Cannes Lions 2026: New Creative and Creator Tools for Every Marketer to Cross the AI Threshold

Advertisement

AI is a threshold technology: you try the products, they don't quite meet the bar — until, suddenly, they do. When capability crosses into everyday usefulness, it feels sudden, even transformative, even though it's been building all along.

AI has been crossing thresholds across our ads system for years: in ranking, in delivery, and in how we model outcomes. And marketers and agencies are seeing the results. A new analysis of more than 1 million ad campaigns found that, on average, every dollar an advertiser spends on Meta generates $4.13 in revenue, up 25% since 2022.1

Now, AI is crossing the threshold for ads creative, allowing marketers to generate more creative faster and freeing up creatives to focus on storytelling and designing for maximum impact.

At Cannes Lions 2026, we're announcing new updates to help every marketer seize this opportunity: an end-to-end creative solution that makes AI-enabled ad creation accessible to every marketer, unified creator partnership tools that turn authentic content into high-performing ads, and AI-enabled experiences that connect directly with your customers.

New AI Tools To Reach Customers With Creative Velocity

Today, we’re announcing a new end-to-end creative solution with brand-aware creative generation tools so every marketer can produce better ads, faster.

A dedicated space for navigating creative strategy and optimization: Learn what ads are performing, generate new ones based on what works for your business, and test them — so your next creative move is backed by real performance, not guesswork. As a shared space for creative and media teams, this solution translates campaign insights into your next creative decisions in real time, closing the loop between what's performing and what comes next. We’re currently testing these new capabilities with plans to roll out more broadly in the coming months.

Brand memory: Great ad creative starts with knowing what your brand stands for. This new creative solution will learn about a brand's identity and tone from its existing ads and bring these insights to the creative generation capabilities within the tool. Marketers can refine their brand memory by defining what their brand is, so that they can scale creative production without sacrificing consistency.

Agency-ready from the start: Agencies are critical partners who need AI that fits how they already work, not another standalone tool. That's why we're building with agency integrations from day one. To start, we're collaborating with WPP to bring this experience into WPP Open, so agencies can diagnose, generate, and scale high-performing creative for their clients without changing their process.

We’re also introducing new generative AI updates to features that marketers are already using in Ads Manager, including:

• Enhanced Text Generation Tools: We’re expanding text generation in Ads Manager beyond headlines and primary text to include text that appears directly in image creative. Using past ad performance, and our understanding of your business, the new experience helps marketers explore more message angles and create more diverse ad variations.
• Language Translations: Marketers designing for global customers need ad creatives that work across markets too. To help them reach their customers in more languages we’re adding Portuguese, French, German, Italian and Indonesian to text on media, and adding Portuguese, Hindi, Arabic, German, French, Chinese, Italian, Indonesian, Polish, Dutch and Turkish to video voiceover.
• Creative Approval Flow: We are also testing a built-in creative approval workflow, to enable advertisers to get feedback and alignment on creative modifications in a more streamlined, integrated way.
• From Creator Partnerships to Paid Performance, All in One Place: Better creative is only part of the equation. Delivering the right ad to the right person at the right time also depends upon which content performs best, and increasingly, that’s from the people customers already trust: creators.

• Unifying Surfaces into a Central Creator Marketing Hub: We are bringing our two creator marketing surfaces – Creator Marketplace and Partnership Ads Hub – together into a single surface called ‘Meta Creator Marketing Hub’ launching later this year. This new, single destination will make it easier for marketers to move from discovering creators to finding content related to their brand and activating it as a partnership ad.

Bringing Facebook creators to Creator Marketplace: With more than 5 million Instagram creators already discoverable in creator marketplace, we’re now expanding the tool to include Facebook creators. For the first time, businesses can discover and connect with creators across both Instagram and Facebook in a single destination, making it easier to find partners who are predicted to drive strong results in partnership ad campaigns across Meta’s platform.

• Enhancing Creator Content Discovery in Partnership Ads Hub: We're also making it easier for businesses to find new creator content that’s ready to become an ad:
• We're beginning to surface content from creators a business doesn't already work with, including product-tagged and user-generated posts.

To bring creators and shopping opportunities closer together, we're also adding the ability to filter by content that has product tags.

With new pre-permissioned content from creators who've opted in to have their content run as an ad, the path to partnership ad performance just got shorter.

Finally, new paid performance insights in the hub let advertisers see how creator-driven ads stack up, right where they discovered the content.

As these creator partnerships generate conversations with customers, Business AI makes sure those interactions lead somewhere.

AI That Connects To Your Customers

Beyond better tools for advertisers and agencies, AI is also giving marketers business agents that get smarter over time while providing sales recommendations and support for the 3.5 billion people already using our apps.

At Conversations, we introduced the Meta Business Agent Platform, allowing enterprises to plug in their existing systems to build, customize, and deploy agents at scale. It’s AI that turns every customer message into a conversion opportunity, all within the messaging apps used by billions of customers worldwide.

More than a million businesses are already using Meta Business Agent to show up for every customer, in every moment

Kutay Konakci, Head of Growth, Trendyol Group: “We had millions of customers already on WhatsApp, but we were only using it as a notification channel. With Meta Business Agent, we've transformed that touchpoint into a personalized shopping experience – from a purchase confirmation to a curated 'complete the look' conversation that builds baskets in real time. In our first week live in Saudi Arabia, we saw over 15,000 AI-powered shopping conversations. That's not incremental – that's a new commerce channel.”

Writing the next chapter of AI and advertising together

Every creative insight trains the next campaign. Every creator partnership fuels the next ad. And every AI conversation sharpens the next recommendation.

With these new updates, we’re accelerating our ecosystem and giving marketers, advertisers, and agencies a platform that compounds performance. Join us at Meta Beach at Cannes to learn more.

1 Results from a large-scale study run on Meta's platforms from April 13 to 20, 2026, with over one million ad campaigns, following the testing framework developed by academics at the University of California at Berkeley and published with the National Bureau of Economic Research in Tadelis et al., 2023