AI was on every Cannes Lions booth, every stage, every cocktail napkin, and "creativity at scale" got repeated so many times it stopped meaning anything. The whole industry was holding its breath waiting to see what part of the job gets automated next.
Then you looked at what actually won and none of it was generated with AI.
The Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix went to AXA, a French insurer that added three words to its standard home insurance contract: "and domestic violence." That change meant 2.5 million existing policyholders could suddenly access emergency relocation, legal support, and psychological assistance the same way they'd file a claim for fire or flood. AXA already had the infrastructure. Someone just decided it was worth using differently. New contracts went up 9.1% over the following six months and AXA moved from second to first in brand consideration in France. No model generated that idea. A person did, because they were paying attention to something real.
Which makes it interesting timing that OpenAI chose this same week to declare itself an advertising business. Their CRO Denise Dresser said on June 22 that the company is "clearly in the advertising business now," twenty-one months after Sam Altman called ads "a last resort." The self-serve platform is live, early B2B advertisers are reporting conversion rates two to four times higher than equivalent Google Search campaigns, and the CPMs are still soft enough that it's worth running a test before that changes.
But the fact that OpenAI felt it needed to show up at a creativity festival and make the case to marketers says something. Even the people building the most powerful AI in the world spent a week trying to convince the room that their technology understands people. Anthropic made the same trip with two words on a Super Bowl ad that won a Film Grand Prix at the festival: "Keep Thinking."
The most valuable things I did all week didn't happen on a stage. They happened in rooms and on rooftops with founders, platform partners, and clients who were reachable in ways they otherwise wouldn't be. Cannes compresses six months of relationship-building into five days. That's the part that doesn't show up in any recap, and it's exactly the kind of thing AXA's idea required: someone in the room who was paying close enough attention to see what was already there.
That kind of attention is what the machine can't replicate. The AI layer is table stakes and it gets cheaper every month. When every agency and every brand has access to the same tools, the only thing left that actually differentiates you is the quality of thinking you bring to them. Figure out what that is for your business and stop treating it like a soft advantage.
Virtual insider session: Human taste can’t be automated.
The debate about using AI in your creative process is over. Almost every brand is using it somewhere. The challenge now is whether you are using it in the right places. Brands that get it wrong risk audience trust and, in many cases, worse performance.
In 30 minutes plus a live 15-minute Q&A, members of Level’s creative team will walk through where AI actually belongs in the process, where it makes creative worse, and how teams can truly get value from it versus just pumping out slop.
Meta launches complete AI creative ad ecosystem at Cannes
At Cannes Lions, Meta unveiled an end-to-end AI creative ecosystem that lets advertisers generate, test, and optimize ads in a single workspace, anchored by a new "Brand Memory" feature that learns a brand's identity and tone from its existing ad library and applies it to all future AI-generated creative. The announcement also includes a unified Meta Creator Marketing Hub combining Creator Marketplace and Partnership Ads Hub, expanded multilingual creative tools in Ads Manager, and a built-in approval workflow. Meta says automation has now crossed a practical threshold for creative production.
IAB Tech Lab announces SupplyChain v1.1 for programmatic transparency
IAB Tech Lab has announced a proposed upgrade to the OpenRTB standard that, for the first time, would let advertisers see not just who gets paid in a programmatic transaction, but who actually touches the bid request as it moves through ad servers, SSPs, SDKs, wrappers, and other infrastructure. For performance marketers managing programmatic budgets, the practical impact is significant: cleaner supply-path optimization, fewer duplicative bids, and a clearer picture of whether working media dollars are actually reaching quality inventory or just padding the chain. The proposal is open for public comment through August 21, 2026.
CMOs and CFOs Want the Same Things. So Why Can't They Agree?
A Bain & Company survey of more than 1,400 senior marketing and finance leaders found that CMOs and CFOs actually agree on the metrics that matter most (ROI and revenue growth), but neither side believes the other is aligned. The real problem isn't disagreement on goals: it's that marketers lead with storytelling when finance just wants to see the numbers, and measurement frameworks get built after campaigns run instead of before. The fix is simpler than most CMOs expect: skip the narrative, start with the data, and co-create measurement criteria with finance before a dollar gets spent. For marketing leaders making the case for budget, this research is worth reading before your next planning conversation.
Deep dive: Profound Zero Click NYC AI visibility recap
Level's SEO team spent a full day at Profound's Zero Click NYC conference a few weeks ago. It was a day built around a single uncomfortable truth: three years into AI search, the engines still barely agree with each other. Everyone in the room wanted a playbook, but the data refuses to offer one up. Here's what we learned, in brief:
Claude and ChatGPT cite almost completely different content.Claude pulled 36.4% of its citations from listicles; ChatGPT pulled 19.7%. ChatGPT cited forum and user-generated content 15.8% of the time; Claude only 0.9%. The same page does not win in both.
Your organic SEO work carries into Claude, not ChatGPT.Claude's results overlapped with Google's 64% of the time. ChatGPT's overlapped just 37%.
Claude doesn't search as often as people think. With web search enabled, it ran a live search on only 36.6% of prompts versus 95.5% for ChatGPT. Commercial and time-sensitive queries are where live visibility is still up for grabs.
Two small things moved the needle more than expected:Claude includes a year in 94% of its searches (ChatGPT does it 17% of the time), so dated titles get matched to dated queries. And models turn vague phrases into specific names. If your content already names the thing, you win the match.
The goal isn't just to show up; it's to get recommended.Coca-Cola framed it as a ladder: first a model mentions you, then cites you, then recommends you by name. Paid placements in AI answers and agentic shopping are forming now.
Adobe rolled out a significant upgrade to Firefly on June 18, expanding its AI Assistant into public beta across Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Frame.io, so the creative agent now works directly inside the apps your team already uses every day, not just inside Firefly itself. The practical additions are immediately useful: a Brand Kit Creation skill generates a complete logo, color palette, and brand identity from a description; Short Product Video transforms product photos into polished short-form content; and Quick Cut automatically assembles raw footage into a structured first edit you can refine.
The bigger structural upgrade is in the new Firefly studio experience, now in private beta: Elements lets you save and reuse characters, locations, and objects across generations for consistent campaign assets, while Projects keeps your assets, creative history, and context connected across sessions so you're never rebuilding from scratch. If your team produces high volumes of campaign creative across multiple formats and channels, this is worth exploring now.
When did you last audit what AI thinks of your brand?
Don't rely on an unreviewed algorithm to manage your brand’s reputation. Our scorecard pulls back the curtain on how AI platforms frame your brand sentiment and which sources they use to vet your authority.
Inside your custom report:
Visibility score and share of voice: The percentage of AI prompts your brand appears in, benchmarked against your top competitors across all major models.
Sentiment and positioning: Whether AI describes your brand favorably, neutrally, or negatively, and whether you're showing up as the primary recommendation or an afterthought.
Optimization roadmap: The specific content structure and authority signals you need to improve your score.
