Media Monitor: Conversations in Cannes | 3 Common Threads That Kept Coming Up

Welcome to the first episode of Media Monitor: Conversations in Cannes — a special mini-series featuring industry leaders sharing their predictions for the future of media, advertising, AI, data, and marketing.

Recorded during Cannes Lions, these conversations brought together executives from across the advertising ecosystem to discuss where the industry is headed next.

Before releasing those interviews, Kelly Sweeney and Sean Wright step back to identify the biggest themes that consistently emerged across every conversation.

Three major ideas stood out.

🤖 AI is becoming a human-led tool.

The conversation around AI has matured. Rather than replacing marketers and creative teams, industry leaders are focused on using AI to help people work faster, think better, and execute more efficiently while keeping human creativity at the center.

🎯 The Addressable Audience

The ability to reach the right people, at the right time, with the right message has become one of the industry's biggest competitive advantages. Better audience intelligence, first-party data, and smarter targeting are reshaping how brands build meaningful customer relationships.

📊 Metrics That Matter

The industry is moving beyond tracking KPIs simply because they exist. Today's marketing leaders are asking a more important question: Which metrics actually predict business growth? The conversations repeatedly emphasized measuring outcomes that create meaningful results instead of chasing vanity metrics.

Throughout the episode, Kelly and Sean share highlights from conversations with leaders across media, advertising, retail media, analytics, and technology, including executives from Rumble, Albertsons Media Collective, WPP, Analytic Partners, Prisma, and more.

If you work in advertising, media, analytics, brand marketing, or digital strategy, this episode offers a preview of the biggest ideas you'll hear throughout the Media Monitor: Conversations in Cannes series.

In This Episode

• Introducing Media Monitor: Conversations in Cannes
• The biggest themes from Cannes Lions
• Why AI is becoming a creative partner instead of a replacement
• The growing value of addressable audiences
• Finding the right customer with better data
• Why marketers are rethinking measurement
• Moving beyond vanity metrics
• Predictions for the future of media and advertising

Connect with Guideline

Questions or feedback?

📩 press@guideline.ai

If you’d like access to the benchmark report or want to suggest a topic for the next part of the programmatic series, reach out to press@guideline.ai.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow or subscribe so you don’t miss future conversations on advertising, media strategy, and cultural marketing moments.

And if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, a quick rating or review helps more people discover the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:04

You're listening to Media Monitor, where we break down what's happening in the media and the advertising industry and tell you what it actually means. Welcome back, Sean. How's it going?

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Great. How are you?

SPEAKER_02 0:21

Well, I am I'm good, although I'm gonna start this episode with my family pool update because I think that I have fallen to a place where it I'm not going to recover. I did have Switzerland. Which was good. No, that was good. That was good. Yeah, yay. Yeah, that was good. But I am sitting in fourth place and with a point deficit that I won't recover from. So but on in more positive news, we have a really exciting episode today that I'm excited to do with you. So for folks who may recall, it was Can a few weeks ago, and we did something really exciting at Can. We filmed some podcasts. You and I weren't there.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Collective guideline did, yeah. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 1:08

The collective guideline was there. We did not make it because we were back home holding it down, making sure that we would approach and cross 50,000 downloads.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Big deal. Yeah. Maybe we know what we should do is get a soundboard because this calls for an air horn. Like that one of those. This feels like a celebratory moment. From a humble podcast of zero downloads and to no followers just a couple months ago to just eclipsing over 50,000, lots of followers, feeling feeling good. We also went through the whole process to validate so that ad frog and all that jazz. So far, it seems like we actually have real people downloading our podcast. So yeah, it's exciting.

