It’s been a little over a week since Cannes Lions 2025, and the conversations are still echoing. As the excitement settles, we’re reflecting on the key themes that dominated our conversations and the insights that will reshape marketing, media, and growth in the years ahead. Here are the five takeaways that will have a lasting impact:
1. Agentic AI is past the experimentation phase
While AI was everywhere at Cannes, what stood out was how companies are moving beyond pilot purgatory into real execution. Agentic AI is scaling fast, redefining workflows and proving real value across both B2B and B2C organizations.
Traditionally difficult to implement, agentic systems have become far more accessible thanks to foundation models trained on vast, unstructured data. These systems can interpret natural language prompts, break them into actionable tasks, and execute complex workflows without the need for rule-based programming or extensive retraining.
Marketing is leading the way for adoption, with agents already driving hyper-personalized campaigns, scaled customer experiences, and intelligent media buying. To realize full impact, organizations need strong first-party data foundations, AI-literate teams, and clear KPIs to validate use cases.
Key question: Do you have the right systems and talent in place to make your organization agentic AI-ready?
2. Human-AI partnership is what distinguishes leaders from the rest
Gen AI is accelerating creativity and execution—helping marketers move from concept to campaign in record time, while freeing up capacity for higher-value thinking and more impactful outcomes. But as AI-generated content floods the landscape, real differentiation comes from keeping humans in the loop.
As roles evolve and new ones emerge (think: chief AI officer, AI ethicist, AI governance lead), organizations will need to rethink the skills, oversight, and collaboration needed in an AI-driven world. Blending human judgement with AI isn’t just critical for creativity it’s also essential for safety, ethics, and trust.
Key question: How are you using AI to both maximize productivity and unlock human creativity?
3. Consumer attention is not all equal
There’s a new way to think about media monetization—one that prioritizes the quality of consumer attention over the quantity of time spent. As marketers develop a more nuanced understanding of attention across platforms, they're rethinking each channel’s role in the full-funnel journey and how to optimize their mix and spend.
It’s no longer just about reach or duration, but rather the value of the attention captured: the consumer’s focus and intent. This shift is transforming how brands and publishers activate high-attention channels like CTV and live sports as part of integrated, often closed-loop, strategies.
Key question: Is your creative and media mix optimized to capture meaningful consumer attention?
4. CMO-CFO-CEO alignment can drive growth
At this year’s Cannes Lions, the launch of a global CEO forum underscored a growing concern: the widening disconnect between CEOs and CMOs. CEOs and their teams are grappling with non-stop disruption as customer behavior is more fragmented than ever before. No single function or executive owns the customer—yet marketing is uniquely positioned to connect the dots across sales, digital, support, product, and finance.
The divide between CEOs and CMOs over what metrics should be used to judge success is growing. While 70 percent of CEOs evaluate marketing based on revenue and margin, only 35 percent of CMOs prioritize those metrics, resulting in a misalignment on what success looks like. Companies that embed marketing at the core of their growth agenda are 1.4x more likely to outperform peers.
Key question: How effectively are you translating marketing KPIs into core business outcomes?
5. Commerce media is shifting into other advertiser categories
Commerce media is rapidly expanding beyond consumer-packaged goods (CPG) into categories like travel, last-mile delivery, and financial services. Nearly half of advertisers surveyed say they plan to increase their investment across these emerging networks, drawn by the opportunity to reach highly targeted, intent-rich audiences. Sixty percent of CPG brands and 70 percent of travel advertisers say that they will increase their spend in the year ahead.
This momentum is fueled by improved sales strategies, continued product innovation, and stronger cross-channel measurement that clearly demonstrates ROI. As a result, commerce media is no longer a niche play but quickly becoming a foundational component of performance-driven, full-funnel strategies.
Key question: Are you set up to deliver, measure, and attribute performance in a way that earns trust?