Next week we're heading to Cannes Lions, the largest gathering of creative and marketing professionals in the world, at a moment when the industry is questioning whether human creativity is still worth paying for.
Marc Pritchard has been standing on Cannes stages for years saying some version of the same thing. Last year he said, "AI doesn't get the spine tingles. Humanity matters." It's less nostalgia and more a description of the last competitive edge that can't be automated away.
The platforms have since made his point for him. Google's 2026 marketing playbook boils down to one bet: automation wins, and creative becomes the last human-controlled lever. Meta's roadmap is even more explicit. Zuckerberg's stated goal is a system where you hand over a URL and a budget and walk away. Their Advantage+ campaigns already account for 60 to 70 percent of some agencies' total Meta spend, and the models are getting smarter every quarter.
What that means practically is that the machines are getting very good at the work that used to require expertise: targeting, placement, bid optimization, copy variation, automated at scale faster than any human team. What they cannot do is feel the difference between something true and something plausible.
That’s what Cannes keeps circling back to this year. For most serious practitioners, the debate about whether AI belongs in advertising is already over. The more important question is what happens to originality and emotional resonance when the tools of production are widely democratized.
Greg Quinton, CCO at Design Bridge and Partners and this year's Design Jury president, said in an interview this week that “the role of the human designer feels more prominent than ever,” precisely because AI is handling execution and humans are moving upstream toward the judgment calls that actually matter.
Human judgment is what makes the machine worth running, and we're excited to continue the conversation in La Croisette.
Patrick Patterson
CEO at Level Agency
What's interesting this week
Meta puts AI search inside Facebook Meta launched AI Mode on Facebook this week. Instead of links, it surfaces answers drawn from public conversations, Groups, and Reels across their apps. It’s part of a broader push to make Facebook more useful before the next generation of ad formats lands on top of it. Worth understanding before the behavior change is already well underway.
Key takeaway: What your brand says in public communities is now being indexed for AI-generated answers. Organic Facebook presence just got more consequential.
Three Google Ads bidding updates, one deadline you need to know Google announced Smart Bidding Exploration expanding to Performance Max, a new Promotion Mode beta for demand spikes, and an August 17 change to how budget-limited campaigns optimize. That last one is the one to act on. If your campaigns have been outperforming their stated targets, they’ll start delivering to those targets after the update. Google starts flagging affected accounts on July 6, which is earlier than most teams will notice on their own.
Key takeaway: Check your budget-limited campaigns before July 6. If actual CPA is well below your stated target, update it now or expect a performance reset in August.
YouTube is bigger than most media plans treat it Hootsuite’s annual stats roundup is a useful gut check on just how dominant YouTube has become. It tops the list for time spent on mobile globally and is the most popular social platform among US adults. The gap between where the platform sits in most media plans and where audiences are actually spending their time is worth examining.
Key takeaway: If YouTube’s budget allocation hasn’t been revisited since CTV started moving, the numbers in this piece make a clear case for doing it.
Putting a number on creative investment Cannes Lions dropped data in Digiday this week on what award-winning creative actually produces for the brands that invest in it. The argument that creativity drives business results has been made on instinct for a long time. This piece gives it a sharper edge, right before the festival week that tends to spark the same debate all over again.
Key takeaway: If creative has been hard to defend in your budget conversations, this is worth bookmarking before Cannes coverage takes over your feed.
Data accuracy matters more than data scale when AI is running your campaigns
Epsilon’s Gillian MacPherson makes a point in Marketing Dive this week that should be uncomfortable for any team that’s been adding data sources without auditing what’s already there. In an automated environment, bad data accelerates mistakes. AI optimizes in the wrong direction, faster than any human team would.
This article connects directly to what Ernie DeCoite and Google’s Alana Parsons covered in our measurement session last month. More sources feeding a broken attribution model produce a more confident wrong answer. The fix is knowing which signals your AI is actually optimizing against. Our attribution and signal quality session with Google is available on demand. Watch here.
Key takeaway: Before adding another data source, audit the ones you have. Accuracy at the decision point matters more than volume.
What leading financial services brands are getting right about growth
Howard Diamond, Level’s Chief Revenue Officer, attended Mediapost’s first Financial Services Summit in Nashville last week. The room included senior marketers from some of the largest financial institutions in the country.
The piece centers on two things. First, a generational wealth transfer is underway that will reshape the financial services audience for the next two decades, and the two groups on either end of it don’t share a mental model of money. Brands speaking with a single voice across them are assuming a shared framework that doesn’t exist. Second, every financial decision arrives in the middle of a story. A divorce and a promotion are both signals of the same product opportunity. They are not the same moment, and they don’t respond to the same message.
The organizational challenge Howard surfaces is the one that rarely makes it onto a conference agenda: compliance friction, creative approval cycles, and the internal pace at which financial brands can actually move. The brands pulling ahead have solved the operational constraints that slow everyone else down.
Key takeaway: Financial services marketing is harder than most categories because of the human complexity underneath every financial decision. Getting the signals right is a prerequisite, not a competitive advantage.
The Level team will be at Booth 611 all three days, and we’re bringing the 2026 Higher Education Performance Benchmarks Report with us. Brad Stephenson and Josh Muskin are on stage Tuesday afternoon alongside Christopher Mercado from Northbridge University.
Come find us on the floor or lock in a time ahead of the show.
Most research workflows run on screenshots buried in a camera roll and links dropped in Slack that nobody finds again. Pool is a mobile app that fixes that: take a screenshot of anything, and the AI reads it, categorizes it, and connects it to other things you’ve saved. You can organize captures into collections and share them with a team.
The longer you use it, the more connections it surfaces between things you captured weeks apart. For anyone building briefs or creative references from a lot of sources, that’s where the real value shows up.
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