Cannes Lions 2026: Behind the Shortlist Jury with Helene Daubert, VP Create, France
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is about panels, networking, innovation, sunshine — but at the heart of it all is the reason we’re all here: the work. Every year, Cannes sets the bar for the industry with awards across 30 categories and a week of celebrating teams’ hard work all year long. For 2026, our VP Create at POP France, Helene Daubert, was selected to help decide which campaigns would go down in history as a member of the Shortlisting jury in the Film Craft category.
We spoke to her about her experience, and she gave us all the insights.
“Being on the Film Craft shortlist jury at Cannes Lions is not about rewarding polish for polish’s sake. It’s about protecting the standard. Our job is to spot the work where craft doesn’t decorate the idea – it detonates it.”
How does the shortlisting process work?
Helene gives us a peek behind the curtain. At every screening, the jury asks themselves the same questions:
- Is the direction executed with virtuosity?
- Does the craft elevate the idea somewhere unexpected?
- Is the execution genuinely right for the concept, or just expensive noise wearing good lighting?
“The jury is built for objectivity, heavily briefed, perfectly calibrated, so the work speaks, not the room,” said Helene. “When a craft is undeniable, twenty trained eyes converge in seconds.”
As a member of the shortlist jury, she’s sorting through the raw material that will eventually be the final conversation. For Helene, that means being open enough to new ideas not to miss a “strange little masterpiece,” and demanding enough from the entries not to confuse mere volume with real nuance. “Basically: less ‘looks amazing’, more ‘couldn’t have been made any other way.’”
Human-led craft at the heart
For the Film Craft category, craft is, of course, paramount. “It’s a craft jury: a brilliant idea badly made never makes the cut,” said Helene. “Three questions decide everything — is the execution virtuosic, does it elevate the idea, is it relevant to product and context?” These qualities were non-negotiable for the jury members, and allowed them to pick out work that truly rose above the rest.
As in every other category across the Cannes Lions this year, AI was a huge topic of conversation. “The magic happens when a real director with a singular universe writes the prompt: human eye at the source, machine power at scale.”
This is in line with POP’s human-led approach to AI — great ideas come from our people, and AI helps execute. Helene puts it this way: “A universal idea captures everyone’s emotion — that core stays human. AI transcreation then localises it into real cultural variants, with no copycat reshoots on set: one idea, many cultures, zero dilution.”
Cannes as a classroom for the future
As VP Create at POP, this was also a great opportunity for Helene to bring learnings back to POP to inform our approach to film craft at scale. “My real prize is the long list — dozens of hidden gems to share with our producers,” said Helene. “The lesson? Apple and Amazon stay relentlessly bold, year after year, always trusting great signatures. That’s our bar.”
As the Film Craft shortlisting jury set the global bar for what excellence looks like, Helene’s seat at the table mattered. Cannes Lions is the industry’s peer review at scale, where rigor, taste, and cultural relevance are pressure‑tested by the best in the business.
Helene brought POP’s point of view into that room and returned with sharper standards, fresh references, and a renewed mandate: protect craft, champion distinct voices, and keep human judgment at the center as AI scales what great teams imagine. That’s the value of Cannes — and the value of having our leaders help define its benchmark.
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