Author: Seb Joseph

Somewhere in Cannes over dinner, one ad exec asked the question nobody likes asking out loud: would anyone actually notice if they just didn’t turn up to any of this? They weren’t being cynical. If anything, they were being candid. They’d spent the week running from meeting to meeting and couldn’t point to a single one that wouldn’t have happened anyway, eventually. Asked how they measure whether thirty-six hours of meetings, handshakes, dinners, late-night WhatsApp rants and rosé actually worked, they didn’t pretend there was a hard metric. There isn’t one. It’s a soft win, they said. They showed up and so did everyone else and the showing up is the whole transaction.

Nobody at the table disagreed. They just gave the exec the look that means “and what.” Cannes has run on presence over proof for as long as anyone’s been coming here. That part isn’t news. What’s actually changed is the price of admission. This was the year the people writing the checks started doing the math out loud.

The numbers, once you start collecting them, get hard to unhear.

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Bose CMO Jim Mollica hasn’t used a creative agency in four or five years, he told Digiday. One CPG CMO, overheard at a dinner this week, said they no longer believe in agencies of record. They want ideas to come from anywhere — a creative agency, a creator, even AI. Creator-owned StudioB founder Olly Lewis met with several CMOs this week who want creator-made shows, not TV ads, as the baseline for their advertising.

These are small examples but they point to something bigger. For the first time, a growing number of CMOs are thinking about creative more broadly than creative agencies. Those businesses don’t have a monopoly on it anymore.

“What we see from our own agency partners when we collaborate from the same starting point are more relevant campaigns that enhance the consumers’ in-the-moment experience — faster iteration, sharper formats, and work that adapts as audiences do,” said Corey Rados, head of global creative studio at Uber Advertising. “When AI is optimizing placements against real-time behaviors in milliseconds, brands need to build campaigns that can move fluidly with those signals. This makes closer collaboration across creative and media necessary.”

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