A Freight Train is About to Hit Cannes
Well, I was part of the big, shiny Cannes experience. Crazy to think this was my first time at Cannes after over twenty-five years in the ad business. But then again, I was never a pure creative myself — which is who I’d always imagined Cannes was about.
At first glance, the French Riviera festival fit all my expectations. I was surrounded by creative minds buzzing about subversive art and headline smashing campaigns. Brand execs sporting event wristbands like neon trophies. DSP heads footing a casual $1m fee to take over a restaurant for a thirty-minute glitter cannon party. Coated in a vague mist of golden confetti, I figured this was the essential Cannes experience: a Super Bowl sized party for our industry where a bit of hard-earned bacchanal intersects with the ad-world's best & brightest minds driving billion-dollar decision making around the globe.
But as the days went on and I dove deeper into the events along La Croisette, I started to feel like something was ... off. A sense that beyond all the private yachts and power-soaked dinners, the festival felt like a farewell party to simpler times. Times where we’ve seen principal media become an acceptable principle. Where SSPs and DSPs have thrived with an opaque cost structure. Where the agency value-add of strategic planning has been cutoff at the knees by a wide faction of brand marketers.
Maybe “simple” wasn’t the right word for these times, after all.
And as I searched for some kind of comfort in what the future holds, that farewell feeling only grew as I sat front row for a series of AI talks. Having invested in the AI space since 2016 and having been exposed in depth to the underlying science, I firmly believe that our industry awareness of AI’s impact has only been scratching the surface of the changing guard to come.
Now would be a good time to point out Zuckerberg’s yacht floating ominously just off the coast — with the man himself never appearing onshore — like some imperious Orwellian symbol of a ruler studying his subjects from afar.
I know this all sounds doom and gloom, but I promise I'm not pushing for cynicism — I’m sounding a wake-up call for us to take advantage of the major transformation that is upon us.
This industry is going to look vastly different in a few years time. Full stop. No amount of glitter guns or ad tech funded champagne soirées will change our course. Meaning we all need to start being honest with ourselves about what the industry will look like after a few years of rapid transformation, and how we will be active participants in the disruption that’s already underway.
The proliferation of AI might seem like it’s simply the latest innovation in a constant wave of change — but it’s not a simple shift, it’s a paradigm change with massive opportunities and existential stakes. If we believe in Forresters’s recent impact analysis on how AI will affect the agency landscape, we’re agreeing to a future where roughly 8% of the agency workforce could be displaced by automation. If you believe in Anthropic’s Dario Amodei’s dire outlook, we’re looking at a potential 50% reduction in the broader white-collar workforce. That figure may sound extreme—but it starts to feel plausible when you factor in the accelerating power of agentic workflows and platform-level automation.
So with our view of Cannes as a jumping off point for the broader advertising landscape, let’s take a clear-eyed, realpolitik look at the warp-speed changes reshaping the industry and what bold choices we need to make to succeed in an algorithmically driven ad world.
Here are my top-line takeaways:
The Arrival of the Tech Nerds
You notice it at every meeting and industry event worldwide. Despite all the claims of tech-enablement, agency rosters across the board are conspicuously light on tech personnel.
Looking at the agency-wide talent pool, most rosters are currently full of craftsmen in media, creative, strategy, etc. — very often with a heavy emphasis on account services and project management. True tech personnel are mostly constrained to roles within web and app development, maybe systems integration work. Sure, with the increasing demand for data processing and reporting, we've seen a trend in expanding analytics teams. But in the end, these are typically lower-level data processors without deep technical and scientific expertise.
This is all about to change. As the high-speed AI train comes barreling toward our industry, agencies and marketers are going to need to reconstruct the composition of their teams from the bottom up. And the impact will stretch far beyond the beaches of Cannes where new logos like Databricks and OpenAI will become central to the axis of power.
The dominance of data driven capabilities even beyond the current AI - LLM landscape is going to drive a major staffing shake-up. Across agencies, brand marketers, media publishers, et al. — the impact will be universally felt. And the net result will be the need for a majority of team members with deep technical and scientific resources that know how to harness the power of the data, tech and AI revolution.
