Luxury brands love Cannes. Chanel supplied wardrobe highlights for Richard Linklater’s latest festival showing, comedy drama Nouvelle Vague (which it also supported financially). Bottega Veneta chose Cannes as a soft-launch location to debut the designs of its new creative director, Louise Trotter. And Chopard took over a hangar at Cannes Mandelieu airport to showcase its latest high jewellery offering. Year after year, the French film festival continues to grow in influence as a high-stakes platform for luxury brand storytelling.
But which brands managed to cut through on social media? Influencer marketing platform Lefty analysed over 3,000 Instagram influencers with more than 10,000 followers each, calculating the equivalent ad spend — known as earned media value (EMV) — of their Cannes-related content. Overall, the 2025 edition of the festival generated $203 million in EMV on Instagram, more than double the $86.3 million recorded in 2024. Fashion was once again the top performing category, generating $77.2 million in EMV, followed by beauty at $68.9 million and jewellery at $56.8 million.
