Omnicom Group and Interpublic Group logos are seen in this illustration taken December 9, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
Mary Ann Belliveau, an alum of Reddit, X (then Twitter), and Google, is joining Snap as its president of North America Sales, Snap announced on Thursday.
Belliveau most recently led large customer sales in North America for Reddit, where she worked with Fortune 500 companies and their agencies to develop scalable marketing strategies. During her tenure, Reddit grew its revenue from under $100 million to over $1 billion in the span of five years.
Now, Snap is betting that the exec’s wealth of digital media experience will help bolster its advertising business.
“I’m thrilled to join the Snap team and dive into Snap’s North America business,” said Belliveau in a statement shared with ADWEEK. “As one of the most innovative companies in the world, Snap has built an incredible community of 900 million, revamped their ad platform to focus on performance, and introduced exciting new formats that help partners reach a unique Gen Z and millennial audience.”
Bob Cornwall, a former executive at The Trade Desk, joins as general manager of Canada. He previously held positions at Google, Mondelēz, and Unilever.
Plus, Izabela Lopes is taking the post of senior director of screens and services for North America. Lopes most recently served as managing director of ads at Google.
The expansion of Snap’s sales arm arrives at a moment when the social platform—which has 460 million daily active users—is dialing up its advertising efforts.
At its NewFronts event this spring, Snap announced a suite of AI-powered advertising solutions including automated bidding aligned to advertisers’ set cost-per-action parameters and smart budget features designed to optimize ROI.
The app has also been trying to cash in on TikTok’s uncertain future in the U.S., offering financial incentives for advertisers this spring.
These developments followed the debut of two ad formats on the platform launched last fall: Sponsored Snaps, which enable advertisers to send branded messages directly to users in their Chat inbox; and Promoted Places, which spotlight places of interest on Snap Map, helping advertisers gain visibility among local audiences.
The arrival of Belliveau, Cornwall and Lopes comes less than six months after Ajit Mohan was appointed chief business officer at Snap, stepping up from his former role as president of APAC.
Now, Mohan is focused on building out a more robust sales team in North America to help brands and their partners improve performance through the platform’s engaged millennial and Gen Z user base.
“I look forward to working with Mary Ann, Bob, and Izabela to help drive Snap’s momentum across North America,” Mohan said in a statement.
Snap will announce its second quarter earnings on August 5. The stock is down more than 19% since the start of the year.
Correction July 11 at 1:42 pm E.T.: A previous version of this story inaccurately stated that Snap’s second quarter earnings would be announced July 17. They will be announced August 5.
After an exceptionally turbulent start under Elon Musk’s ownership, Twitter is finally winning back advertisers that had fled the platform after the billionaire famously told them to “go f*** yourselves” if they were concerned about rising hate speech on the platform he bought for $44 billion in 2022 and renamed X.
The work to win back those advertisers, which account for about 75 per cent of X’s revenue, was largely down to the efforts of one person: Linda Yaccarino.
The former head of global advertising at the entertainment giant NBCUniversal joined as X’s chief executive in June 2023 and wooed advertisers over champagne and canapés on superyachts at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity on the Côte d’Azur. But this week, in a tweet of course, she quit.
• Linda Yaccarino abruptly steps down after two years as CEO of X
“After two incredible years, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of X,” she said with no hint of a reason for her exit in a week when the company had been thrust back into the spotlight over antisemitic posts churned out by its AI chatbot, Grok.
Musk posted a reply, saying only: “Thank you for your contributions.”
Without Yaccarino’s charm and with Musk back in the hotseat, will advertisers stay the course or jump ship again out of fear that his often erratic behaviour could damage their brands’ reputations?
“She leaves a huge, huge void,” Dan Ives, managing director and senior equity research analyst at Wedbush, said. “She was integral to building back trust in Twitter. She led the company during an intensely chaotic period and managed to stabilise it, increase user engagement and bring back advertisers.
“There are a lot of opportunities for continued success at Twitter, but you can’t sugarcoat it: they are losing the lungs of X with Linda leaving.”
Ives, who has been covering technology companies for two decades, said finding a replacement for Yaccarino would be an exceptionally hard task as she had “the unique ability of having a strong advertising and social [media] background, and she got along with Musk”.
He added: “There are very few people who will be able to do both. Musk continues to exercise very strong control of the platform and you need someone that can play nice with him in the sandbox.”
Yaccarino surprised analysts by sticking it out with Musk for as long as she did: many predicted her exit each time Musk reignited controversy but Yaccarino publicly defended him every time. When he went on stage and gave his four-letter advice to advertisers, she wrote a memo to all staff defending Musk’s stance on free speech and described his overall comments as “candid and profound”.
She wrote: “Our principles do not have a price tag, nor will they be compromised — ever.”
Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at eMarketer, said: “Being the chief executive of X was always going to be a tough job and Yaccarino lasted in the role longer than many expected.
“Faced with a mercurial owner who never fully stepped away from the helm and continued to use the platform as his personal megaphone, Yaccarino had to try to run the business while also regularly putting out fires.”
She said Yaccarino achieved success in rebuilding X’s ads business, which she expects to return to growth in 2025 after more than halving between 2022 and 2023 following Musk’s takeover. Revenue in 2025 is expected to come in at about $2.4 billion, up from $1.94 billion in 2024.
• Elon Musk dismisses rumours of TikTok takeover
Randall Peterson, director of the Leadership Institute at the London Business School, said Yaccarino’s exit was a fresh example of a chief executive struggling in a battle for control with a very hands-on owner.
“It’s incredibly hard to run a company when the owner is so heavily involved,” he said. “She was probably promised autonomy but the reality was clearly different. You can fight it for a while but in the longer run it is untenable. We predicted she would last two years, and that’s how long it ended it up being. It’s just long enough to show that you were the right hire.”
Peterson said that whoever followed Yaccarino would have to have an “awfully large ego to imagine they can handle Musk differently”.
Names of possible successors are already swirling. The YouTuber Mr Beast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, has offered his services on X, where he changed his bio to read “X Super Official CEO”. When Mr Beast previously offered, on X, to become chief executive before Yaccarino was appointed, Musk responded: “It’s not out of the question.”
More seriously in the frame is Nikita Bier, a social media app developer whom Musk appointed head of product this month, three years after he too tweeted that the platform should hire him. “I’ve officially posted my way to the top,” he said on X announcing his new position. “While I already spend every waking hour on this app, I’ll now be spending that time helping others unlock that same value.”
Drew Benvie, chief executive of the social media consultancy Battenhall, said Bier, who has been dubbed the “king of virality” for a slew of apps he has created for teenagers, could help “inject some fresh ideas” into X.
“Perhaps the thing Twitter needs is a new look and feel. It has been through a really difficult period and it needs a change to signal that the bad times are over,” Benvie said. “It does suit his [Bier’s] skill set and he is clearly ambitious.”
Musk’s vision for X extends far beyond Twitter’s origins as a “virtual townsquare” for people to connect and exchange information and ideas in 140 characters.
He wants X to be the “Everything App” and told his employees, those that remained after axing about 6,000 roles, that it would eventually replace YouTube, LinkedIn, dating apps and even financial services.
Artificial intelligence will be at the centre of everything at the new X, which he signalled by transferring X’s ownership to his AI venture xAI in a deal that valued X at $33 billion in March.
Only this week, however, it sparked further controversy when its AI chatbot Grok started referring to itself as MechaHitler and made antisemitic comments in response to user queries. Musk has apologised and the comments have been deleted.
Despite all the controversy, Benvie said X continued to be popular with advertisers seeking to connect with communities. “When I speak to large companies about where they’re putting their ad money, they are still interested in Twitter,” he said. “There are competitors now but none of them — Instagram’s Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Truth Social — have replaced the speed and volume of Twitter.
“When Musk took over, everyone expected one of the new ones to hoover up all of the users, but none of them have really taken off in the same way.”
• Elon Musk’s X removes Grok AI chatbot posts praising Hitler
Instead, he said, people have mostly turned to established apps including TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn.
“The beneficiaries are the old school apps, which was not what anyone expected,” he said. “They have become a bit more old school Twitter-y with a bit more news and a bit more comment.”
X still has 374 million active users, not hugely down from 397 million before Musk took over in 2022, according to research by eMarketer. “A lot of them are probably a whole lot less active than they used to be, but not that many people have actually quit Twitter entirely,” Benvie said. “So there’s an opportunity there if they can improve the experience and make it a bit more friendly, the users and the advertisers could come back.”
Imagine looking up at the night sky in wonder. It’s clear and the blackness is studded with stars, thousands of light years away. The Sea of Tranquility is clear on the full moon’s surface. And then, drifting across your vision, larger still, comes a soda brand logo followed by a QR code. You point your phone and get updated on its latest flavor. The final frontier racks up a sale.
If advertising from space sounds like the stuff of science fiction, the award-winning Russian adman Vlad Sitnikov and his company StartRocket have just that in mind. He proposes an array, or constellation, of up to 400 “cubesats” — miniature maneuverable satellites — with the ability to project the messaging of any brand willing to pay into the night sky.
While the war with Ukraine has somewhat put plans on ice for the moment, he’s out to raise some $100 million in investment and, in conjunction with Avant Space, another space advertising startup, use off-the-shelf components assembled in Malaysia to have said array up and running just a year later. Avant Space has already been granted a patent and completed testing from stratospheric balloons. Major brands have expressed tentative interest.
