This June, Sparks heads to the Côte d’Azur for the Cannes International Festival of Creativity.
Across the week, we’re partnering with The Female Quotient, Vogue Business, The Wall Street Journal, and ADWEEK to host four of the festival’s defining programs: Opening night cocktails at FQ Beach, a private breakfast with Vogue Business, a presenting sponsorship at Journal House, and an exclusive excursion with ADWEEK’s invitation-only Marketing Vanguard community.
Alongside the four flagship programs, XP Land is hosting an exclusive on-the-ground tour of Cannes for experiential leaders. And for those staying stateside, we’re bringing the conversation to New York in partnership with TruNorth.
Each moment is built around the same conviction: in an era of infinite content, the most important conversations still happen in person. It’s the work we do every day, designing the rooms where the right conversations happen, and the connection that follows.
The Female Quotient: Conversations & Cocktails at FQ Beach
June 22, 2026 · Register for Access
Sparks co-hosts The Power of Experiential Connection, a Conversation & Cocktails reception at FQ Beach at Hôtel Martinez. The Female Quotient’s Monday evening event welcomes senior marketing leaders, women in leadership, and the broader FQ community — opening with a curated panel moderated by Imani Ellis, CEO & Founder of CULTURECON, and featuring:
Sheyna Bruckner, SVP Marketing, Sparks
Judy Lee, Sr. Managing Director, House of Creative, Pinterest
Juliet Scott-Croxford, President Americas, Brompton Bikes
Patricia Corsi, Chief Growth Officer, Kimberly Clark; Founder, Good Latinas for Good
In a world optimized for clicks, experiences create something more enduring: belonging. Experiential marketing has become one of the most powerful ways to turn audiences into advocates, brands into communities, and moments into movements. As its influence grows, so does the opportunity to rethink how impact is measured.
FQ Beach is the newest addition to The Female Quotient’s Cannes presence — an expansion of the FQ Lounge, a Croisette destination for over a decade. The new venue across from Hôtel Martinez gives the FQ community more space and more programming for the conversations driving the industry forward.
For Sparks, co-hosting Conversation & Cocktails is a statement about the community we design experiences for: senior leaders who set the tone for the industry and the conversations that follow. Monday evening is where that week begins.
Journal House: Capturing Collective Intelligence in Real Time
June 22–25, 2026 · Register for Access
Sparks joins The Wall Street Journal as a presenting sponsor of Journal House, with a place on the programming alongside WSJ editors and industry leaders, hosting the in-house coffee bar, and producing Collective Intelligence, a live installation that reveals each guest’s leadership archetype and how it compares to the room.
Now in its sixth year on the Croisette, Journal House has become one of the most-revered destinations of the festival. The 2026 program convenes brand and marketing leaders, creatives, and senior executives around the question shaping the industry’s next chapter: how the speed and scale of AI can be harnessed without compromising the credibility and human judgment that brands are built on.
Our contribution to that conversation takes three forms. We’re on the programming alongside WSJ editors and industry leaders — including a session on June 22 titled ‘More Than Memories: Measuring the Impact of Experiential Engagement,’ moderated by Raakhee Mirchandani from The Trust, WSJ, and featuring:
Melissa Levy, President, Sparks
Jimmy Knowles, Global Head of Experiential Marketing, Canva
Craig McNary, Global Head of Brand and Creative, Xbox
Erin Oles, EVP, Global Integrated Marketing, Salesforce
We’re hosting the in-house coffee bar across the week. And we’re producing Collective Intelligence, a live installation that gives every guest a way to see themselves in the room.
Collective Intelligence is the centerpiece of that work. Five questions, one reveal. Each participant scans in, answers a short prompt, and discovers the leadership archetype they bring to the table, set against the live signal of the room. Every guest leaves with a read on how their instincts compare. The installation runs across all four days of Journal House programming.
XP Land: An Exclusive Tour for Experiential Leaders
June 22, 2026 · By Invitation Only
Sparks powers Women in XP Land, an invitation-only walking tour for the senior women shaping the future of experiential. Held along the Croisette on June 22, the tour brings a small group inside the most talked-about activations at Cannes — guided by the brand leaders behind them.
At each stop, the leaders behind the work share what inspired it, how it came together, and why it matters. It’s a rare look at the thinking behind the activations — and a chance for the women shaping the industry to spend a few hours in conversation with one another.
Women in XP Land is a program of XP Land, presented by Sparks. For Sparks, powering this tour is an extension of the same belief that runs through everything we do at Cannes: that the most important conversations still happen in person, in the right rooms, with the right people.
Vogue Business: Leaders Unpack The Taste Advantage
June 23, 2026 · By Invitation Only
Co-hosted with Vogue Business, this invitation-only breakfast convenes twenty leaders across luxury, technology, and media. Hilary Milnes, Features Director at Vogue Business, and Sparks President Melissa Levy will lead a conversation on why human connection, editorial authority and the quality of experience matter more than ever in an era of infinite content and automation.
The premise of the conversation is the taste advantage: as content scales and automation accelerates, the brands that earn enduring trust are the ones that protect the quality of the experience and the credibility of the voice behind it.
ADWEEK Marketing Vanguard: An Exclusive Excursion for CMOs
Private Event · By Invitation Only
Sparks is the co-host of ADWEEK’s Marketing Vanguard Inspiration Excursion, an afternoon convening the CMOs of ADWEEK’s invitation-only Marketing Vanguard community during this year’s Cannes Lions festival.
Marketing Vanguard is ADWEEK’s invitation-only program for C-suite marketers, designed to give senior brand-side marketing leaders access, intelligence, and influence at a moment when the role is being rewritten in real time. The Cannes Inspiration Excursion is one of the most exclusive gatherings the program hosts each year, and the 2026 edition takes place at one of the most distinctive venues on the Riviera. Suffice it to say this gathering will be very fashion forward.
For Sparks, sole-sponsoring this afternoon is a statement about who we build for. The CMOs and senior marketing leaders in the room are the audience whose programs we’re designed to support: strategic, ambitious, and accountable for both brand and business outcomes.
Sparks UnCanned: A New York Counterpoint to Cannes
June 23, 2026 · Register for Access
For the leaders staying stateside, Sparks UnCanned — in partnership with TruNorth — is a full-day gathering for those reshaping how marketing, creativity, and AI collide. Three facilitated working sessions on the conventions we’ve all inherited, activation strategy that actually moves people, and an honest conversation about AI in our work. No panels, no fluff.
UnCanned exists because the most consequential work in our industry rarely happens at the front of a ballroom. It happens in smaller rooms, with peers willing to set aside the polished version of the answer and work through the version that’s still being figured out. Each session is built for participation, capped at a small group, and structured around a single question worth a few hours of real attention.
For Sparks, hosting UnCanned in New York during Cannes Lions week is intentional. Marketing leaders shouldn’t have to fly to the Côte d’Azur to get into the conversations that matter most to their work. UnCanned brings the room to them, with an agenda built around what’s actually hard, and the peers willing to talk through it honestly.
Let’s meet in Cannes.
If the festival brings you to the Côte d’Azur, whether to step inside one of the programs above or to find a quiet moment with our leadership on the ground, we’d welcome the conversation.