Tiny Industry
Speaking of team reconfiguration, it’s not just about swapping out capabilities — it’s about honestly assessing the size of team needed to hit peak efficiency in a next-gen ad world.
I’m a strong believer in Silicon Valley’s Tiny Startup perspective that modern start-ups should be built around a less-is-more staffing mindset.
Like high octane petrol in a French Riviera Ferrari, the AI transformation is poised to supercharge this strategy and make it all the more valuable. Automation, open data pipelines, agent-based systems, modern inter-connected SaaS — there’s an army of emergent systems now ready for prime-time that are not just reducing the need for human capital, they’re empowering forward-thinking orgs to create a modern operational OS that drives (pun intended) Formula 1 level speed and agility.
Which raises a vital question for all of us operators who have been thriving in the current ecosystem: how do we rapidly change our operational OS to harness the power of next-gen tech without upending our current course of business or undercutting our organizational culture?
At the minimum, my recommendation is to begin an honest dialogue about what these OS upgrades mean for your own business. Because I can promise you this: the new cadre of ad businesses will be built from the ground up to leverage these systems. And if you don’t begin the conversation now about how to future proof and adapt, you’re going to be at war with a new wave of operators whose agility, speed of delivery and cost structures are light years beyond what we’ve long considered ‘industry standard’.
New Service Layers / Offerings
The wave of organizational change doesn’t end with talent. For any successful next-gen participant of our industry, those fresh faces will also call for a fresh outlook on service offerings.
We’re entering a world in which media will be hyper-optimized by automated platforms (yes, media planners, Google’s PMax is smarter than all of us - eventually). In which creative AI agents will edit, personalize and spin core creative with minimal human intervention. Which begs the question: in this near-future world, how do you define your core purpose with your clients?
Got some ideas? I’ll give you two concrete ideas from my POV.
We've all heard the phrase: "Data is the oil of the AI industry.” And the further we move into this new era, the more that’s proving to be true. But look around and you’ll find most of marketers with disconnected & disorganized data lakes. This extends to disjointed creative assets across various DAM executions that are disconnected from media data. Taken as a whole, there’s a clear void for someone to step in and build a strategic path forward for these orgs to optimize-around data implementation. Not as a one-time fix — but as a continual service offering rooted in real time updates and continuous adaptability. Therefore, I’d challenge all of you (especially calling out my Agency friends) to think about how you can get ahead of the curve and own this as an offering. Because I have no doubt this will be a foundational element of our future AI marketing world.
This ties directly into the next potential opportunity area: proprietary data strategy as a service. For years we’ve seen agencies selling themselves based on their “diverse outside perspectives” and their “proprietary methodologies.” As someone who’s been working side by side with AI scientists for 10 years now, I can confidently say that the industry winners in this next chapter will combine both these ideas into data-strategies-as-offerings.
So what does this look like in practice? It means offering a service that goes far beyond any plug-and-play dataset — a solution that delivers data-driven executions tailored to each marketer’s specific goals, powered by custom-trained models. The ability to build a unique, proprietary approach to harnessing data for competitive advantage will be essential, whether you’re a creative agency, an adtech platform, or a publisher. As access to advanced models becomes increasingly democratized, I’d say now is time for all of us to define our strategy for data layering, model training, and ongoing calibration.
The Authentic Self
Zooming out to the macro level, there are some existential questions I’m sure we’re all asking ourselves. What does the future of our industry look like for the flesh-and-bone human workforce? Will I need to re-invent myself? Jockey for space with the big bad LLM’s and agents who have now entered the room?
Fortunately, the answer to many of these very large questions can be answered with one concept: authentic ingenuity.
I’d never claim to know the outer limit of AI’s powers, but I do know that all of the existing models struggle deeply with true ingenuity. This shouldn’t be surprising. Training on historical data is bound to produce results that are — in a fundamental sense — derivative. Given the same models trained on the same data will trend towards similar outputs, it’s easy to envision a world hyper-saturated with what I’d call the “standard AI based campaign.”