“Wherever there is commerce, advertising will be there,” Sitnikov tells me. “It’s an inevitable step. People get upset about advertising because it’s designed to interrupt — that’s how it gets our attention. But you can’t develop any economy without it.”
Space, he points out, is increasingly just that: not solely of scientific or military interest, but a business, driven in large part by private enterprise.
Besides, advertising in space is already happening: from Pepsi launching an oversized can replica outside Russia’s Mir space station in 1996 to Felix Baumgartner’s Red Bull-sponsored skydive in 2012 to Tesla putting a car into orbit in 2018. Even NASA has taken the money, transporting bottles of an Estée Lauder skincare serum into space for a photoshoot. Why all the snobbery about the next logical step in space advertising, Sitnokov asks, especially when other forms of galactic commercialization, like asteroid mining, are fomenting plenty of excitement in some circles?
John Barentine is spearheading opposition to advertising satellites. A fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a member of the American Astronomical Society’s light pollution committee, he argues that the light reflected off and by advertising cubesats would be hugely detrimental to astronomy; they are designed to produce light visible to the unaided eye, so you can imagine how easily they’d interfere with super-sensitive telescopes.
“You can move an observatory on Earth to places with very low light pollution,” Barentine says. But “you can’t do that if the light is coming from space.” However, he understands that not many people care what the impact on astronomy might be.
“It’s just not of interest to enough people, especially against the interests of commerce,” he reckons. He thinks what might carry the day eventually is a deeper, more widespread and more human hostility to the idea of ads in space.
“They would be too intrusive,” he says. “You can turn off a TV ad. And while people have become desensitized to billboards, I don’t think we’ll turn a blind eye to billboards in space, even as our thinking about how we use space — more as an economy — is changing rapidly.” The idea of space as a global commons, as a pristine environment worthy of preservation, may have already sailed, much as it has for the oceans, but “that doesn’t mean we still can’t put in guardrails,” he adds.
If a client came to me and said they wanted to project [their brand] to Earth from space…I’d explain why it wouldn’t work — because it’s likely that everyone would hate them for it.
– Chris Rose, cofounder of Sent Into Space
U.S. policy is on his side. Congress banned the launch of “obtrusive” space advertising programs from U.S. territory in 2000, inspired by a Georgia-based marketing company’s plan to put a billboard into the Earth’s atmosphere for the 1996 Summer Olympics. The problem, of course, is that this does not stop other spacefaring nations from sending up such ads. But Barentine believes that the real impetus to stop advertising from space will likely only come after the shock of “a very conspicuous case” of it happening first: seeing will be disbelieving. That might light a fire under enough member countries of the United Nations to embrace U.S. policy as their own. However, this could take years.
Sitnikov understands the resistance. He’s a self-described space nerd who jokes that when he’s made his billions from space advertising he’ll be booking a seat on the next rocket.
“For sure there should be limits on advertising in space,” he insists. StartRocket proposes the use of its constellation only at dusk and dawn, not at night — not least because nobody will pay to advertise when everyone is asleep — and only over large population centers, not, say, national parks or any remote spot where an observatory is likely to be. (Again, there aren’t enough eyeballs there.) He also suggests that such a constellation could also have the potential to be used for public service messaging.
Few in the scientific community are convinced. Piero Benvenuti, professor emeritus of astrophysics at the University of Padua — who first urged the banning of advertising-by-satellite constellation at the United Nations’ Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, and who will do so again this July — puts the counter-argument simply: “Advertising can already be done and is done extensively on the ground. There’s simply no need for it in space too.”
Benvenuti isn’t against all modern satellites, even those that have interfered with astronomic research. Astronomy first caught onto the idea that satellite constellations can have a negative impact on its work with the deployment of SpaceX’s Starlink six years ago, but in that instance there was a recognition of its social benefit, and so of the need for astronomy to collaborate with such endeavors.
The problem, Benvenuti worries, is not just that such constellations and proposed ones — such as the “Golden Dome” defense array recently proposed by President Donald Trump — require constant replenishment with new satellites (satellites in low-Earth orbit decay over time through friction with the thermosphere) and that this, in turn, may have an as yet unknown impact on the chemical composition of the atmosphere. It’s that low-Earth orbit is just getting way too crowded already.
“People think of space as infinite, but low-Earth orbit isn’t,” he stresses. “Ideally we might limit the number of satellites in low-Earth orbit, but that raises the hard question of how that number might be distributed among nations. But clearly allowing even more satellites into space for advertising makes no sense.”
As artificial light spreads, we don’t just “lose the night sky.” As astronomer Connie Walker sees it, “we lose part of ourselves.”
