Salesforce Beach, Cannes Lions 2026

Role: Experiential Creative Director

Team: multidisciplinary creative team (design, Creative technology, copy)

Internal Partners: Salesforce Strategic Events, Customer Marketing, programming & Influencer/Social teams

Agency Partner: sparks

Ambient to Anchor Activations

The whole beach was filled with real Salesforce customers. Not booths, not logos on a wall, just brands people already trust, doing what they do best, so the beach felt less like a Salesforce World Tour or Dreamforce on the beach and more like a stretch of the Croisette where good things happened to run on Salesforce.

Two anchor activations sat at the center of that: F1 and a beauty and skincare partner. Around them, Yeti kept drinks cold at meeting spots built into the sand. Sonos played personalized Spotify playlists. Shutterfly ran a photo booth. Shark|Ninja kept the heat off. Nobody was selling anything. You were just in it, while billions in enterprise pipeline moved through our resort.

I worked directly with each of these partners to bring them into the space.

The Activations

SPF, Status Protection Formulator

Guests answer three questions about how they run Cannes. Agent Astro reads the signal and hands back a personal OOO persona, an object, a status line, and a piece of sunscreen to match.

Thirty-six possible personas, built across three variables: sun threshold, hydration, and Cannes agenda (packed, curated, spontaneous, or Salesforce Forever). A shade seeker with a packed schedule becomes a deep-sea creature, unreachable on purpose. A sun worshipper set on the party becomes a disco ball delight.

Every one of the 36 personas came with a full first-person status line, written to sound like something a person would actually post, not a brand voice describing them.

AI in Production
We used a mix of Luma.AI and Claude to help with brainstorming, graphic previz and ideation. I also built the naming and persona system with Claude, then worked with our internal developer, who was vibe-coding the build in Claude, to design a filename convention (SPF-Q1Q2Q3) so his pipeline could automatically pull the correct final image for each guest. No manual matching, no handoff lag between question logic and creative output.

F1 Track Star

F1 has its intro anthem. We gave every guest their own. Enter your name, answer a few questions with Agent Astro, and Agentforce builds a personalized race day anthem and visualizer.

A composer built 125 possible track combinations in advance. Once a guest answered, ElevenLabs wove their own voice into the final mix. They picked a visualizer, then left with a shareable, personalized video, their own podium moment.

Download rate reached 19.8% of QR scans by Wednesday and 99% of finishers played their track.

Did it Land

Nobody on our team said "Out of Office, On Brand." Bulbul Agency did, unprompted, in coverage of the beach. It became the sharpest external description of what we'd built.

An event evaluator quoted our wall copy, "Yes, this counts as work," back at us, knowing it was deliberate, calling it effective anyway.

Independent voices across the week kept naming the same thing: the space felt intentional. Play and substance coexisted without tension. People lingered, came back, brought people with them.

What it Proved

The brief asked for four things: take the Salesforce hat off, lead with experience, meet the moment as a tech brand, bring the swagger back.

An anchor activation lost its partner three weeks out. The rebuild didn't just hold, it became one of the parts of the beach people quoted back to us. That's the actual test of whether an idea is sound: not whether the plan survives contact, but whether the idea underneath it does.

From AI to Real Life

The beach didn't exist yet when we needed the EVPs to say yes to it. So we built it first, in AI.

Using our 3D renders as a base, we generated a sizzle reel of the space before a single piece of it was fabricated. It let leadership see the Anti-Hustle Club as a real place, not a deck of mood boards, and gave us a faster, more confident yes on a concept that was still, on paper, a big ask.