The rosé is gone, the branded beach activations are dismantled, and the Croisette has returned to its quiet summer rhythm. But the conversations from Cannes Lions traveled home with the executives who had them, and this year, the throughline was unmistakable: the industry has stopped debating whether AI belongs in marketing and started demanding it prove its worth.
“The conversation is now about how to embed AI into everyday operations in ways that deliver measurable business outcomes,” says Ryan Nelsen, CMO of StackAdapt. The shift from last year is specific. “AI is no longer being viewed as something that replaces marketers. It’s becoming the intelligence layer that helps them work more strategically by automating repetitive tasks, surfacing opportunities, and allowing teams to focus on creativity, customer relationships, and business strategy.”
That accountability push exposed a gap that ran through nearly every serious conversation on the Croisette. Mike Finnerty, U.S. president at Mutinex, described an industry moving at two speeds. “On creativity and AI integration, it’s racing ahead,” Finnerty says. “Where it’s racing to catch up is measurement. Nearly every serious conversation this year circled back to the same admission: brands are spending more than ever and still struggle to say what actually grew the business. We’ve built remarkable engines for making marketing, and almost nothing to tell us whether it worked.”
Closing that gap, Finnerty argues, requires measurement that operates on a different timescale than the industry is used to. “It has to move fast enough to influence decisions while money is still being spent, not after the campaign is over,” he says. “And it has to explain why one piece of creative drove growth and another didn’t, because creative has become one of the biggest variables in marketing performance.”
Todd Braverman, CRO at Ampersand, saw the same pattern beneath the AI enthusiasm. “Even with all the excitement around AI and emerging technologies, many of the conversations are coming back to the fundamentals,” Braverman says. “Marketers want better data, better measurement, and a clearer understanding of what’s really driving results.”
If last year’s Cannes was about brands and platforms forming new data partnerships, this year’s was about making the data already on hand actually usable. Danielle Zazula, SVP of revenue, digital publishers at VideoAmp, framed the shift directly. “Brands aren’t asking for another dashboard,” Zazula says. “They’re asking how to connect first-party data, commerce signals, media exposure, and outcomes into a single view that helps them make smarter decisions.”
That consolidation instinct extended to vendor strategy. Patrick Viau, CRO of Optable, heard it in conversation after conversation with agencies, publishers, and SSPs. “The ad-tech tax has gotten high enough that people are finally willing to rebuild around it,” Viau says.
Agencies are shifting toward buying directly with key publishers rather than routing everything through programmatic plumbing, he says, and the appetite for fewer, more transparent vendor relationships is replacing the old instinct to add another point solution.
“We’re hearing less ‘I need a CDP [customer data platform]’ or ‘I need a DMP [data management platform]’ every year,” Viau says. “Now, advertisers and publishers alike are looking for infrastructure that lets them safely activate their first-party data, pull clear signals from it, and enrich it transparently.”
Kevin Dunn, chief revenue officer at Experian Marketing Services, described the same pressure in terms of flexibility. “The opportunity is to connect data, identity, activation, and measurement across a growing set of partners and channels,” Dunn says. “The challenge is doing that without getting locked into one platform, workflow, or commercial environment.”
His colleague Budi Tanzi, SVP of product and solutions engineering at Experian Marketing Services, tied the urgency back to outcomes. “AI is putting pressure on every part of the ecosystem to move faster,” Tanzi says, “but speed only creates value when it is built on trusted data, interoperable identity and measurement that can prove what actually worked.”
The old tension between brand-building and performance marketing showed signs of resolving — not because one side won, but because AI-mediated discovery is forcing the two disciplines to merge. Paul D’Arcy, CMO of Moloco, framed the question that kept recurring: what does brand building look like when AI increasingly shapes how consumers discover products? “For years, performance marketing has largely been about capturing demand,” D’Arcy says. “In an AI-driven world, it also has to help create demand by ensuring brands remain relevant, trusted, and discoverable wherever consumers are making decisions. The brands that will succeed won’t separate brand and performance.”
Anna Bager, president and CEO of the OAAA, connected that convergence to a defense of creativity itself. “What hasn’t changed is the importance of creativity,” Bager says. “In a media landscape increasingly shaped by algorithms, brands still need ideas that capture attention, spark emotion, and build lasting connections. Technology can help marketers reach people more effectively, but creativity remains what gives people a reason to care.”