Jan Siminski says these satellite swarms could prove catastrophic. He monitors potential debris collisions for satellites for the European Space Agency, and with some 500,000 bits of space junk in orbit already, he has to pay close attention. He cites the so-called Kessler syndrome, first proposed by NASA scientists Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais in the late ‘70s, in which a crowded orbit sees a greater frequency of collisions, which creates a debris field, which then causes more collisions, and on and on.
“Of course the probability of a collision increases with the number of satellites and if [an advertising constellation is] flying in formation you could get a cascade effect within that constellation. So its operators would have to be very confident of their control,” says Siminski. “But the potential for a cascade effectively poses a risk to all satellites and the systems they provide [from Earth observation to meteorology to communications]. And, long term, the effect could be that we can’t launch into space anymore.”
There is an alternative for the future of space advertising. While it may not involve projecting logos or slogans from on high, one niche business has for the last 15 years been busy sending products into space, filming some complex stunt involving them for social media, and then returning them to Earth. Originally launched as a test platform for the then-fledgling cubesat industry, the U.K.-based Sent Into Space soon found itself working for the likes of Sony, Heinz, Jameson, Mattel, Visa and Samsonite. It even fired an Oreo into infinity and beyond using an air-powered cannon.
“Space very quickly became an advertising platform for brands whose products are not necessarily related to space but who want to see them against that amazing vista. People know that’s hard to pull off and so it signals the brand’s success and ambition,” suggests Chris Rose, cofounder of Sent Into Space, which mostly uses high-altitude balloons to carry payloads of up to three tons. “The fact is that we’re in the midst of a new space race, one centered around culture and entertainment as much as exploration. These [launches] get hundreds of millions of views online. The allure of space to brands will wane [in time], but I think we’ll see exponential growth first.”
Critically though, Rose emphasizes, Sent Into Space’s projects are fleeting and passive. And that is how he believes space advertising has to be.
“We go up, we don’t hang around, we come down, we leave nothing behind,” he says. “If a client came to me and said they wanted to project [their brand] to Earth from space, I’d tell them that the idea was gross. And I’d explain why it wouldn’t work — because it’s likely that everyone would hate them for it.”
Marc Andreessen’s 2011 prediction that “software is eating the world” has proven prophetic, but nowhere has the transformation been more complete than in marketing. At this year’s Cannes Lions — advertising’s equivalent of the Oscars — the technology takeover that’s been building for years is now complete.
Walking down the Croisette, the traditional advertising agencies that once dominated have been replaced by tech giants: Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Pinterest, Reddit, Spotify and Salesforce now command the iconic boulevard. But this shift represents just the beginning of a far more fundamental transformation.
We’re witnessing the death of marketing as we know it, replaced by an AI-driven paradigm that’s rewriting every rule in the playbook.
IDC predicts that by 2028, three out of five marketing functions will be handled by AI workers, while businesses will spend up to three times more on optimizing for AI systems than traditional search engines by 2029. This isn’t a gradual evolution but rather a complete reimagining of how brands and their marketing teams will connect with customers.
For two decades, search engine optimization anchored digital strategy. Companies invested billions in the $90 billion SEO industry, obsessing over Google rankings and keyword strategies. That playbook is becoming obsolete.
Search is rapidly migrating from traditional browsers to AI platforms. Apple’s integration of AI-powered tools like Perplexity directly into Safari represents just the beginning of Google’s declining monopoly on discovery. What’s emerging is what venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz calls generative engine optimization — optimizing for AI-driven answers instead of clickable links.
As AI use soars and companies shift from SEO to GEO, the implications are staggering. Instead of ranking high on search results pages, brands now need to be featured directly in AI responses. Traditional SEO tactics become worthless when AI models synthesize answers from multiple sources while maintaining context across conversations.
“How you’re encoded into the AI layer is the new competitive advantage,” explains Zach Cohen from a16z. Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch recently noted that ChatGPT was already referring 10% of his company’s new customers simply by mentioning it in AI responses. This organic referral power represents a glimpse of AI’s customer acquisition potential.
Success metrics are fundamentally changing. Page views matter less than “reference rates” — how often AI systems cite your brand when answering customer queries. Companies are already deploying specialized tools to track AI mentions and optimize content accordingly such as Brandrank.ai, Peec.ai and Quni.ai
The next wave is even more disruptive: autonomous AI agents that act on behalf of both consumers and businesses. Every major tech company is focused on bringing agents to life — from global giants like Google, Microsoft and Salesforce and frontier models like Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI to AI-native startups like Glean, Sierra and Writer. They are racing to deploy agents that can make decisions, execute transactions and interact with other agents with minimal human oversight.
A recent PwC survey reveals 35% of companies are broadly adopting AI agents, with another 17% implementing them across nearly all workflows. While still early days, this isn’t experimental technology — it’s becoming operational reality.
