After
the Twenty
Minutes
On what buyers remember from a week in Cannes, and why so little of it happens on the stand.
Every December, your brand crosses the Croisette, builds its stand and opens its diary. Twenty minutes per buyer, one appointment after another, four days in a row. For years, that was enough.
Then the Palais
filled up.
The appointment system works. That is precisely the challenge: it works for everyone. Last December, your brand was one of thousands with the same table, the same twenty minutes and the same buyers.
Where the week actually happens
- A hotel collection gathered more than eighty advisors from one region on a private beach, for a single evening.
- An ultra-luxury resort brand held its cocktails inside a fashion house boutique, away from the Palais.
- A hotel group opened the day with a breakfast that ended in a gong bath.
- A hotel brand turned its party into a disco, which one advisor called the perfect way out of the meetings.
- A travel company quietly settled every tab at a grand hotel bar, as a surprise.
Questions worth asking before December
- 01Of the buyers you met last year, how many could describe your stand today?
- 02What did your brand give them that they could retell to a client?
- 03When the last appointment ends, where do your best buyers go, and who is hosting them?
- 04Which market matters most to you this year, and did it get more than twenty minutes?
- 05If a journalist wrote one line about your week, what would it say?
Figures: ILTM Cannes 2025 official results (24th edition, 1 to 4 December 2025) and ILTM buyer guidelines. Averages are our own calculations from these figures (meetings divided by buyers; 20 minutes per meeting). Examples are drawn from editions 2022 to 2025 as reported in the trade press.
Give them a moment,
not a meeting.
The diary is full, but not every hour of it belongs to the Palais. Mornings, lunches and nights are where a brand stops being one of thousands and becomes the one they talk about.
The Breakfast
Ten to twenty buyers, the sea still pale, coffee poured by someone who knows their name. They walk into the Palais already carrying your story.
The Lunch
A long table a short walk away, a menu in three acts, everyone back in time for the afternoon. The one quiet hour of their day, and it carries your name.
The Dinner
No stand, no slides. A villa above the bay, a deck at the Old Port or a hall taken over for the night, a menu that tastes of where you are from. The conversation you never have time for in twenty minutes.
Exclusive Hospitality
A suite, an apartment, a yacht or a boutique after hours becomes your brand's address for the week. Where your best buyers come to breathe, sit, talk and come back.
The Evening Event
A concept written for your brand, a place transformed, live artists, music, a guest list that mixes buyers and press. The one evening of the week that becomes a story, a photo and a reason to call you in January.
People forget meetings.
They keep moments.
Forty pitches in four days blur into one. Research on memory explains why, and what cuts through.
People judge an experience mostly by its most intense moment and by how it ends, far more than by its length.
A week of identical meetings has no peak. Your evening can be it.
Kahneman, Fredrickson et al., 1993; Redelmeier & Kahneman, 1996.
Emotionally arousing experiences create lasting memories: the brain consolidates what moved us more strongly than what merely informed us.
A pitch informs. A moment moves.
McGaugh, Annual Review of Psychology, 2015.
What we learn once, with nothing to anchor it, fades steeply within the first day.
Twenty minutes on Tuesday is a memory by Wednesday. Or it is gone.
Ebbinghaus, 1885, replicated by Murre & Dros, PLOS ONE, 2015.
What they rarely take home
- The brochure
- The fact sheet
- The slide with the floor plan
- The fourteenth handshake of the day
What they keep
- A face, and a first name
- A taste, a sound, a view
- A story they can retell to a client
- A photo they actually wanted to post
The stand opens the door. What happens around it decides who is remembered once Cannes is over. Be the brand they talk about on the way home: give them a moment of their own.
Your brand is the story.
We write the evening.
Once Upon a Party designs and produces brand events on the French Riviera. We know Cannes in December: its venues, its people, its permits, its light. We stay behind your brand, never in front of it, so that the only name your buyers remember is yours.
The creativity, talent & project management were some of the best I have experienced. Within a short timeline Max & team turned around one of the best customer engagement parties we have had.
We handed Maxime a last-minute event in Cannes with just a 24-hour window. We were essentially asking for a miracle, and Maxime overdelivered. The level of execution, professionalism, and calmness under extreme pressure was incredible.
Tell us which morning, lunch or night is still free in your Cannes diary. We will tell you what it could become.