CANNESERIES : What Brand Activation Looks Like During the Series Festival
CANNESERIES is the international festival dedicated to television series, held every April along the Croisette in Cannes. Created in 2018 by the City of Cannes, it runs for six days and is free and open to the public, which makes it unlike most events on the Riviera calendar. The 9th edition takes place from 23 to 28 April 2026. The competition structure awards prizes across long-form fiction, short-form series, and since 2026, a new category for digital content created for YouTube.
The festival has two distinct audiences operating in parallel. The public side attracts tens of thousands of series fans who come for screenings, signing sessions, and encounters with cast and creative teams from international productions. The industry side, CANNESERIES Industry, is a professional programme of networking, pitch sessions, and meetings for screenwriters, producers, distributors, and platforms. Both sides operate simultaneously, which gives the event a scale and an energy that purely trade events cannot match.
Who attends CANNESERIES ?
On the professional side, the audience includes international production companies, streaming platforms, broadcasters, talent agencies, and the writers and directors whose work is in competition. On the public side, the audience is fans with a genuine passion for international series, which skews younger and more culturally engaged than the average festival-goer. The combination creates a genuinely unusual environment for brands: the reach of a mass cultural event with the relevance of an industry gathering.
What does brand activation look like at CANNESERIES ?
The event takes place along the Croisette and in venues across central Cannes, which gives brands multiple formats to work with. Official partnerships with the festival allow integration into the screening programme, the award ceremonies, and the fan zone area near the red carpet. Private events during the festival week, whether dinners for producers and platform executives, or screenings and receptions for press and talent, align naturally with the cultural tone of the event.
For media, streaming, and entertainment technology brands, CANNESERIES offers a context that is harder to find at MIPCOM in October: a festival atmosphere with real public energy, rather than a trade market. For luxury and lifestyle brands with a genuine connection to screen culture or creative industries, it is one of the better-timed opportunities on the spring Riviera calendar, sitting as it does two weeks before the Cannes Film Festival begins.
What does it cost ?
A contained presence at CANNESERIES, covering a private event for 30 to 50 guests during the festival week in a well-chosen Cannes venue, sits in the range of 20,000 to 35,000 euros. A mid-range programme combining an official partnership package with a private dinner or screening event for industry contacts runs from 40,000 to 75,000 euros. A more significant presence involving a named partnership with one of the festival’s sections, a branded space during the festival, and a programme of events across several days sits above 100,000 euros. The free and public nature of CANNESERIES means that official partnership visibility reaches an audience far larger than a trade event of equivalent scale, which affects the value calculation significantly.
When to start planning ?
CANNESERIES is in late April. Official partnership discussions with the festival need to start in November or December. Private events during the festival week can be planned from January onwards, but the best venues in central Cannes in April are in demand from multiple events during this period, and good availability requires early commitment.
Planning an activation at CANNESERIES ? Send us your brief.