Canva lines up brand chiefs of LEGO, Disney, PepsiCo and Mars for Cannes beach

By Staff on Monday, June 15, 2026

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Canva has published the line-up for its Creative Cabana at Cannes Lions, and it is stacked with client-side marketing chiefs.

Across four days at Vega La Plage (22–25 June), the platform will run more than 30 sessions featuring chief marketing, brand and creative officers from LEGO, PepsiCo, Disney, Mars, Walmart and Mastercard, among others.

The spine is Variety’s returning “in the C-Suite” strand, a run of paired conversations that this year reads like a who’s who of client-side marketing.

Toys and gaming bring Julia Goldin (LEGO), Roberto Stanichi (Mattel) and David Tinson (Electronic Arts).

Food and drink field a particularly deep bench: Mark Kirkham (PepsiCo), Todd Kaplan (Kraft Heinz), Taylor Montgomery (Taco Bell), Gabrielle Dallas Wesley (Mars), Leonardo Aizpuru (Nespresso) and Christophe Poirier (KFC).

Retail and beauty bring William White and David Hartman (Walmart), Fabiola Torres (Gap), Michelle Mesenburg (Target) and Jessica Stacey (Sephora).

Entertainment turns out in force too — Rita Ferro (Disney), Darren Schillace (FOX Entertainment) and Shelley Macintyre (BBC Studios) — with the celebrity pull supplied by actor Alan Cumming, who joins NBCUniversal’s Frances Berwick to unpack the rise of The Traitors.

Platforms and services are well represented: Heather Freeland (LinkedIn), Manu Orssaud (Duolingo), Keiko Mori (TikTok) and Billy Bohan Chinique (Virgin Voyages).

From broader verticals Asmita Dubey (L’Oréal), Claudia Calouri (Philips), Jill Kramer (Mastercard) and Ndidi Oteh, global chief executive of Accenture Song — and, from the agency side, BBDO global chief creative officer Chris Beresford-Hill, dissecting Pepsi’s Super Bowl work with Kirkham.

The topics are the usual Cannes preoccupations — cracking Gen Z, the ROI of social listening, rebuilding legacy brands, brand distinctiveness. But the value on offer here is access. For a platform still proving its enterprise credentials to the people who actually hold the budgets, getting this many senior marketers onto a single beach is impressive.

Canva’s own people are threaded throughout. Co-founders Cameron Adams and Cliff Obrecht take main-stage sessions, the latter opposite The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro on who owns creativity in an AI era, while customer and brand chiefs Rob Giglio and Meghan Gendelman host panels — including “Build a Bold Brand in a Sea of Sameness,” with marketing leads from Zoom and Business Insider.

AI runs underneath all of it, including a demo built around Canva’s integration with Anthropic’s Claude. And the festival theatrics are present and correct: a Brand Harmony Choir on Monday morning, “Canvarobics in the Sea” on Wednesday, an AI-and-magic variety show on Tuesday night, and a GLAAD-run Pride party to close the week.