Hyundai's Coquí Frog

For years, Cannes Lions has been the highlight of my creative and branding calendar, alongside Forward Festival and Off. Cannes always signals the next wave, the trends the whole industry ends up borrowing from for the next twelve months. This year signalled something entirely different again.

20,050 entries this year, down from nearly 27,000 last year. Cannes Lions tightened its AI-integrity rules after last year's scandals, and the smaller number tells you the story: fewer ideas made it through, but the ones that did had to earn it. A handful of cases from Cannes Lions Week kept resonating with me long after the trophies were handed out, enough that I want to walk through them properly rather than cram them into one list. First up, the distinctive asset that beat the room without saying a word.

 TL;DR for strategists

• Hyundai Puerto Rico won the Grand Prix in Audio and Radio for replacing the factory car lock sound with the call of the coqui frog.
• The campaign didn't manufacture a sonic identity. It borrowed one that already existed in the culture.
• Cannes 2026 rewarded brands doing this consistently: taking existing meaning seriously rather than inventing new meaning from a brief.
• The transferable question for any brand: what's your coqui, the thing you already own that you haven't noticed yet. 

A tourist, a Reddit post, and a national nerve

A tourist in Puerto Rico posted online asking how to silence the coqui, the small tree frog whose call is loud enough to hear from a hundred metres and famous enough to be printed on tourist merchandise. Locals don't hear noise. They hear home. The post went viral for exactly the reason you'd expect: someone from outside the culture had mistaken a point of national pride for a nuisance.

Hyundai and BBDO Puerto Rico didn't write a statement defending the frog. They replaced the factory lock-and-unlock beep on their rental fleet with its call, then briefed every visitor on why it mattered. Grand Prix, Audio and Radio, Cannes Lions 2026.

The wrong question versus the right question

Most brands chasing a sonic identity start from the wrong question. They ask what sound we can own, then commission something from nothing and hope that repetition turns it into meaning. That's manufacturing significance and hoping the market backfills it. It sometimes works; however, it's rare because the market can tell the difference between a sound with a history and one with a media budget behind it.

Hyundai asked a different question. What does this place already believe, deeply and specifically, that we could simply carry? The coqui didn't need inventing. It needed to be noticed, and then the discipline to leave it alone rather than dress it up. No jingle. No sonic logo built by a composer in a studio with no relationship to Puerto Rico.

Borrowed meaning, done properly

That's the whole idea, in four words. Not a sound with a media budget behind it, a sound with a history. It belongs to Puerto Rico first and Hyundai second, and that ordering is exactly why it works.

The Intelligence

Sound is one of the strongest recognition assets a brand can hold, and most brands never use it deliberately; Hyundai's move works because it's rare, not because it's clever.Netflix does this with the sound it plays every time you open the app: a sound at the start and a sound at the end, until it stops being an ad and becomes the brand. Hyundai's done it on the car door instead of the app: the coquí greets you when you get in and sees you off when you leave, so the sound isn't decoration; it's the connection.