SPEAKER_02 1:50

It is. And uh and I think the momentum is there, right? When we reached out to folks and said, hey, we're gonna be filming, our chief product officer Steve Silvers is gonna be filming some podcasts in Can. Would you like to participate? We got an overwhelming number of people who wanted to participate. And so we wanted to devote this episode to featuring some of the highlights and themes of those. So today we're gonna skip the headlines, dive straight into those themes. And then as a special kind of added bonus throughout kind of the balance of the summer, we're going to be featuring some additional podcasts that will be our Conversations in Can by guideline that we'll drop in addition to our weekly podcasts.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Yeah, kind of feeling mixed, mixing it up. That way folks can get a kind of a fresh perspective from folks that were there talking around where they see the industry going, which is a bit different of a flavor of our nerdy delving into some topics a bit deeper. And very curious to kind of hear what all of you like, don't like about the pods. So when you hear it, you let us know what you think. And if it seems like it's of interest, right, we could always include more of those conversational elements. We've always talked about having a more regular cadence of guests on the show. But yeah, I think it'll be good.

SPEAKER_02 3:10

Yeah. So let's dig into it. You and I, we've listened to all the conversations and some themes definitely emerged. So talk to us about those themes, Sean.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Yeah, right. I think kind of our classic take on what happened at Cannes, and I'm seeing a lot of those. And this is kind of our version. There were three things that I felt were kind of like a thread through most of the conversations. The one, which we'll start with, I know people are probably tired of hearing this, but I think worthy of talking about, was kind of the AI human value chain. So the idea of, I think the conversation is now maturing, where it's not AI is going to replace all of these things and we don't need creatives anymore, and we don't need this. There was a lot of thematic elements. I think maybe because of some pushback, but also some realities and also some now that tools have been in place for some time, people are getting a sense of like, how do I use these to be effective and productive? And so we saw kind of heard that as a bit of a theme through kind of through line throughout a couple of conversations of what are companies doing to be implementing AI smartly, and rather than trying to say we're going to replace people, is like, how do we actually make current employees better, faster, smarter with their jobs, where AI is a tool, just like the personal computer at one point was, just like the typewriter before that. And so I thought that was a cool evolution. So the yeah, go.

SPEAKER_02 4:30

Yeah, I was gonna say, I definitely heard some really interesting commentary that I wanted to highlight, but did you want to run through all of this?

SPEAKER_01 4:36

Yeah, I figured maybe the three themes and then we'll kind of come back. So the second theme was really on the value of audience, right? The notion of now that we have all of this data, how do you find the right people at the right time? So we kind of heard from a f a couple of folks around what the important importance, the importance of audience was. How do people buy audiences? Where do you find the right folks? And what is the value in doing that as a brand? And then the last was really kind of metrics that matter. The idea that in the digital age, we've kind of become accustomed to if we can find a data point anywhere, we can measure it, which I guess is true. And as a guy who literally has built his career on measuring stuff with data points, I get it to a point, but there's a lot of conversation of just because you can measure it doesn't mean it's of value. Because you can actually track it, doesn't mean it it's doing anything for you as a brand or as a company. And so there's a lot of that conversation of like, how do you pick the right stuff to follow to make sure that you are doing whatever objective it is, right? That's not just chasing some sort of ROI for the sake of ROI. It's chasing the how many more people know about my brand, how many people are actually buying it, all of these things. So there was a bit of that that I thought was interesting.

SPEAKER_02 5:44

And what's the ultimate outcome that we're trying to achieve? Because that may evolve, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Yeah. It should, it should evolve, right? A brand that is D2C today, that's just launching for the first time and running their first Instagram ad should absolutely not be tracking the same things as Proctor and Gamble, right? Like that would be ludicrous. And just trying to then flatlining that and saying both should be tracking return on ad spend or OS is comical. Proctor and Gamble should, and even within Proctor and Gamble, right? It's a moving target. Tide should not have the same target as other brands. That's also silly. So yeah, the what you're going after should change based on what you're seeing, knowing, etc., for sure. But yeah, do we want to start with AI since that was the top? What were some things that kind of piqued your interest?

SPEAKER_02 6:25

Well, so I think the theme that kept coming back, and we heard this from the people who were in attendance at Cannes that while last year AI dominated the agendas, this year it didn't. But people they can't help but talk about it. But it I think how it's being talked out, talked about was what was so interesting to me. And it was that yes, AI, everyone's using it. It has to be incorporated. But the overwhelming theme for me was that it's a AI as a human-led tool, and that there is a human at the helm at the end of the day. And I think we'll listen to a quote from Jonathan Anassis at Rumble, because he put it really well in summarizing kind of how the idea has to come from a human and from there, yes, AI is gonna make you smarter, better, faster, all of those things, but AI is not coming up with the ideas. Right? So let's play that quote.

