Thousands of brand people are on their way to Cannes with hopes of winning a Lion. Most will be disappointed. They will also miss out on the annual winners’ dinner. Only 3-4% of work submitted gets those two thrills. Atlantic New York is offering compensation (OK, a brilliant business-building initiative), the Losers’ Dinner.

The dinner will be held on June 18 and includes an elegant French menu and an agency pitch as well as consolation.

To join the dinner, brand people need to email losers@atlantic-newyork.com or call +1 347-855-7860 and wait for approval (losing twice would be quite the downer). Adding fun – and financial compensation for the expense of being there and losing – brands that book Atlantic for next year will receive a credit toward the agency’s fee equal to every penny they wasted on their failed 2025 submissions (capped at US$50K).

If it’s all about eating, the menu is here. www.atlantic-losers-dinner.com.

But there’s also merch (already sold out, apparently):

The Losers’ Dinner adds to Atlantic’s creative ways around the new-business process. At Cannes 2023, the agency introduced the Atlantic Car Service, that offered free rides from the Nice airport to marketers willing to hear a pitch in transit. In 2024, it launched The Reverse Pitch, inviting brands to a seedy hotel room to compete for the chance to become the agency’s next “client of record”. Last year, at SXSW, Atlantic introduced Line Sitters, a service that let marketers skip the worst festival lines if they agreed to a meeting with the agency equal in length to the time they saved.