Out-of-home, she argues, benefits directly from that dynamic, delivering scale and cultural impact that complements an increasingly algorithm-driven media ecosystem.
Piper Stull-Lane, head of product marketing at tvScientific by Pinterest, saw the same pairing playing out in how marketers are using AI itself. “The conversation around AI has shifted from hype to execution, with marketers focused on using it to make creative, media, and measurement more intelligent, not to replace the creativity and judgment that drive great advertising,” Stull-Lane says. “AI can help optimize campaigns and uncover what makes creative resonate, but lasting growth will always come from connecting with people in meaningful ways.”
AI’s role in actual media transactions also matured visibly this year. Where prior festivals treated agentic buying as a speculative future state, this year’s conversations treated it as infrastructure already being built. Viau noted real but qualified appetite: “Most are still skeptical of the word ‘agentic,’ and fairly so, but they agree it’s a credible path to cutting the tax.”
Alex Collmer, founder and executive chairman at Vidmob, pointed to a widening gap in how the industry understands what AI actually needs to perform well. “AI feeds on data and insights, but there’s another split emerging,” Collmer says. “Many early AI adopters don’t know what genuine creative intelligence looks like, so they assume they already have it. AI tells you what you can make. Creative data tells you what you should make.”
Even as AI infrastructure matured, the festival’s strongest signal may have been a renewed insistence on human craft. Felipe Simi, co-CEO and creative chairperson at Droga5 São Paulo, says the ideas that resonated most weren’t the most technologically sophisticated.
“The ideas that resonated weren’t necessarily the most technologically sophisticated, but the ones with the strongest creative intent, cultural relevance and emotional impact,” Simi says. “The more technology advances, the more we value what makes us human. AI is no longer the story, it’s become the context.”
Tommy Johnson, senior director of partnerships at Open Influence, heard a parallel theme in the return of “authenticity” as an industry watchword. “The consensus isn’t that AI should replace people,” Johnson says. “It’s that AI should handle repetitive work, leaving more room for human creativity, judgment, and connection.”
That human emphasis extended to where brands are choosing to show up. Petur Workman, VP of business development at Movers+Shakers, says social-first marketing has graduated from tactic to organizing principle. “Social-first marketing is no longer a niche strategy — it’s becoming the organizing principle for how modern brands build relevance,” Workman says. “Attention is earned, not bought. The brands creating the most momentum are the ones building ongoing relationships with audiences through creators, communities, and social storytelling — not just launching campaigns.”
Alex Buxton, director of global partnerships at Thinkingbox, framed the structural version of the same shift: “Creators have moved from the sidelines to the center of Cannes. The debate is no longer whether brands should work with creators, but how to integrate them into every stage of the marketing process.”
Brandon Fox, SVP of client services at Pearpop, summed up where AI fits into that human-centered picture. “The conversation around AI has largely shifted from fear to productivity,” Fox says. “It’s not about replacing marketers, but instead to let them spend less time on spreadsheets and status updates, and more time doing the work they were actually hired to do.”
Beneath the festival’s headline themes ran a quieter one: trust has become the actual currency being traded on the Croisette. Rishi Chandiramani, head of East Coast sales at Big Happy, found it in the substance of the week’s best conversations. “The biggest opportunity at Cannes wasn’t on a stage, it was in the room,” Chandiramani says. “Every meaningful conversation we had throughout the week came down to trust, proof, and patience. Show the work, build the case study, then scale the partnership.”
Garrett Dale, co-founder and chief media officer at Kepler, captured the festival’s underlying mood of productive uncertainty. “I found myself wondering whether that was a sign of industry growth or a reflection of the uncertainty AI is creating,” Dale says. “Was some of it posturing and positioning? Probably. But periods of disruption always bring people together. Change breeds opportunity, and right now our industry has no shortage of it.”
Courtney Williams, chief growth officer and partner at The Variable, noted the festival’s own evolving identity, with the creator economy and independent agencies generating as much buzz as any single campaign. “Cannes Lions is becoming even more influential than the Film Festival,” Williams says, pointing to activations from Canva, Amazon, UTA, and Spotify, alongside the growing anticipation around which independent firms will emerge as the industry’s next breakout names.