The AI Agents are coming, and both consumers and brands will have not just one, but dozens of … More
Getty Images
Consider the customer journey transformation: Your customer’s personal AI assistant might research products, negotiate prices and complete purchases without the customer ever visiting your website. Meanwhile, your company’s AI agent handles inquiries, provides recommendations and closes deals 24/7. The entire transaction could happen between two AI systems.
“Previously, marketers would target campaigns directly at customers, but now the shortlisting and decisions are made by the AI,” notes a recent IDC report. This represents a fundamental shift in where influence occurs — companies must now market to algorithms as much as humans.
The speed of this transition is remarkable. What took decades with previous technology shifts is happening in months with AI. Companies that don’t adapt risk becoming invisible in an AI-mediated marketplace.
AI agents are erasing traditional boundaries between marketing, sales and customer service. When a customer’s AI communicates with your company’s AI, it doesn’t matter whether the inquiry is about product features, pricing or technical support — it’s all one continuous conversation.
This convergence creates unprecedented opportunities for customer experience optimization. A well-designed AI agent can greet customers by name, recall purchase history, answer technical questions, process returns and suggest upgrades within a single interaction. The result is more efficient operations and significantly improved customer satisfaction.
However, it also demands organizational restructuring. Companies can no longer operate with siloed departments when AI systems need unified customer data and consistent messaging across all touchpoints. Early adopters are already reorganizing around integrated AI platforms rather than functional divisions.
The employment implications are substantial and immediate. A 2024 industry survey found 78% of marketers expect at least a quarter of their tasks to be automated within three years, with over one-third anticipating more than half their work becoming AI-automated.
Meta’s public roadmap discusses fully automating advertising campaigns, where humans only set budgets and high-level objectives. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are developing systems that handle targeting, creative generation and optimization without human intervention.
But this disruption creates new opportunities for professionals who adapt. As AI handles routine tasks, human expertise shifts toward strategy, creativity, ethics and managing hybrid human-AI teams. Tomorrow’s marketing leaders will be part creative director, part technologist, part data scientist — orchestrating AI systems rather than managing manual processes.
In this AI-driven landscape, two assets become disproportionately valuable: brand strength and first-party data.
Strong brands gain significant advantages in AI-mediated interactions. When AI systems trained on billions of data points make recommendations, they naturally favor well-known, trusted brands. This creates a compounding effect where established brands become even more prominent in AI responses.
First-party customer data becomes the fuel for competitive AI systems. Companies with rich, consent-based customer information can train more sophisticated AI agents that deliver superior personalized experiences. In an era of privacy regulations and disappearing third-party cookies, this data represents a crucial competitive moat.
AI is growing exponentially, like a snowball gaining size and speed. In tasks like language and image generation, performance is doubling roughly every six months, driven by massive computing power, huge datasets and smarter algorithms. Companies that wait for certainty will find themselves permanently behind.
AI agents will transform consumers — and marketing as we know it.
Gado via Getty Images
The strategic response requires three parallel efforts:
Most importantly, leaders must recognize this isn’t about adopting new tools. It’s about reimagining customer relationships in an AI-mediated world. The companies that thrive will be those that ensure their AI agents deliver genuine value, maintain trust and enhance rather than replace human connection.
We’re entering a world where billions of people will have trillions of AI agents. The question isn’t whether AI will transform customer engagement — it’s whether your company will lead or follow in that transformation. The rules of marketing are being rewritten by AI. The winners will be those who write the new playbook.
If Cannes Lions is a microcosm of the ad industry, then this year’s festival mirrored a trend playing out across the corporate world: the public discourse about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has gotten quieter.
As recently as three years ago DEI was the topic du jour at Cannes Lions. But attendees this year told ADWEEK they observed fewer Palais sessions focused on DEI and less conversation about it offstage.
“There were disappointingly few discussions devoted to addressing diversity,” Rania Robinson, CEO of London agency Quiet Storm, told ADWEEK.
Cannes Lions hosted a few main stage talks at the Palais focused on DEI. Havas and The New York Times spoke about neurodiversity, and talent agency ZBD Talent spoke on a session called “The Inclusion Revolution.” However, conversation at the festival centered instead on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI), as well as trends such as creators and sports marketing.
“Conversations that once centered on equity, representation, and systemic progress were largely replaced with AI, ROI, and humor as the new creative currency,” said Ted Kohnen, CEO of agency Park & Battery.
Cannes Lions spokespeople did not respond to ADWEEK’s request for specifics about the diversity of attendees or DEI programming this year.
The lack of open discussion about DEI in Cannes reflects a wider corporate shift amid businesses walking back their DEI commitments due to right-wing political pressure. Target, Ford, and Walmart are among major brands that have ceased or rolled back DEI initiatives in the past year.
