Beet.TV

CANNES, France — Artificial intelligence may be able to write an advertisement, analyze an audience and rescue an executive from the inconvenience of forming an original sentence. That does not mean it should run the marketing department. AI’s proper role is to help people work faster and make better decisions, according to marketing leaders who spoke during a panel at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

CANNES, Lions — Consumers increasingly divide their time among video games, delivery apps, live events and the occasional attempt to experience reality without checking a phone. That fragmentation is pushing marketers to look beyond conventional media placements and find moments when people are actively engaged.

Marketers spent years building first-party data systems to escape their dependence on third-party cookies. Then many discovered that the solution came with its own collection of clean rooms, technology integrations and fresh silos. Apparently, data infrastructure follows the same rule as household storage: The more containers you buy, the more clutter you find.

CANNES, France — Artificial intelligence may be able to create a media plan, generate thousands of ads and summarize a meeting before anyone has found the conference room. That does not mean it always should. As agencies and brands race to adopt agentic AI, the industry needs to move beyond isolated experiments and build systems that improve actual business outcomes, executives from Basis and PHD said at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

CANNES, France – Artificial intelligence may be capable of planning vacations, organizing inboxes and softening emails written in a moment of righteous irritation. Transforming a sprawling marketing organization is another matter. Companies must prepare for AI across their operations, even if employees, clients and finance chiefs are not entirely comfortable with the cost or consequences, said Amie Owen, chief client officer of Flywheel and Omnicom Media.

CANNES, France – Podcasts were once the place where two people could talk into microphones for three hours and confidently assume nobody needed to see what they were wearing. That era is ending. Podcasts are rapidly becoming a video medium, giving advertisers new ways to combine the intimacy of host-driven audio with the visual impact of television, Maureen Bosetti, chief investment officer at Omnicom Media, said at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

CANNES, France — Advertisers searching for the next great use of artificial intelligence might want to put down the efficiency spreadsheet for a moment. For Lauren Anderson, U.S. head of Amazon Ads Brand Innovation Lab, AI is not merely a tool for making ads faster or cheaper. It can help creative teams build customer experiences that previously were not possible, provided humans remain in charge of the creative decisions.

A year ago, retail media meant building e-commerce platforms and optimizing sponsored product listings. Today, the category has sprawled into connected TV, offsite partnerships, and even live sports apps – anywhere a retailer’s first-party data can follow a consumer. Dick’s Sporting Goods, for instance, now reaches families through its app while they watch their kids play soccer, far from any store shelf.

CANNES, France – Commerce media has reached the awkward stage of its development when simply showing up with shopper data no longer counts as a personality. During a panel at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, executives from Dick’s Sporting Goods, CVS Media Exchange and Fluent said the next phase will require retail media networks to differentiate themselves, recruit advertisers from outside their traditional categories and turn physical stores into measurable media channels.

CANNES, France – The age-old wall between advertising and promotions is crumbling. For decades, consumer packaged goods companies kept their media budgets in one silo and their trade and shopper marketing dollars in another, each measured by different teams with different metrics and different definitions of success. Now, as retail and commerce media networks mature, there is growing pressure to tear down that wall.