And all the normalization of this output will be compounded by the decreasing average ability of humans to think creatively. There’s already plenty of scientific proof that overreliance on AI leads to cognitive decline
Mix that all together and you have the perfect conditions for a world in which authentic ingenuity will stand out more than ever. Truly differentiated skillsets and outputs that can only be human made will rise above the sea of AI generated ideas.
This doesn’t undercut the importance of embracing the AI wave — but it’s a warning shot reminding us not to get lazy. There’s a difference between optimized and over-reliant. And the types of ideas that come from true introspection and human innovation will be a crucial component to success in the new world: be it in creative, UX/UI, technology, strategy, media, what have you.
Of course, not every situation will call for a layer of originality, and part of future optimization is recognizing how to triage automated vs. human-based tasks. But my challenge for our industry is to flex the muscle of our shared humanity whenever we can, and to celebrate the moments when we are able to showcase our true, authentic selves in what we create.
New Compensation Model
For our final takeaway, we need to address the million-dollar Elephant in the room: how will the AI revolution affect the commercial model of our sector?
We’ve already established that generative LLM models are poised to create a wave of increasingly homogenous output, which — from a monetary perspective — means that authentic ideas and truly unique data models that outperform should generate asymmetrically higher values.
That being the case, I believe it’s imperative we re-imagine the cost structure of our industry, keeping in mind a simple economic truth: as the rarity and marginal utility of truly innovative work-product increases, the dollar amount for that effort should materially increase as well. Long gone should be the days of brands milking $450/hr creative resources for Cannes-headline level work product. That tier of truly differentiated, human-driven ingenuity should be valued in the thousands per hour or a value-based pricing model. Surely, asking for compensation that’s commensurate with the impact of the work shouldn’t seem revolutionary — especially in a world where such unique output will be increasingly hard to find.
Forging this path won’t be easy. The unchecked efficiency-hunting that comes with widespread AI will naturally encourage a race to the bottom. We’re entering an era of Game Theory on steroids. And clients have already been trained to optimize towards assets with the most easily quantifiable impact — i.e. slashing quality to boost the bottom line.
But all of us have ways we can position ourselves to demand higher value for our premium efforts. Even if your model isn’t built around top-shelf creative output, there are plenty of internal levers you can all pull to drive your own brand of ingenuity. Be it your workflow processes that drives superior speed and accuracy, your unique approach to deploying algorithms, your organization of data sets — innovation looks different to every organization. But the larger point prevails: truly meaningful human innovation will be a major driver of outsized value if we have the courage to demand a fair price. And we must all have courage to level up our game — building a roadmap that emphasizes human innovation and delivers premium value to our organizations.
Not Adieu. À Bientôt.
Having had the privilege to work alongside brand marketers, agencies and publishers for my entire career, I feel confident in my observation that we’re all pros when it comes to chatting about the latest buzzwords and the hottest wave of disruptive tech. But when it comes to taking action, many of us tend to do the bare minimum to stay culturally relevant and appear cutting edge.
That’s not a knock on our industry. Habit is a hell of a drug. But the cold hard truth is that the majority of leaders in this space favor their proven formula over fundamental change — meaning we’re currently failing to look beyond the horizon and prepare for the seismic shifts that are — without question — about to re-shape the way businesses operate in all verticals around the globe.
Of course, the great irony here is that with everyone hanging out in the kid’s pool, there’s all-the-more massive opportunity waiting for those of us who take the plunge into open waters.
So this is my plea to all members of our beloved ad community:
Be daring. Be humble. Embrace the change. And realize that we’re all in this together... with every one of us staring into a vast, unknowable new chapter of our shared history.
The process won’t be linear. And it certainly won’t be easy. But I have no doubt there’s an even brighter future for those of us brave enough to choose it. A new world where those who continue to champion human ingenuity will be rewarded far more than ever — and where the symbol of Cannes can return to what it once was: a celebration of human creativity that will remain forever out of algorithmic reach.
