Every platform came to Cannes this year with a new AI announcement. Capability has never been cheaper or faster to buy, which is exactly why the most valuable conversations were not about the tools at all. They were about the objective. A tool without a clear objective is just spend with better production values.

The floor has risen, so execution alone is no longer an edge

Scott Galloway, the NYU Stern marketing professor and Pivot podcast host, put it well: social media pushed people toward the extremes, and AI is pulling everyone back toward the middle. When any team can generate a competent, on brand answer from a model in seconds, competence becomes table stakes.

That shift is changing where organizations create value. Galloway pointed out that IBM has a larger share of designers and creatives on staff this year than last because, as routine work becomes automated, judgment, taste, and strategic thinking become more valuable.

What does that mean in practice? If your AI investment this year focused on producing more, faster, you bought your way to the new baseline. The real advantage comes from what your best people do with the time automation gives back.

The harder problem is an objective no one shares

Victoria Sjardin, Global VP of Media and Marketing Excellence at Mars, said it simply: AI aimed at the wrong objective just gets you to the wrong place faster.

That idea showed up throughout Cannes. The Trade Desk and Mutinex announced new work to bring incrementality signals into programmatic buying, another step toward measuring business outcomes instead of optimizing for CPMs or last click attribution.

The operators were candid about why that remains difficult. Jess Gilby, GM of Digital at News Corp Australia, and Nick Garrett, CEO of Omnicom Oceania, pointed to the same challenge. Inside many organizations, paid media, creative, retail, and brand teams are all optimizing toward different KPIs with no shared definition of success. Give automation an unclear objective and all you get is faster, more expensive motion.

Before adding another AI tool to the stack, marketers should ask a simpler question: what is every team actually optimizing toward this quarter? In many organizations, those answers do not align. No automation layer can solve an objective that three teams define three different ways.

The attribution window is defunding demand generation

This was one of the most important conversations at Cannes.

Radhika Duggal, CMO at Major League Soccer and former rights buyer at JPMorgan Chase, argued that a seven-day or even one-month attribution window cannot capture the impact of brand and demand generation. Those efforts should be evaluated over a longer horizon that reflects how demand is actually built.

The data supports that thinking. CeraVe's New Face of Legs campaign with Kevin Durant lifted sales by 43%, according to the brand. Netflix's fandom work ranks in the top 1% of all ads ever tested by System1 for brand lift. Yet short attribution windows often give all the credit to the retargeting ad that closes the sale while overlooking the campaigns that created demand in the first place.

The result is predictable. Brands cut the very work that is driving long-term growth because their measurement framework cannot see its impact.

The fix is straightforward, even if it is uncomfortable. Measure demand generation over a window long enough to reflect its contribution, and keep that separate from the measurement used for lower-funnel performance.

What this actually asks of marketers

These conversations all point to the same conclusion.

Fast execution is becoming a commodity. The advantage comes from setting the right objective, aligning teams around it, and measuring success in a way that reflects how growth actually happens.

The challenge is no longer adopting AI. It is making sure every team is working toward the same objective and measuring success the same way. Without that foundation, even the best tools will struggle to create meaningful growth.

AI is quickly becoming available to everyone. Strategy will not. The advantage no longer comes from having better tools. It comes from pointing those tools at the right objective and measuring success in a way that reflects how businesses actually grow.