I just returned from the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival for only the second time. While yes, it’s a global festival whose mission is to celebrate creativity, the reason why I had avoided it for so long is that I had always been an advertising business skeptic. The big holding companies were the machine, and sitting out Cannes was another way for me to rage against it.

After two years of attending, I’ve softened my stance somewhat. As always, there was great work on display, and hordes of brilliant creatives were rewarded by trips to the Palais to revel in their deserved success. It’s a great opportunity for some of the industry’s most important players to be in one place, and it can be a highly productive environment if you play your cards (and sleep) right. It’s a bit of orchestrated serendipity, and worth the trip, for me, at least.

But hey, I’m still jaded. After all, it is still money that makes the advertising world go around, even though great, creative work is often done in spite of that. There was a low hum of complaint; that creative budgets just aren’t what they used to be, having to be spread across too many agencies, that it’s harder to hire great talent these days, that brands have lost their commitment to a big idea, that the work that won was too closely and emptily tied into social causes.

Advertising is a business, after all, and the business of advertising was on full display at Cannes, for better and for worse. What I’ve learned in these past two years, is that Cannes is a caricature of the advertising business, and its hyper-exaggerated features are signals of needed, life-preserving change.