The UnCannes

An Imagined Alternative

Somewhere along the way, the industry’s biggest celebration stopped being about the work and started being about the people selling tools to the people who make it. The yachts got bigger. The awards got stranger. And the actual business of running an agency, winning clients, paying people, surviving the platforms, and keeping anyone sane became the one thing nobody scheduled a session about.

So this is the other one.

The UnCannes is free, it’s online, and it takes no money from the platforms or the holding companies, because you can’t honestly talk about the people drowning you while they’re catering the lunch. There are no Lions. Nobody’s here to win anything. There’s no flight to book and no badge to expense, just a link, a program of sessions about what’s genuinely happening to this business, and a room full of people willing to say the true thing out loud.

1. What AI Cannot Do
Building the human skills, judgment, conviction, and point of view that become an agency’s real differentiators.

2. The Ad Plans of the AI Giants
What Meta, Google, and OpenAI are building, on what timeline, and where it leaves the agency model.

3. Stories of Pitch Ghosting
Practitioners share firsthand accounts of the modern pitch process and what, if anything, can replace it.

4. How We Got Clients to Pay for Taste
A working session on pricing judgment and creative direction as a line item rather than a giveaway.

5. We Turned Our Creative Department into a Gallery of Personal Work and Won Big
How investing in our people’s personal voice became our strongest new-business asset.

6. How Banning Weekend Work Made Us Better
One agency’s case study on protecting team wellbeing and the effect it had on output.

7. The REAL Truths About Influencer Marketing
An honest look at engagement, authenticity, and what brands are actually paying for.

8. How AI Ruined Our Strategy Department
What automation did to the strategist’s role, and which parts of the job remain defensible.

9. Winning NYC Accounts from a Berlin Bedroom
How a small remote team competes for and wins major international business.

10. Culture: The Word We All Use and None of Us Can Define
A frank conversation about what “culture” actually means in a brief, and whether the term still holds.

11. We Built a Global Agency with 10 People
The lean operating model behind a small studio is punching well above its headcount.

12. How Freelancers Became Our Agency’s Superpower
Building a flexible bench instead of a payroll, and running a serious shop without the overhead.

13. What’s Really Happening to the Holding Companies
Candid perspectives from people who used to work inside them on where the model goes from here.

14. We Decoupled and Relocated Our Strategy Department
How an agency moved strategy into a former neighborhood store to get closer to real people.

15. What We Can Learn from Architects
Architecture firms face many of the same pressures we do; we sit down with a few to compare notes.

16. What the Demise of UX Tells Us About the Future of Strategy
A look at how one discipline got absorbed into the workflow, and what it predicts for the next.

17. Go Brave or Go Home
Creative risk has stopped being a luxury and has become the only defensible position. Lessons from people who take risks for a living.

18. How Cultural Immersion Led to New Inspirations
One week a month, a core team decamps to a new city, meets the people shaping its culture, and returns to share what they found.

19. Personal Creativity
What do you make when you’re not making ads, and what work do you do for yourself, to give back to the work you do for clients