For two decades, Cannes Lions has been the advertising industry’s high church of the campaign — the ad, the stunt and the killer creative idea. This year, the conversations actually happening in the villas and the beach cabanas aren’t about creative execution at all. They’re about something closer to brand infrastructure: how brands get discovered, trusted, and recommended by AI systems that don’t care about a media plan. That’s a quieter, less glamorous story than the one Cannes normally embodies, but it’s the one playing out behind the closed doors.
Take one exchange overheard in a meeting earlier in the week, where an exec running media and analytics for a major platform laid out the unglamorous part nobody wants to talk about: coordination. When someone gets a single answer back from an LLM, they said, that answer was assembled from everywhere — SEO, PR, content and product — whether the company meant it to be or not. So the job isn’t optimizing one channel anymore. It’s making sure every function is pointed at the same message because the model doesn’t know or care which team owns which piece.
Strip the AI framing out of that and it’s not really a search problem at all. It’s the oldest brand-building problem there is — does this company say one consistent thing about itself, everywhere, all the time — except now there’s a machine reading every inconsistency back to the customer in real time. Search used to forgive a messy brand. You could buy your way to the top of a results page even if your PR, your reviews and your product page told three different stories. An LLM doesn’t buy that. It synthesizes whatever’s out there, gaps and contradictions included, and hands the customer one version of the truth. So the “SEO problem” everyone at Cannes is panicking about isn’t really about search at all. It’s brand coherence, finally getting graded in public.
“The industry is still treating AI visibility like an extension of SEO, but it’s becoming a distinct layer of digital infrastructure,” said Franklin Rios, CEO of AI-driven SEO firm Next Net. “For two decades, marketers optimized for impressions clicks, but now they’re competing for citations, trust signals, and machine-readable authority. LLMs surface brands that are the easiest for AI systems to verify and understand.”
What Rios is describing isn’t a new set of rules so much as the old ones enforced more strictly. Marketers still have to build genuine authority, create content that earns trust, be the brand people actually talk about. What’s changed is the measurement layer sitting on top of that work. When the same prompt produces a different answer 99 times out of 100, chasing “AI rankings” is like trying to photograph a moving train from another moving train. The work that matters isn’t tracking the train. It’s the work that makes it worth being recommended in the first place.
That distinction — being legible to a machine versus being persuasive to a person — is starting to split brand-building into two separate disciplines that don’t always pull in the same direction. The keyword-dense, heavily structured content that used to win search rankings often reads as noise to an LLM, while the language that actually earns trust with a human can be too loose, too narrative, for a model to parse cleanly. Brands are quietly being asked to write two versions of themselves: one built for people, one built to be understood by the systems standing in front of them.
“The brands that are ahead of this shift have realized that winning hearts and minds is not the same as being understood by AI,” said Amanda Forrester, svp of marketing and communications at ad tech firm OpenX. “They’re both important, but they’re different. A campaign can build real awareness with a human audience and still be invisible, misread, or mistimed when an agent or model is doing the interpreting. That changes the job of marketing in a fundamental way.”
At Cannes, CMOs have a ‘how’ problem
This week the one question on most CMOs’ lips is “how?
That’s the way Donna Sharp summed up the crux of conversations so far this week. As managing director of MediaLink and a partner at its owner UTA, Sharp spends Cannes doing little else but sitting across from CMOs — this Monday alone, a dozen-plus back-to-back meetings — which puts her in about as good a position as anyone to spot the pattern repeating across them.
How to build an AI stack that scales past one brand, one market. How to know if principal trading is quietly bleeding their media budget. How to train teams to use agents without running up bigger bills than the headcount they replaced. None of these are really separate problems. They’re the same problem, asked multiple different ways: how is this role changing amid all this cultural, geopolitical and technological upheaval. But spending all their time on the how is keeping them from the one question that actually matters: what are they building toward?
One answer came, unexpectedly, in a car heading up into the hills above Cannes for a panel and lunch. A French ad-tech consultant, asked what he actually does day to day, named two tools: a well-known SEO platform and a lesser-known French AI-search analytics tool born out of a Paris startup incubator.
His example, kept anonymous per Cannes etiquette: a client whose budget logic across countries was crude: big country means big budget. He and a colleague tried something else. Using the analytics tool, they measured the brand’s share of voice in Google and Amazon search results, then laid that against actual market share, country by country. The correlation was strong enough to become the new logic for the budget.
It’s a small story. But also a concrete answer to the one Cannes keeps circling: how marketers can actually use AI to decide where the next dollar of media budget goes.
“People are really afraid of risks, and an inherent risk-averse mindset is going to hold back experimentation and creativity,” said Laurel Burton, CEO of Stagwell’s Instrument tech and design agency. “A lot of CEOs and CMOs are being held to metrics. And when those metrics can be met with mediocrity, then there’s no incentive for creativity. So true innovation will happen when our C-suite truly understands that a metric isn’t the way that any business is going to advance.”
The numbers doing the rounds this week back her up. Boston Consulting Group surveyed 300 CMOs globally and found 96% say AI is transforming marketing, but only about a third have actually rebuilt their workflows, operating models, and talent strategies to capture the value. In other words, the gap isn’t the technology so much as it’s everything around it.
That gap is exactly what one agency CEO, speaking on condition his client not be named, thinks is being papered over. The bigger problem, he said, is what’s being sold to CMOs in the first place. Most holdcos, in his client’s view, are “selling air” when it comes to their new tech, leading with an AI platform as the future rather than what actually makes them different.
Voices from the Croisette
“People are still talking about automating creative at Cannes, but the conversation doesn’t appear to have moved on much from what we heard back in February when we spoke with 20 brands and created a framework with ISBA on the topic. Throughout our discussions both now and back then it’s clear that it’s not a case of whether to use AI in creative, but whether you’re using it in a way that serves the consumer, protects brand trust, and can withstand scrutiny when it scales. The brands getting this right aren’t the fastest movers, they’re the ones who established governance and full oversight before they pushed the button on AI generated creative.” — Hannah Mirza, CEO of The Responsible Marketing Agency
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Cannes by the numbers
A Boston Consulting Group survey of 300 CMOs found that 96% believe AI is transforming marketing. Only a third have actually rebuilt the workflows, operating models and talent strategies needed to capture that value. The gap, according to the report, isn’t technology. It’s organizational change.
About half of the CMOs surveyed say marketing now leads AI investment decisions within the function, compared with 14% for the CEO or board and 15% for strategy.