What Cannes Lions signaled about what's next

Cannes Lions highlighted a transition from AI experimentation to organizational redesign. We’ve talked a lot about what AI can do, and now it’s more toward how it is actually reshaping marketing operating models, connecting media, creative, data, and technology into a more integrated system. Marketing is increasingly being rebuilt as a connected, always-on system rather than a sequence of standalone campaigns.

At the Cannes Lions CMO Accelerator, in partnership with The Brandtech Group, we brought this shift to life through The Great Honey Experiment. Using a single agentic workflow in Pencil, our leading gen AI agentic marketing platform, we created three distinct honey brands live on stage, each designed for a different audience. The experiment reinforced that success with AI is not only about capability, but about the operating system around it, including people, process, and creative direction.

Three themes stood out across the festival.

First, AI-readiness as organizational design. The most effective companies are treating AI as a C-suite level transformation challenge, redesigning teams, roles, and decision-making structures around integrated, tech-enabled systems rather than functional silos.

Second, the dual audience reality, where discoverability is shaped as much by machines as by people, driven by recommendation engines and large language models.

To explore what this means, we unveiled new research with INSEAD at the Cannes Lions x WARC Creative Impact stage. Jellyfish’s Tom Roach, VP Brand Strategy and Natasha Wallace, Chief Solutions Officer, with INSEAD’s David Dubois, used Share of Model™ to analyse 480 Cannes Lions ads and compare how humans and AI models evaluate creativity.

The findings point to a dual audience reality. There was zero correlation between human and AI model rankings. Humans respond more to storytelling, emotion, and narrative, while AI prioritises clarity, structure, product visibility, and explicit signals. Rather than requiring separate strategies, this points to the need for stronger unified brand systems that can be interpreted across both audiences. As AI increasingly draws on wider ecosystem signals beyond brand-owned channels, consistency across creators, reviews, and third-party content becomes critical to effectiveness. Read more about the findings here.

The third topic is, culture at machine speed. The creator economy is accelerating participation, with brands blending AI-driven production and strong creative direction to stay relevant in real time.

Across sessions, there was also a clear move from campaign thinking to connected systems. Commerce, content, and media are converging into continuous loops where performance and brand building reinforce each other. The most effective work reflected this shift, from community-led models like Vaseline Originals and Dove Real Reviews, to culture-hacking ideas such as Kit Kat Heist and Coca-Cola meme activations, to commerce-integrated executions like BCP’s POS banking solution and Mercado Libre’s stadium experiences.

Looking ahead, Cannes pointed to a maturing phase where AI becomes invisible infrastructure. As that happens, attention shifts back toward craft, storytelling, and creative quality, with the core challenge being how well brands align people, systems, and culture into one coherent, adaptive operating model.

Get the key findings, plus a handpicked list of further reading and podcasts. Read more