What a week at Cannes Lions teaches you about building commercial pull when you can't buy a yacht.

Cannes Lions sells itself as the bleeding edge of marketing. A week there tells you it's a trade show with better catering and worse air conditioning.

Tom Potter spent that week walking the beaches and the yachts in June. F1 is having its moment, the biggest brands are in the room, and so is everyone trying to sell to them. The question for a boutique agency is whether to go and whether doing so buys you anything at all.

Here's what he found.

Cannes looks like access. Wristbands from elbow to wrist, beaches, yachts, and standing-room panels. But the senior decision-makers - the CMOs and brand leads Rush exists to reach - aren't in the throng. They're dropped at a stage door in an air-conditioned car, taken to a green room, put on stage, and taken out again. The ones in private meeting rooms are booked from 6:00 to 6:30, with the next meeting starting at 6:31.

What Tom noticed was that the people worth meeting wore almost no credentials at all. The full-arm lanyard collection marks someone who applied to every beach six months out. The person with one pass, for the actual awards, is the one who matters.

So the floor gives you peers, suppliers, and agencies chasing the same buyer you are. A sea of supply, very little demand. The credential count is inversely correlated with how worth it is to meet someone.

The lesson Tom takes from the week is the one Rush gives its own clients about the Grand Prix itself.

The people you need are busy, the logistics are against you, and a chance encounter is forgotten within 10 minutes.

What works is a plan, and the plan starts long before anyone arrives. For a sponsor heading to a race, Rush maps who's actually worth meeting - every prospective client in the paddock that weekend - and prioritises them, because you cannot chase everyone, and the ones who matter most are the hardest to reach. Then it makes sure the right people from the sponsor's side are at the race to meet them, rather than hoping seniority and a guest list will line up on the day.

From there, it's about engineering the meeting before you're in the same place. The network does the introduction. A thought-leadership session, a breakfast, a roundtable - something that earns proper time in a setting where the other person is receptive, and that positions the sponsor's products and services well enough that the buyer is actually open to the conversation when it comes. That beats a corridor handshake every time, because a corridor handshake is forgotten by lunch. The intimate room beats the big stage, because the big stage is full of people who aren't your buyers.

It's the same logic at Cannes. The week only pays back if you arrive knowing exactly who you want to see and have already done the work to get the time. Show up to soak it in, and you'll leave with photos and a sunburn.

This is the structural reality, rather than a complaint. F1's commercial growth means the teams now travel to these events directly, with the scale to host - Mercedes had a yacht on the water. And a brand curious about F1 will take one meeting on it, because they're at Cannes for ten other reasons. If a team is offering that conversation on their own yacht, that's where it happens.

It's a seller's market for the sport, and the sport's own commercial machinery is present. For a boutique firm, that changes the maths of what a physical presence can deliver.

For all the talk of thought leadership and the bleeding edge, most of what Tom saw was platitudes, back-slapping, and sales dressed up as insight. F1 is exploding, look at the demographic. Said from enough stages, by enough people, in enough rooms that had already heard it at Autosport and at the last race.

The exception proved what the rest were missing. The Axios x The Race session was the best thing Tom attended all week - small, intimate, on a yacht, with a moderator (Sara Fischer) who actually got into the business of it and asked questions the speakers hadn't pre-baked.

That's how you get the real story: Sainz on his early hesitation about letting Netflix into his private life, and what that openness ultimately did for his profile and his personal endorsements. People stay in the room for that. Sponsors and prospective sponsors gravitate towards it.

Set against that, the generic panels showed their seams. The Williams session with Sainz drew a standing-room-only crowd straight after Kevin Durant, and the audience drifted in after half an hour, talking over the moderator, only holding on for a photo at the end. The story was right there, and the format didn't reach for it. A precious commodity, driver time, on a stage that never quite earned it.

Everyone already knows F1 is growing. Nobody pays attention to being told it again. The events that work are the ones with someone in the chair willing to push for something real.

And the longer game runs underneath all of it. The agencies that win the long F1 sales cycle are ones whose name comes up first when a brand finally decides to move - because they've built mental availability through insight, not through being somewhere hot in June.

Cannes is worth the trip. What it isn't is a shortcut. The first name a brand remembers when they're ready to move is earned the rest of the year, through insight - long before anyone's on a yacht.