SPEAKER_04 7:25

I've been through a whole bunch of technology disruption cycles as a marketer and as a business person. And did CGI replace human filmmaking? No, right? And I think it it becomes like that. We just came through an electoral cycle in Los Angeles, where AI was really powerful for an outsider candidate. And I think he leveraged AI in a very powerful way, which is compressing the time of production and compressing the cost of production, where he was able to I've never seen somebody be able to respond in advertising to the news cycle so quickly, right? Where for the first time you could see a 90-second AI-genated spot at super high production value that answered literally an opponent's quote from 12 hours ago, right? Super powerful. But there was an idea behind all that messaging that AI didn't create, right? A human created the idea, a human created what the response was going to be an AI-enabled quality, speed, cost compression.

SPEAKER_02 8:28

All right. What'd you think, Sean?

SPEAKER_01 8:31

Interesting, right? Because like to your point, it's about humans at its core, kind of coming up with the ideas, wrapping it, trying to figure it out. He also said something interesting, kind of right after that, of the future is balance, that it's really about kind of taking AI and starting to kind of implement it, building on it, but never leaving kind of the human-created element. And that it's at some point in the future is going to kind of create this like stasis between them two, right? Where like AI can help with some cases, AI can't help with all. And I thought it was a fairly like balanced kind of take on on what we are hearing and seeing in the market.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's I think another part of this theme that I heard in a number of conversations at Cannes is that there's this fear that these jobs are going to be replaced. And I think everybody unanimously said they're not going to be replaced. New jobs are going to emerge because we're just going to be thinking differently, right? We're going to be doing things differently. So I'm glad to kind of hear that as a kind of a common sentiment because I do think that AI is getting a bad rap. And this kind of had a positive spin for me.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Yeah, right. It's a more balanced approach. I think you and I sit on slightly different kind of boomer optimistic framing of AI. But yeah, overall, I I think I agree with kind of the approach that he took in terms of it's about enhancement of human-led ideas. Similar conversation, Drew McCain from Prisma Media Ocean, he kind of had a similar thing of, and I'll kind of roughly paraphrase it, but it was like, don't default to AI, right? It shouldn't be just the natural inclination of like when we do something new, it should be AI. It's like, why are you implementing and thinking about strategically of what value is this bringing? And then from there, then building the product or idea or campaign around AI, but don't just default to it because it's like the easy thing to do or the thing that's going to get the headline. Start first with the core value of what you're doing, and then where it makes sense to implement AI. And again, roughly paraphrasing him and introducting my own kind of commentary, then that's where you actually start to kind of like smartly apply it. And I thought that was a good, like a smart take, right? Because like when I think about my applications for AI and tools, et cetera, it has enormously sped up my ability to code and my ability to model stuff. Not that I haven't been able to code and model stuff in the past, but this allows me to kind of quickly scale. And it's a great use case. And I use it almost daily for that because it's fantastic. But there's other places where I'm like, ah, like this doesn't really move the needle. Like I'm still able to do all the things I can. This is kind of just an added layer. And I and I that kind of resonated with me personally. I thought it was a good quote.

SPEAKER_02 11:08

Yeah, no, I totally agree. Well, let's move into our audience theme because I thought this one was really interesting and really kind of like the value of the audience at the core. And I know you had a uh piece that you wanted to highlight.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Yeah, right. Who better to talk about audiences and first party data than someone living and breathing within retail media? And so Steve also interviewed Evan Havorka out of Albertson's Media Network, where I thought he talked pretty cool about a recent campaign they did with PG, where they're kind of doing this, I guess like a novella slash like drama, using real people, real stores, real products, all of those things, but kind of wrapped in that, and you will play the quote about why audience was so important. So I'll play it, and then for folks at home, they can listen as well, and then we'll kind of jump into it.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