During Pride Month in June, companies including Anheuser-Busch, PepsiCo, and Nissan dropped or scaled back their sponsorship of Pride events, the Associated Press reported. And during Black History Month in February, mentions declined in brands’ social media and corporate announcements, ADWEEK analysis revealed.
Marketers are more cautious about articulating values and taking public stances amid an “increasingly unpredictable” and tense geopolitical environment, according to research from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) published this month. In WFA’s survey of global marketers, 81% said that today’s environment is riskier compared to 12 months ago.
Cannes Lions has been criticized in recent years for too heavily awarding purpose-driven work rather than commercially-driven campaigns. Last year, the festival added a humor subcategory to encourage more business-minded entries.
Amid these pressures, attendees like Lola Bakare, inclusive marketing strategist and author, observed a prevailing “attitude of restraint around discussions related to DEI.”
While Bakare participated in panels hosted by partners such as ADWEEK, Tubi, Purpose Hive, and e.l.f. Beauty that “addressed the subject head on,” she “saw a lack of willingness to ‘go there’ from others whom I’ve partnered with in the past, like LinkedIn,” Bakare said.
Instead, she observed an increase in “coded language” at many events, replacing the terms “diversity, equity, and inclusion” with words like “culture” and “purpose.”
She said brands and platforms with the power to advocate for DEI boldly are shying away from the opportunity. Instead, they’re “toeing an arbitrary line drawn in the sand by a loud minority of voices that prefer we regress back to a status quo.”
Though DEI discussion was noticeably quieter, the topic wasn’t totally absent from Cannes.
Fringe events, such as WACL’s Empower Café and Cannes Can: Diversity Collective (CC:DC)’s Inkwell Beach, “filled in the gap for more inclusive conversations,” said Adrianne C. Smith, founder of CC:DC and chief inclusion and impact officer at FleishmanHillard.
Inkwell Beach debuted at Cannes in 2019 in an effort to make the festival more inclusive. In its first year, Inkwell drew an average of 40 to 50 attendees per session. This year, that increased to an average of 100 to 150 attendees at each of its seven or eight panels per day, Smith said. Over 10,000 people registered for the beach this year.
However, Inkwell also had to slightly scale back its activation this year after some sponsors reduced or ceased their investment, Smith said.
“There were even some who pulled out 10 days before we hit the ground, which was devastating,” she said. “Uncertainty is the thing making people risk averse–they want to just do what they know.”
At odds with the lack of candid conversation along the Croisette, the work awarded at Cannes this year came from a more diverse set of global agencies.
For example, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Chicago Hearing Society, and FCB Chicago won three Grands Prix for “Caption with Intention,” which redesigned closed captioning for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing communities. British broadcaster Channel 4 won a Film Grand Prix for its Paralympics ad challenging disability stereotypes. And Brazilian company Idomed and agency Artplan won the Industry Craft Grand Prix for a book addressing racial inequities faced by Black patients in the healthcare system.
Cannes Lions also expanded the scope of the Glass award—established in 2015 to recognize work progressing gender equality—to campaigns promoting representation across disability, race, sexuality, and social inequity. The 2025 Glass Grand Prix went to Dove’s latest “Real Beauty” initiative.
“While diversity wasn’t trending in the talks or headlines, it was still present in the work, in casting, in storytelling, and in the topics brands are willing to tackle,” said Alex Bennett-Grant, co-founder of Amsterdam agency We Are Pi. “The creative industry hasn’t turned away from it—not yet.”
He and Smith said that while open discussion about DEI waned along the Croisette, they both observed a more diverse crowd of attendees compared to previous years.
“Most of the people who looked like me in the first year [I attended Cannes] were either the help or the entertainment,” Smith said. “Now I see more thought leaders in C-suite or leadership positions who are on the stages, and that’s important.”
Still, she noted the lack of “mainstream presence of [DEI] conversations” at the festival, adding she hopes for more next year.
For his part, Bennett-Grant warned that as government policies and corporate priorities shift, the ad industry “needs to stay vigilant” about DEI.
“There’s a real risk that progress starts to roll back,” he said. “We must protect the space that’s been created for underrepresented voices.”
Artificial intelligence will inevitably reduce the number of people needed for today’s advertising work – but it will also fuel a wave of new, different jobs, according to WPP CEO Mark Read, according to a report by ADWEEK.
Speaking at the inaugural SXSW London on Wednesday, Read laid out his perspective on AI’s disruptive impact on the ad industry. “To do the work we do today, there will be fewer people doing it,” he acknowledged. “But there will be many more and different things that people do,” he added in the report.
Read emphasized that innovation drives new opportunities, likening AI’s job-creating potential to how platforms like Instagram and TikTok spawned the booming creator economy. But Read also issued a clear warning to brands: don’t treat AI merely as an “efficiency tool.” According to Read, AI is a way to work more quickly and efficiently, but also to be more effective.
