Every year, Cannes gives the advertising industry something new to obsess over. Last year, it was AI. This year, the conversation felt different.
During several sessions on stage at the Infillion Café, The COOL Company’s Founder & CEO Zack Dugow joined leaders from The Weather Company, Tripadvisor, KERV.ai, and MMA Global for conversations about the future of advertising. Very few people were asking whether AI would change advertising anymore. That part feels settled.
Instead, the conversations focused on what comes next:
- How do brands create an advantage when everyone has access to the same technology?
- How do marketers use AI to create better experiences instead of simply producing more mediocre content?
- And what happens when advertising starts working as one connected system instead of a collection of disconnected channels and tools?
Here are the five takeaways from our time at Cannes.
1. AI changes how marketing works.
One idea kept surfacing throughout the conversations: AI isn’t just making advertising faster. It’s fundamentally changing how campaigns improve.
For years, campaign optimization has looked pretty much the same. Launch the campaign. Review the data. Adjust the budget. Swap out creative. Repeat.
AI changes that process completely.
Instead of making a handful of optimization decisions each week, campaigns can make thousands every day. They don’t wait for the next reporting cycle, they’re continuously learning.
2. The biggest gains happen when everything learns together.
One of Zack’s recurring themes throughout the week was that marketers have spent years optimizing creative and media separately.
But consumers don’t experience ads that way.
Creative influences media performance. Media influences creative. Audience signals influence both. Consumers never separated those decisions. Now marketers don’t have to either.
AI finally makes it possible to connect those dots. Thousands of creative variations can be tested alongside audiences, channels, bids, budgets, and timing simultaneously.
Every signal informs the next decision.
3. Relevance has become scalable.
One of the week’s most interesting discussions began with a simple question: Do consumers really hate advertising?
They do and they don’t.
Consumers hate ads that don’t earn their attention. The more relevant an ad becomes—through better creative, better context, and better timing—the less it feels like advertising at all.
The difference today is that relevance no longer has to be built manually. Creative can respond to weather. Location. Time of day. Audience behavior. Context. Performance. Instead of creating dozens of campaigns by hand, marketers can build systems that adapt continuously to capture attention.
That’s a better experience for consumers—and a better outcome for brands.
4. Channels matter less than outcomes.
Consumers don’t think in channels. They don’t distinguish between search, social, CTV, display, or video. They simply interact with brands.
Marketing is finally starting to reflect that reality.
Rather than deciding how much budget belongs in each channel, AI makes it possible to optimize around the outcome instead. The goal stays constant. The path adjusts as performance changes.
That’s a subtle shift, but it’s an important one. It moves advertising away from channel management and toward continuous decision-making.
5. Speed of learning is a competitive edge.
Don’t wait for perfect. That was a theme that surfaced throughout the week in Cannes. The companies making progress are testing, learning, and adjusting. Every campaign teaches the system something new, and every lesson improves the next campaign.
The brands that start experimenting today won’t just gain experience with AI. They’ll build better systems that keep getting smarter. Those advantages are difficult to catch up to once they’ve started to compound.
If there was one takeaway from Cannes this year, it’s that advertising is becoming more connected. Creative isn’t separate from media. Media isn’t separate from measurement. Personalization isn’t separate from performance. Every signal has the potential to inform the next decision.
That’s exactly how we’ve built COOL AI.
Every campaign powered by COOL AI makes thousands of decisions across creative, targeting, bidding, budgeting, and optimization, compounding exponentially.
The consumer sees one ad. Behind the scenes, thousands of decisions made sure it was the right one.