We wanted to introduce a new way to reach that similar targeted audience with ad content that feels more like a story. And so we're calling it a novella or a mini novella. And it literally goes back to casting actors, real actors doing real things in real Robertson stores, touching real PNG products, but doing it in a way that doesn't feel as advertising. So it's a storytelling spin on creative that we're using in partnership to move their message to the right shopper.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

So that was pretty cool because it kind of ended with the thesis, right? Is like you're reaching the right shopper, and it's all about kind of finding the right audience, and really that's being powered by data. And it's one of those where we'll talk about what is the right audience. But I think there's at least this notion or through line that we are better enabled today to kind of smartly find those folks. Now, what something that I liked and what resonated me, resonated with me about the PG campaign in particular, is too often I feel like the default for audience and data is to be like hyper-targeted. I'm going to serve you this weirdly specific ad because I know that you are a mom with two kids who lives in Sheboygan and really likes Cool Whip or whatever, right? So I'm going to just give you a cool whip thing that says, come and buy and I'll give you five, five cents off. And you're like, okay, that's hyper-targeted. The reason why I liked this is because it's still finding the right shopper, but it's humanizing it, right? It's like people shopping and buying stuff. It's hyper-targeted and it's finding the right people for PG products, but it's not in this overt performance-driven KPI way that I liked kind of both about the example, and then also using that to still like meaningfully say still finding that right shopper that I thought was like a good mix of like we just too often default in the ad industry to going straight towards data and audiences equals hyper-targeting equals performance. Not that they're not going to get some sort of performance metrics out of it, but it felt nice, right? It felt like a call back to the days of brand.

SPEAKER_02 13:47

And they're kind of wooing you, right? It's not like this direct ask. They're kind of bringing you into the story. So, and of course, I have to make fun of you because of course you would pick the grocery store one. Grocery store obsessed Sean.

SPEAKER_01 14:02

I love grocery stores. I had to. I had to. As soon as I saw Albertson's in there, I was like, I have to, number one, I gotta hear what's going on. Number two, you know I love grocery stores. I was just fondly going through LinkedIn for a few of the folks that I worked with way back in the day just to see what they were up to. Still at grocery stores.

SPEAKER_02 14:17

So well, on the audience side, I kind of picked up on that theme from a little bit of a different angle. Devin DeBlasio at WPP was talking about how the volume of data that we have and the level of insight is enabling us to create even brand new audiences. And I thought that was so interesting. I think he said, I'll paraphrase it, of course, like I've never thought about that type of audience before, combining healthcare and financial services, but there could be this through line based on the behaviors that they're seeing and creating these new subsets. And I thought that was really interesting and powerful because it's true. There there are these overlaps and these pockets of people who you might have put in different buckets before, before you had the data to combine them.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:12

So I thought it was well put.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

I think so too. It's again finding that right accommodation where you're being more nuanced, but in a smart way, like a like a and I don't want to say targeted, right? Because that's redundant as well, but like smartly thinking about audience for sure.

SPEAKER_02 15:29

Yeah. Well, and kind of on that side, and I think he spoke a little bit to this, but just all of the data and the analytics is a perfect segue into our last theme, the metrics. The metrics, maybe they matter, right?

SPEAKER_01 15:43

You could build a whole career around it.

SPEAKER_02 15:45

And so I thought it was really interesting. Preeti Croak at Analytics Partners, she talked a lot about the the bridge that's being built between the marketing and the finance teams and how marketing was a group that had been called not data driven, but in in fact, it's like entirely the opposite. And there's this partnership that's emerging. So let's hear what she had to say.

SPEAKER_03 16:10

Yeah. I don't think it's a data problem. Okay. Definitely not a data problem. I think it's a common language problem. So a shared language problem. So there's like a credibility gap that I think we're seeing where they're aligned in practice, but the actual implementation is more challenging. And I think it's like kind of getting alignment across those functions and bringing them closer together in terms of what outcome are we trying to drive, what data we do we need to do that. So what's the data to make the decision? Not just getting data in a dashboard, but what how do we actually use the data and how we get it in a format to actually leverage it for results? And I think that's where the bridge is needed, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:48

Yeah, a lot of a lot packed into the data.