WPP itself has been betting big on AI, both to future-proof its business and drive creative innovation. Last week, the holding company launched an ad campaign spotlighting WPP Open – its proprietary AI-powered marketing platform – backed by more than $400 million in annual investment and key partnerships with AI firms, the report added.
The company’s AI portfolio also includes its 2021 acquisition of tech firm Satalia and an investment in Stability AI earlier this year.
Despite wider industry anxieties about AI’s impact on creative jobs, Read struck an optimistic tone. “The creative industries will be some of the best defended industries against AI [because] we will have all of these tools,” he said in the media report.
He predicted AI will soon be embedded across nearly all advertising platforms. Every TV that we see won’t have a reason not to use AI, Read said in the report. It will only be a matter of time until the first AI film wins an Oscar – not by writing the script, but by creating the film, Read clarified.
Read also defended another controversial company move – WPP’s mandatory return-to-office policy. The four-day-in-office rule took effect in April and caused friction across some agencies and teams, ADWEEK reported.
“I think people are happier when they’re in the office. In our offices, they’re much happier,” Read said in the report.
But his rationale was serious: the pace of change in the industry requires close collaboration. “If we’re going to deal with all of this [AI-driven transformation], we better be together. We’re not going to be able to do it through video screens very easily,” he said in the report.
Get away from the sameness and push for something bold—it can pay off.
Boring is expensive. The first time I saw those words was the summer of 2023. Our head of strategy in New York had them on a slide during a meeting, and it stopped me cold.
Since then, it’s become something of a mantra around here, not because it was a new idea, but because it captured something I’ve felt in my bones since the beginning of our agency.
It put a price tag on the thing we’ve been fighting all along: sameness.
I’ve always believed that distinctive work wins. It wins creatively, emotionally, and commercially. That the best advertising doesn’t blend in with the category. It stands out from it. Sometimes it even does the exact opposite of what the rest of the category is doing.
And now, more than ever, that matters.
We’re living in an age of sameness. Average is everywhere. The gravitational pull to fit in is strong. And I’m not just talking about advertising.
Fitting in, after all, is a good thing for us humans.
We want to belong. We want to blend in with the group.
We want our kids to be accepted at school.
We even want our dogs to fit in with their furry friends at the dog park.
But if you’re a brand, fitting in is the fast track to irrelevance.
When everything looks and feels the same, what are people supposed to base their choice on? Usually, it’s price.
At our company, we talk a lot about “fighting sameness.” Because while comfort might feel like safer bet (especially in turbulent times), safe can be forgettable. And it can be costly.
That’s what research from Binet & Field, System1, and the IPA has shown us:
That’s the cost of boring.
And we’ve seen the upside of doing the opposite when brands are brave enough to stand out, the results follow.
Like when Extra Gum launched their now-famous comeback ad in 2021, set to Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.” While most brands were preaching caution and isolation, Extra leaned into humor, joy, and pent-up human connection. Sales spiked. Brand metrics jumped. It won the Global Grand Effie, the top recognition for advertising effectiveness.
We’ve seen it firsthand in our own work, too.
At the height of inflation, we launched The Fixed-Rate Pizza for Pizza Pizza, a tongue-in-cheek campaign that treated pizza like a financial asset. People could “lock in” their price for a full year, complete with “pre-approvals.” It cut through the noise and immediately drove increases to store, web traffic, and sales growth.
With Harry’s, our brand platform “Man, that feels good” challenged the overpromising masculinity tropes of the grooming category. And it’s paying off. Honesty has always been part of the brand’s DNA and leaning back into it has drove lifts in awareness, consideration, and perceived quality across the board.
When the work dares to be different and it makes people feel something, it works better. Full stop.
So yes, “boring is expensive” might be a clever turn of phrase. But to all of us in the marketing community, it’s more than that.
It’s a reminder. A challenge.
And maybe even a little warning.
So if you’re in a position to shape the work, as a marketer, as a CEO, as a CFO, this is your moment.
Push for the bold
The next time you brief your agency, ask for something you haven’t seen before. Something that makes you feel something. Resist the comfort of category conventions. Don’t reach for the familiar. Reach for the stuff that scares you a little. The stuff that gets talked about, remembered, and passed around.
Fight for the work that doesn’t blend in.
Back your creative teams when they bring you bold, emotional, human ideas. No, actually push them further. Challenge them to surprise you.
Because safe might get approved, but it rarely moves the needle.
So push for bold. Ask for different. Fight sameness.
Advertisers were asked to pay over double what they had spent on X before, or face legal action.
A new report from the Wall Street Journal details just how far X owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino have gone to claw back lost ad dollars. The strategy: leverage the courts.
According to the WSJ, Yaccarino and X’s legal team have threatened to pull several major advertisers into their sweeping lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), accusing the group of orchestrating an industry-wide boycott of the platform. As a result of the mounting legal pressure, the WFA shut down its nonprofit initiative, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media.
