Marketer's Rally Cry 2025
5 Marketing Truths You Won't Hear at Cannes
The industry's most visible celebrations sometimes send the wrong signals
Cannes Lions has its place. It's a global stage for celebrating creative excellence, the interplay of marketing and technology, and for inspiring the next generation of marketing leaders. But beneath the festival's polished surface, marketing faces an existential threat few on the Croisette will acknowledge.
Having spent decades at the intersection of marketing, technology, and executive leadership, I believe these hard truths must be confronted now. If not, marketing's relevance will continue to erode in the boardroom, the C-suite, and the discipline itself. The cost of inaction will be profound.
Here are five realities shaping marketing's future, whether or not they are spoken this week in Cannes.
AI is killing marketing jobs
Meta's vision of fully automating campaigns through AI has recently dominated headlines. Many frame this as a Meta-specific issue or blame Mark Zuckerberg for driving it. That is a mistake.
The deeper reality is technological inevitability. AI is transforming every aspect of marketing: insights, creative, content, media, targeting, and optimization. Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon, Microsoft and others are all building toward a future where marketers contribute little beyond budget inputs. This is not hype, it's the roadmap.
This trend has been clear for over a year (since I first wrote about it). Leaders must stop seeing it as a distant threat. The consequences, including job displacement and urgent reskilling, are already here. AI is killing marketing jobs. Denial is not an option.
The CMO role is broken
CMO tenure continues to shrink. It is tempting to blame boards or CEOs for failing to understand marketing. But the problem runs deeper.
The CMO role is often ill-defined and operationally incoherent. CMOs are asked to own brand strategy, performance marketing, customer experience, ecommerce, and martech, but often without clear accountability, resources, or sustained support. Many job descriptions reflect outdated views of marketing or muddled corporate strategy.
Worse, marketing culture is complicit. Instant metrics like clicks and engagement are emphasized over strategic metrics tied to brand value and direct business outcomes. Until this imbalance is addressed, the CMO role will remain vulnerable.
And it's not just the CMO as every marketing role is being redefined. AI will accelerate this shift. A new generation of marketers will rise, but the transition will not be easy. These future leaders will be fluent in producing films with Google's Flow, writing code with Anthropic's Claude, running synthetic research panels, and then shifting seamlessly into the role of a data scientist—all in the same afternoon, if needed.
As a result, it's time to reinvent talent development and rethink the in-house versus agency equation. Marketers must now ask: What capabilities must we build internally to not just survive but thrive in the AI era?
Big Tech runs marketing
Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Snap, Pinterest and TikTok now dictate how marketing works. They control the most valuable audiences, the algorithms, the measurement tools, and increasingly, the creative shaping consumer behavior.
Apple's App Tracking Transparency wiped out billions in ad value and forced marketers to restructure digital campaigns. That wasn't an anomaly—it's the new normal. Meanwhile, first-party data, while important, is not sufficient to drive predictable and scalable performance. Retail media networks like Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, and Instacart are creating new walled gardens with proprietary shopper data and closed-loop measurement. Spend is shifting fast, but measurement standards and transparency remain murky.
To navigate this landscape, brands must move beyond surface-level partnerships. This means diversifying media investments, going deeper with second-party and alternative data partnerships, and building differentiated marketing capabilities to operate across multiple ecosystems. The marketer's role is no longer just about buying impressions, it's about negotiating and managing a complex frenemy relationship with digital landlords who own the pipes, the stores, and, increasingly, the shelves.
Budgets are distorted
Marketing budgets are often distorted by hype cycles, politics, and reactive decision-making. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that many brands resumed spending on X after facing public pressure and private threats from Elon Musk's team. That's not a media strategy, it's capitulation.
Spending on TikTok, Snap, and other platforms frequently outpaces proven ROI. Too often, FOMO or the optics of "being where the culture is" drive budget allocations more than business impact. Retail media is another fast-growing area where budget flows are increasingly dictated by channel access rather than marketing strategy. In some organizations, procurement and finance teams bully the marketers into bad spending decisions.
To reverse this, marketing leaders must impose financial discipline. The goal isn't media coverage or visibility—it's sustainable business growth. CMOs must reclaim ownership of marketing budgets and reshape the allocation model. This includes reevaluating agency partnerships and deciding what to automate, what to outsource, and what to own internally.
Budget control is strategic control. Without it, marketing becomes a cost center rather than a growth engine.
Cannes is not for everyone
For marketers in industries where creativity is the product—fashion, luxury, and entertainment, for example—Cannes remains relevant. It still inspires and rewards breakthrough work.
But for others—particularly in healthcare, financial services, industrials, and B2B technology—Cannes may send the wrong signal. During moments of cost-cutting, technological disruption, or restructuring, celebrating on the Croisette can appear out of touch to boards, employees, and customers.
Marketing leaders must ensure that their presence at industry events aligns with company values and stakeholder expectations. Poor optics erode credibility. Cannes is worthwhile, but only with a clear, outcome-driven agenda. How the experience is framed internally and the ROI of relationships built there matter more than the red carpet moments. Substance must outweigh symbolism.
What marketers must do
- Move faster—much faster. Accelerate AI-driven planning, experimentation, and execution. Speed is now a core advantage. AI must be embedded across the function and every role, not siloed in an innovation team.
- Train your teams. AI literacy is nonnegotiable. Marketers must learn how to deploy, build, and market with AI. Vibe marketing and vibe coding must move from experimentation to expectation.
- Focus on business outcomes. Marketing must link effort to financial results more explicitly. AI makes this easier. CMOs must retake budget ownership and push internal and external teams to measure effectively.
- Adopt agentic AI now. AI agents will reshape campaign execution, personalization at scale, and how customer journeys are orchestrated. Think of AI agents not as tools but as team members.
- Reclaim brand-building. It's time to make the case for brand investment with data and discipline. The current tilt toward short-term performance is unsustainable. Brand equity will be even more of a moat.
- Master vibe marketing. Sensing and responding to cultural signals in real time, on scale with AI as a creative partner and with precision and authenticity, is a new competitive edge. AI must serve strategy, not spectacle.
- Evolve briefs and specs. Marketing briefs must now include first drafts of code, prompts, and agent workflows. Leading brands already do this. Everyone else is behind.
- Automate the value chain. Partial automation won't cut it. AI must be embedded end-to-end—from creative to media to measurement. Agencies that can't deliver this will be left behind.
Marketing stands at an inflection point: AI is rewriting how work is done. The CMO role and the broader function must be redefined. Platforms hold unprecedented power. Budgets are often driven by politics and perception. Even the profession's most celebrated events can risk appearing misaligned with the times.
The marketers who lead with speed, intelligence, and creative courage will define the next decade. The rest will be optimized out. The time to lead is now.
