Founder of Eventers, reporting from advertising and marketing events around the world, highlighting the people and ideas moving the industry forward.
With the festival over, a few clear themes stand out from the week's sessions, winners and debates. AI was discussed less as a novelty and more in terms of results. Creators were present in larger numbers and with more leverage. And much of the work that performed best...
Watching the work roll across the screens at the Palais, a pattern kept repeating. The campaigns that stayed with us did not interrupt people; they gave them something to do, to share, or to argue about. Crisis turned into participation, honesty turned into media, and a tub of petroleum jelly...
Leandro Barreto, Unilever's global CMO, used his Cannes session to push back on the idea that the company is simply "going social first." The real shift, he argued, is "going reality first," building brands around what other people actually want to say about them...
Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, took the Cannes stage to talk about where artificial intelligence is actually heading, and his answer ran against the grain of a festival built on advertising. AI is somewhat overhyped in the near term, he argued, and underrated over the long...
Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer of P&G, structured his Cannes session as a duel. For each big question on the audience's mind, he first read out a tidy answer from a P&G AI engine he nicknamed "ChatPG," then countered with the version...
OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser used her Cannes conversation with CNBC's Julia Boorstin to walk through the company's young advertising business inside ChatGPT, and her framing was deliberately narrow. Ads in ChatGPT, she argued, only work if they are useful. The pitch is not interruption...