The group was designed to help member companies avoid placing ads on platforms that spread harmful content.
When Musk took over the site formerly known as Twitter in 2022, nearly half of its top advertisers bailed. Musk’s overhaul of moderation and verification policies led to the reinstatement of banned far-right accounts and chaos over brand impersonation, thanks to the rollout of paid blue checkmarks without real verification. Then, another report alleged ads were being shown next to pro-Nazi content, so more brands fled. In response, X filed suit against Media Matters for America, the nonprofit that published that report.
Now, the alleged message from X’s leadership is explicit: advertise with us, or risk becoming a defendant.
Some brands, like Verizon and Ralph Lauren, have returned, per the Journal. Verizon has committed to $10 million in ad spend, with a possibility of ramping up to $25 million. Others, including Pinterest, have declined — and now appear as named parties in the WFA suit.
Unilever, one of the world’s largest advertisers, was originally included in the lawsuit. A few months later, after pledging an undisclosed ad spend, its name was quietly dropped, the Journal reported.
The push to reel advertisers back in comes as X continues to chase shrinking revenue. According to the report, the platform pulled in just $2.6 billion in 2024, down from $4.6 billion in 2022, the year Musk took over. The xAI merger helped push the numbers up, and X’s ad revenue is expected to grow in 2025 for the first time under Musk’s ownership.
However, it’s still projected to fall short of pre-acquisition levels.
Plus: Marketers Love Data But Can’t Always Use It, Google’s Likely Precarious Mobile AI Search Dominance, ABC News Live Goes All In On Diddy, Affluent Travelers Stay Grounded
Marketing is a creative discipline, attracting people with outside-of-the-box ideas, a flair for writing and design, a desire to build connections with customers, and enthusiasm for a brand or product. Those on this career path often aren’t the people drawn to programming, data, math and technical aspects. Yet in today’s world, AI and other new technologies are coming to the marketing department, offering applications that can make a marketer’s work more effective—if only they would use it.
A new study from Canva shows that marketers know the value of data and tech, but they are still hesitant to use it. Two-thirds of marketing and sales professionals are anxious about data, with 3 in 10 going out of their way to avoid using it. Canva’s survey, which includes more than 2,400 marketing and sales professionals worldwide, focused mostly on basic data use, including spreadsheets. Nearly 9 in 10 marketers work with data and spreadsheets on a weekly basis or more, but only 44% feel confident when starting a data-heavy task. More than half often make spreadsheet errors, like misusing formulas and struggling to analyze what the spreadsheets can say.
However, more than three-quarters of marketers want to get better at working with data, and hope to improve their effectiveness. A total of 76% think that AI might be the solution, improving data work by automating tedious tasks and suggesting data visualizations. AI certainly can be an aid, but it isn’t the whole solution. More effective and easier-to-use tools could help, as well as continuous practical training that clearly shows how to use the available tech and why the processes work. The data also needs to be explained and fully accessible to marketers, meaning there might be some work to be done on the enterprise system as a whole. The tech and training should be fairly intuitive as well. Marketers are willing to take some time to learn, but they still want to focus on their actual jobs. Canva found that just over half of respondents are willing to invest up to three hours learning new solutions.
For years, marketers have known that YouTube is an important platform, but its impact is just now coming into focus. YouTube is now the most-watched TV channel in the U.S., and trends of what kinds of videos people watch and who those viewers are can determine messaging success. I talked to Evan Shapiro, a longtime media professional who calls himself the Media Universe Cartographer, about some recent research he’s compiled on the video streaming platform. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.
On desktop computers, Google dominates search of all kinds—both traditional and AI-enabled. The tech giant is leading on mobile right now as well, but that could soon change. New research from BrightEdge shows that 54% of all AI searches come from mobile. Other AI search engines get just a sliver of their traffic from mobile: ChatGPT sees just 6% from mobile devices, and Microsoft’s Bing gets only 4.5% from phones.
While it looks like Google dominates this field, it doesn’t have the same search foothold as it does on computers. BrightEdge found that 58% of Google’s mobile search traffic to brand websites comes from iPhones, which makes sense considering they default to Google Search. If Apple were to change the default to another search engine, or a partnership with another AI provider for search, the percentages likely would change immediately.
AI search is getting better all the time, but so are AI videos. Columbia Journalism Review launched a public service campaign—cleverly named PSAi—to help the public distinguish real video from that generated by artificial intelligence, Forbes senior contributor Leslie Katz writes. The video features a catchy rap song with several AI memes—Pope Francis in a designer puffer coat, Will Smith eating spaghetti, Shrimp Jesus and a boat crew rescuing a polar bear—displaying some of the telltale signs of AI.