It’s only been a few days since we soaked in the sun on the French Riviera, surrounded by the people who build the world’s biggest brands. Sounds like any other year at the Cannes Lions, right?
Between the rosé and the rooftop panels, something genuinely useful kept surfacing, repeatedly, in rooms full of CMOs, creators, and analysts comparing notes. The takeaway wasn’t a single big idea. It was a mood, a growing consensus that the industry is tired of shortcuts and ready to get curious again.
AI is a great enabler. It is not a great romantic.
If there was one line repeated across stages this week, it’s that “AI isn’t going to make someone fall in love with a brand.”
Alex Schultz of Meta and Asmita Dubey of L’Oréal explained during their beach-side session that brands need to move at the speed of culture and the pace of technology, treating AI as a technology layer rather than a personality. The magic still has to come from people — half a million creators work alongside L’Oréal today, and the authenticity in that content comes from community, not automation.
AI is decentralizing creative production at a remarkable pace. In the short term, though, most agreed it’s still an enabler of performance rather than a wholesale replacement for human judgment. The brands getting it right are the ones using AI to free up time for the harder, more human work: building real relationships with the people who already like them.
During our own roundtable, that trend surfaced again. Creativity, craftsmanship, critical thinking, and brand coherence remain the foundations of successful luxury brands, even as the industry continues to evolve.
Paid media got lazy. Curiosity didn’t.
Another blunt observation surfaced throughout the week: too many brands are leaning on paid media to do the relationship-building that earned attention used to do. It’s an easy habit to fall into — paid is measurable, available on demand, and satisfyingly controllable. But several conversations converged on the same point: dependence on paid is often a symptom of a brand that has stopped being interesting enough to talk about.
The antidote sounded almost old-fashioned: build an army on social, not by buying it, but by giving people something worth participating in.
Fandom beats reach.
And that’s what one of our favourite case studies did. Rather than chase culture, Oscar Mayer’s team reinvented an asset they already owned: the Wienermobile. Everyone recognized it. Almost nobody engaged with it. So, the team turned it into a race, complete with teams, rivalries, and voting, and watched the icon become an experience.
The bigger lesson travelled further than the hot dogs did. Brands don’t need a bigger budget to build fandom. They need to find what’s distinctly theirs, hand it to their audience, and have the confidence to let things get a little absurd.
The fundamentals still apply.
Not every session reinvented the wheel, and that’s fine too. Ritson vs Sharp was no groundbreaking revelation, but it covered the marketing effectiveness truths that we can all agree on – and it was a good reminder that brands often get bored with themselves first.
Another Sharp panel on measurement covered familiar ground on long-term brand building versus short-term ROI, with the consistent message that the math hasn’t changed, even if the tools have. We’ve known for decades from Analytic Partners ROI Genome® data that, while brand investments drive higher ROI, performance spending is often prioritized. The key to a successful measurement program is balancing brand and performance efforts to optimize investments.
The marketer’s job now is to do the unglamorous work of applying these fundamentals. From our own experience and countless conversations in Cannes, having your data in place helps tremendously with that task – as uncreative as it may sound at first.
It’s not just about storing your data somewhere or looking at dashboards every day. It is truly understanding it, combining it, measuring it, and leveraging it. Use your data to break down internal silos, to inform better creative, and unlock more budget. And above all else, the idea is about using your data for forward-looking decisions.
The throughline.
Strip away the yachts, the parties, and the beachfront decks, and Cannes left us with a simple conclusion: the brands winning right now aren’t necessarily the ones with the most use of AI and other technology. They’re the ones curious enough to ask questions, smart enough to let their audience participate, and advanced enough to truly leverage their data.
Thanks for a week full of market insights, takeaways, new connections, and robust conversations! We enjoyed every single one of them.
