Still, Cannes has become the Olympics of advertising. We all flock there to see the outlier work, the campaigns that will perhaps change the way we do things. Of course, because Cannes is... in Cannes, you can watch Mark Zuckerberg talk to Kanye West in a seminar and then step out into the bright sun of the Riviera while bumping into drunk Swedish ad people who will invite you to gulp down Coquille St Jacques with shouty Australian commercial directors.

The marketers of the world's biggest companies will be in Cannes too, more of them than ever before. They go there to look at the best work in the world, and hopefully come away wanting to make some of their own. Every year the categories multiply: Titanium, Integrated, Innovation, Effectiveness, Product Design. Robotics can't be far off.

The proliferation of categories, to be honest, has tracked the evolving sophistication and fragmentation of the marketplace. Some of the "newer" categories are starting to seem a bit... broad. Cyber is supposed to recognise the best digital work, but digital work is everywhere now, in virtually every category of the festival. It's not unusual for pure digital pieces to win in Outdoor, Film, Direct, Promo, Design and Branded Content. Digital media and content dominate the discussions and the seminars too.

But film, and variations of it, is still hugely influential in many respects. Whatever happens from here, it seems people will always want to watch some kind of story on some kind of screen. As annoying as the people droning on about "content" are, there's no doubt that they're right - there's going to be an explosion of moving media to go on all these screens that are popping up around us.

Cannes wouldn't be Cannes without all the predictions, pieces are flicking swiftly around the web at the moment, the most prominent of which is the annual Leo Burnett/AdAge thumb-suck. Previous experience suggests many of the big winners of the week won't be that well known, to consumers anyway, something some media commentators have chosen to criticise. Last week the Guardian Unlimited ran a piece questioning the role Cannes plays in the industry. It raised a few hard truths and questioned whether the annual showpiece has not become a little too self-congratulatory. Not all the work that wins at Cannes is a filmed activation that happened once or twice on a Brazilian beach with an audience limited to the art director's girlfriend's friend. The big work from the big brands will all be there, and it will command huge attention.

Early next week hyperactive Slideshare bunnies will be falling all over themselves to try and crystalise the big "themes" of Cannes this year (because everyone loves a theme), so we thought we'd have a stab, before it even begins. Here goes:

Agencies and their collaborators (because it's desperately important that we all COLLABORATE NOW) have a whole bunch of fancy new ways to influence and persuade people. That's allowing them to work "upstream", adding value through things other than advertising: an improved delivery process, pack innovation, product development, a distribution breakthrough and even evolving the core competency of a company. How much of that kind of work we'll actually see is debatable, but there's no doubt that's where things are heading, agencies doing all kinds of stuff that agencies haven't normally done.

Picking through the Cannes predictions in the media you get a slightly different view. The work is hugely film biased, whether web or TV (a line that's getting very blurry).

"The game before the game." the extraordinary music video from Beats by Dre out of R/GA will be in contention for the big Film prizes. Out of the same agency is the impressive #LikeAGirl for P&G from Leo Burnett is a hugely influential piece of work, perhaps the best example this year of how brands are discovering and exploring the social tension in their DNA, something that has broad social appeal and huge cultural appeal.

We'll all go in with our personal favourites, but there'll be lots of surprises along the way. And don't expect everything to be hi-fi and techy. Last year one of our favourite pieces was out of Ogilvy & Mather Guatemala. It was a simple song that children could sing in the car called "Vroom Ring Boom" to get their parents to stop using the phone. A road safety message delivered by responsible toddlers to irresponsible cellphone using parents.

You gotta love advertising.