SPEAKER_02 16:52

But I think it's it's it's interesting, right? These are the conversations that happen. I actually had a friend of mine who's kind of in our space tell me the exact same thing about how she's a CMO and how she never imagined a world where she was going to be so close to her CFO. And that's the world that she's living in now.

SPEAKER_01 17:11

Yeah. Yeah. I like the kind of talked about it as more of a framing of credibility, trust, understanding of trying to find this common conversation thread with two disparate entities that I thought was good. Cause we've heard that a lot, right? Where like the CMO is increasingly being asked to take on data operations. And it's less about, hey, make us a really cool creative, make us a really cool idea of like where the brand can go, and more of like how you manage to certain metrics, how you hitting KPIs. Where I think probably uh a CMO 30 years ago, it would have been unfathomable to anything other than maybe occasionally like ripping through a marketing mix model to follow these things. And I think also the meaningful kind of turn on it is that it's not just because, again, you can measure it, doesn't mean it's necessarily the right thing. And I think it's I kind of think she said it best in terms of like it's trying to find the right metric, the one that you really is going to drive the KPI that you want, not just some sort of like return on investment. Totally. Yeah. And I thought to the similar vein, which I think kind of is the compounded book end, in a conversation with Justin Levin, he kind of talked a lot about also on the flip end, you have fraudulent activity, and he kind of called out social media in particular, where it's like $16 billion of ad served. And so part of the challenge is that if you're chasing this ROI and these CPMs and you're kind of increasingly trying to get to the lowest common denominator, the cheapest inventory, just to try to be efficient about ROI, you're starting to miss a little more of what are you trying to track? And it's the rough paraphrase, and I'm always blanking on like the axiom, but it's like, as soon as you try to measure something, then that becomes the metrics of success that everyone chases. And so it's in today's age, it's harder to do this, but it's one of those things that I feel like it is a good reminder to say that like marketing should be measured in some ways, but it should also drive us to do act do something that's hard to measure itself, right? Like feel inspired by a brand, want to buy that brand in the future. How do you actually measure that qualitatively, right? Or even quantitatively. Whether or not I buy it in the future, very rarely is based on that very last ad that I saw, the last click attribution, overwhelming, overwhelmingly, right? A lot of this is far upstream. 10 years ago is when I first started to think about wanting to buy that, but none of the metrics ever that we track today is going to effectively capture that.

SPEAKER_02 19:37

Yeah. And I think like my closing thought on this is really that while we hear so much about how AI can be isolating, a lot of these themes we're talking about how AI can be bringing people together, right? It has to be a human-led idea. It's bringing teams together to track these metrics and it's prioritizing the audience at the end of the day and figuring out exactly who those people are, which relies on a connection to them. So I'm coming out of it very positive on the conversations and positive on how people are leveraging AI.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

Yeah. And from my end, in terms of my takeaway, is more of the, I would say like the theory or idea is like, has marketing lost its way? Have we become so obsessed with metrics that like we've lost fundamentally what it's about? And it's always a good reminder that there are plenty of people out there that are making the argument that no, this is what we should be doing. And with enough of those folks in the industry, right, you kind of feel reassured that maybe marketing has figured out some stuff. Advertising is still on the right track and is just evolving, would be where my head's at. But curious, right? We're trying something new. This is not our normal quote a few numbers, talk about the data, what it means. So very interested, comment, send us an email to hear whether or not you kind of like this format. We're gonna try it a few more times. As Kelly mentioned at the top of the call, we'll release these as like mini episodes. They'll be in your feed, kind of alternating from when you would normally get ours on typically a Wednesday. But yeah, hopefully you enjoyed the conversations that can.

SPEAKER_02 21:06

And thanks for everyone who participated and had those conversations with us. It was great.

unknown 21:12

All right.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 21:13

See you next week, Sean.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

See you next week. That's Media Monitor. Follow us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts every Wednesday for a new episode. And as always, thanks for listening.