I’m writing this from Cannes Lions, and the conversation at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès is familiar yet still on point. We all know that AI is changing the game. Now, the real conversation feels a bit more personal: with all these tools at our fingertips, what’s actually left for us to own?
Walking through the shortlists, the answer feels obvious: it's the brief. And I don't mean just another document to check off before we start making things. I'm talking about the core idea. The decision that makes a project worth doing in the first place.
Production used to be the bottleneck. It cost real money and serious expertise to bring a great idea to life. Now? If you’ve got a solid team, you can churn out a polished ad in an afternoon. But looking at the winning work here, it’s not the flashy technical stuff that’s taking home prizes. It's the work that stayed true to a clear, singular voice, the kind that didn't let the process water it down.
That’s a wake-up call for how we spend our time. We’ve all obsessed over tools that make us faster, but our upstream thinking hasn’t caught up. We’re still spending way more energy reacting to creative than we do defining what it’s supposed to achieve in the first place.
Next time you look at a campaign, ask yourself: how many rounds of review did we grind through? And compare that to the time we actually spent on the brief. If your production speed has outpaced your strategic clarity, that’s your real bottleneck. And unfortunately, there’s no AI plugin that’s going to fix that for you. That part has to be human.
Patrick Patterson
CEO at Level Agency
Podcast spotlight
People-First AI Transformation: The HUMAIN First Framework With Mohammad Anwar, President & CEO of Softway and Culture+
Mohammad Anwar built a 300-person software firm, nearly lost it to his own blind spots, and rebuilt with a behavioral transformation playbook that tripled revenue and produced two Wall Street Journal bestsellers. His conversation with Myles covers his HUMAIN First framework, and the part worth your attention is simple: 90% of AI transformation initiatives fail not because of the technology but because of the people. Winning isn't about deploying the best tools; it’s about understanding your people before you touch the implementation.
How Gen Z rebuilt the customer journey inside social media Most marketing strategies were built for a world where social media is a distribution channel. Gen Z operates differently: social is where they discover, research, evaluate, and buy, often in the same session. The implications run further than Gen Z itself, since younger cohorts have a consistent track record of pulling broader behavior shifts behind them.
Key takeaway: If your social performance metrics are anchored to last-click conversions, you're measuring the end of a journey that started somewhere your attribution never saw.
Organic CTR benchmarks for a search environment that changed Ahrefs pulled real benchmark data to answer the question that should be coming up in every SEO reporting conversation right now: what does a good click-through rate actually look like when AI Overviews are sitting above your results? The site-level average lands in the 1 to 2% range, but the number shifts significantly by industry and whether an AI Overview is present for your queries.
Key takeaway: The benchmarks your team is measuring against were calibrated for a search result that no longer exists in most categories. Worth checking whether your expectations have been updated or are still defending performance against a moving baseline.
Five stats on brand value, AI, and where growth is actually showing up Marketing Week's weekly data snapshot rounds up the numbers worth carrying into the week. The brand value data is what stood out to me: markets that looked flat for years are recovering, and the brands gaining the most are not the ones reacting fastest. They're the ones that made deliberate bets on where they wanted to own perception before conditions improved.
Key takeaway: Brand investment compounds, and the returns show up in exactly these moments. Waiting for the market to turn is the most expensive brand strategy there is.
Workforce Pell Grants just expanded eligibility. What career college marketers need to know. The Department of Education's Workforce Pell Grant final rule expands eligibility to short-term programs, and for career colleges, vocational schools, and certificate providers, it's potentially the most significant federal financial aid change in years. Level's team published a breakdown of what the implementation timeline actually looks like, and the key detail is that rollout runs through state governors first. Institutions that get out ahead of the messaging before that pathway clears are the ones who will need to walk it back.
Key takeaway: This is infrastructure-building time, not announcement time. The schools positioning quietly now will be in a materially better place than the ones rushing the message before implementation catches up.
What Level's creative directors are thinking about Cannes Lions
Brad Stephenson sat down with creative directors Brook Johnston and Carly Fridhandler ahead of Cannes this week, and the piece covers ground you don't usually see in pre-festival content. Brook's framing is that creative is being radically redefined inside the industry while remaining unchanged for the people we're making it for. The platforms evolve, the tools multiply, the testing velocity accelerates. The human on the receiving end still responds to the same things.
Carly's observation about the AI aesthetic is equally worth sitting with. The general public has learned to recognize AI-generated imagery, and the regulatory environment is catching up. New York just passed a law requiring a disclaimer when AI is used on human imagery in advertising. The instinct to treat AI as a production shortcut is running into an audience that's already paying attention.
Key takeaway: Volume without a clear brief is not a creative process. The work earning attention at Cannes stayed true to a singular idea. That part has always been human work, and production speed makes it more necessary, not less.
Social media is now the leading source of news. What that means for how you show up.
Reuters' 2026 Digital News Report found that social media now outpaces TV and news websites as a primary news source. The shift has been building for years, but this edition has the data to confirm it's crossed a threshold. The more important implication for brand marketers is not the statistic itself but what it means for the context your audience is in when your content appears. When news discovery happens inside the same feed as branded content, the tone, credibility, and intent behind what you publish carry more weight than they did when advertising and news lived in separate environments.
Teams managing social primarily as a performance channel are now operating inside a feed where audiences are in news-consumption mode more often than those teams assumed when they built their strategies.
Key takeaway: Tone and credibility are not soft metrics in this environment. How you show up in a social feed is being evaluated against a trust bar that used to be reserved for publishers.
New resource: The 2026 Higher Education Performance Benchmarks Report
Level Agency and LeadSquared just published the 2026 Higher Education Performance Benchmarks Report, built from tens of millions in managed media spend and tens of thousands of tracked enrollments across six program categories.
If you work in higher education or advise clients who do, this is the one to read before your next enrollment planning conversation. Cost per lead is up. Cost per enrolled student is up more. The gap between the two is where most programs are losing ground, and the data maps exactly where it happens.
The report covers:
Why AI search has changed the top of the enrollment funnel
Where lead quality breaks down between inquiry and enrollment
How admissions speed and response behavior determine whether acquisition actually converts
What channel and program-level benchmarks tell you about where the gaps are widening
The conversation at Cannes this week keeps circling back to the gap between having an idea and having something built. Framer is an AI-powered no-code website builder that closes most of that gap without a dev queue.
Describe what you need, from a campaign landing page to a conference microsite, and Framer produces a live, publishable page with responsive layout and SEO handled inside the tool. The quality ceiling is high enough that design teams are using it for client-facing pages, not just internal drafts.
The value is speed on work that already has a clear direction. Show up with a brief and Framer handles the build. Show up without one and you've made it faster to iterate on an unclear idea.
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