year, and the senior team at Ascential was consistently happy with the streams and the response from digital viewers. The clearest proof is that they brought us back: four separate Festivals across 2018, 2019, 2023 and 2024.
The outcome we are proudest of has no number attached to it. Ascential's team began with no live experience at all, and we took them through it year by year, until they were confident enough to build their own production unit and run the streams themselves.
What we did, and the decisions behind it
We put broadcast crew and professional kit on the conference floor and ran it as a television production. That environment did something useful on its own: high-calibre presenters arrived to find a proper broadcast setup around them, and performed with the confidence that comes from familiar surroundings.
The bigger call was what to make for the digital viewer. Streaming the seminars and nothing else would have given a remote ticket-holder less than the room. So we built content the room didn't get: presenter-led films that got behind the curtain of the Festival, plus live and as-live interviews with major marketing figures and with the previous night's Cannes Lions winners. We had to judge this carefully. The digital offer needed to be worth paying for, without being so good it gave people a reason to stop turning up in person.
The constant technical risk was the venue network. Festival venues build their connectivity for the attendees in the building rather than for live transmission out of it, so the signal could wobble without warning, and a live broadcast cannot be re-run. We watched the connection strength all day and carried a full redundancy setup we could switch to without the viewer ever seeing a break.
If this is your event
If you run a conference, an awards ceremony, a festival or a summit and you want to open it to people who can't be there, the hard part is rarely pointing cameras. It is making the remote feed feel like television, and keeping it live and reliable when the venue's own network is against you and your team has never worked live before. That was exactly Ascential's starting point, and it is the kind of event we are built for.
Book a discovery call. Tell us about your event and the audience you want to reach, and we will walk you through how the broadcast would work for your programme and where the real technical risks sit.
Book a discovery call
Tell us about your event and the audience you want to reach, and we will walk you through how the broadcast would work for your programme and where the real technical risks sit.