Brands Are Back—And They’re Driving Growth.

Both the nature of the conversation and the mix of attendees gathered on the Croisette highlighted a shift back to brands this year. The importance of stressing the longer-term trajectory and building future value through present-day emotional connectivity were threads that cropped up again and again.

It was encouraging to hear so much focus on growth, with brands clearly being the driving force. There was notably less overt focus on sustainability and purpose, with both now clearly assumed as key fundamentals in any brand or innovation strategy.

But the question of performance is also shifting, with a recognition that brands now play a crucial role in a world where precision and personalisation are crucial. CMOs are asking themselves how to bring big data to their brands, how to build emotional connectivity most efficiently at scale, and which creative metrics to use to predict performance.

CREATIVITY REMAINS KEY TO MARKETING CULTURE.

Data, digital, optimisation, and efficiency were the buzzwords that ruled the road for a number of years, but 2024 saw the energy recenter on the critical contribution that creativity plays— reemphasising the importance of getting the balance right between the left and right brain.

There were conversations about the many ways companies are using AI to drive creative acceleration, the here-to-stay role of creators and community-generated content (with some brands planning to produce more than 60% of their content this way), the metrics that are best deployed to assess and predict the impact of engagement, and more.

Whatever your perspective, it was refreshing and reassuring to see the Festival of Creativity once again place creativity rightfully back at the top of the marketing leaderboard.

AI WILL WIN WITH ADOPTION AND INTEGRATION.

Last year, Cannes buzzed with talk about the potential that AI would unlock. This year, we celebrated and compared successes, failures, and lessons learned.

The more obvious use cases of efficiency, productivity, and automation (content creation, social media engagement, ad copywriting) have led the way in most businesses. Still, many we spoke to concurred that it would be deployed in innovation and growth (insight generation, personalisation, customer experience), which will be the greater game changers.

Across every example, however, there was a common theme: an acknowledgement of the challenge we now face in delivering this value potential at scale—to move from pilot and proof of concept to integrated, adopted organisational change. There is also the challenge of blending the AI that employees bring in from the bottom up (BYOAI) with the AI that organisations introduce from the top.

And so the real challenge with AI is becoming clearer: it’s not a technological sprint but a human marathon, with change management at its heart.

THE ROLE AND INFLUENCE OF THE CMO CONTINUE TO EXPAND.

Four things became clear this week about the evolving role of the CMO:

1. As the marketing function takes on ever more responsibility for the growth agenda, a networked CMO function is critical, with CMOs themselves needing to play a central role in championing connectivity with finance, technology, and operations.
2. CMOs are leading the way on AI, with 60% driving the AI agenda within their companies, according to a recent survey by BCG and the Association of National Advertisers.
3. Despite the increasingly critical role of technology, human leadership qualities still define the top CMOs; how they lead and inspire change will most likely divide the good from the great in the year ahead.
4. Given the above three shifts, CMOs are growing in influence both within the executive team and with the board. The number of CMO candidates for CEO roles is likely to increase in the year ahead; for this to happen, CMOs need to draw on the other themes outlined above to credibly demonstrate not just business acumen but also their ability to design and deliver growth strategies that align with business metrics.

There is so much more to cover than the four key themes above: the rising role of retail media, how to empower personalisation, the next frontier of modern measurement and marketing effectiveness – the list goes on, and we’ll be sharing deep dives on these topics in the days and weeks ahead.

But as we packed our cabana and savoured the sand between our toes for the last time, we reminisced on all we had learned as a team from the hundreds of conversations we’d had. We talked about the shifting sands of marketing as a function, but there was also much personal reflection: where and how we focus our energies and how we support our personal growth.

Author: JOANNA STRINGER