Over the last five years, brands have pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into CX, if not trillions. Guess what? It’s not working – and customers are getting mad about the brand experience mush being served to them. Per Forrester research, customer experience is hitting new lows, and every single basis point decline represents cratering revenue and profit as customers walk away. R/GA strategy boss Yael Cesarkas urges brands to rapidly align marketing and CX teams, bin one-dimensional efficiency KPIs and start introducing positive friction, mixing in seams of emotional ripple to the industry standard vanilla to reverse the “Great Enshittification” the data suggests is only getting shittier.

As Unilever prepares to push most of its budget into ‘creators’, one of McDonald’s top marketers implies ditching long-held brand rules has likewise helped rapidly reverse sales declines. It’s ceding control to influencers, making sub-genre bootleg copies of its brand into fully-fledged campaigns, and diving headlong into the new order of flipped brand codes, micro-moments of attention and fit-for-niche creative as an early backer of the emerging marketing schism around ad wearout, attention and effectiveness versus the “lots of littles”  theory and feeding platform machines with tonnes of new ad iterations espoused by Analytic Partners’ Grace Kite and Jellyfish’s Tom Roach. Per McDonald’s marketing, brand, content and culture boss, Jennifer Healan, it's directly driving sales – and there is no divide between brand and performance.

Too many dicks, woke wins and exploding Kiwi freezer beers - here's what got the attention of four Australia and New Zealand judges at the Cannes Lions this year as they waded through hundreds of entries and discovered a flurry of cultural curveballs, consistent creative plays, contentious narratives, category convention challenges and creator and community connections. Speaking on a Cannes Download panel this week, Suncorp EGM brand and CX Mim Haysom (Creative Data jury), Publicis Groupe CCO, Dave Bowman (Social & Creative jury), WPP Media CEO, Aimee Buchanan (Media jury) and Dentsu Aotearoa CCO, Mike Flix (Film jury) unpacked the campaigns and creative work that stood out from the 29,600 entries across 32 categories in 2025 – and the trends they’re spotting in the mix.

Les Binet being “mobbed” at Cannes suggests building a brand for marketing effectiveness is paying dividends. A new generation of marketers are starting to question what they are being told and join the dots between band and demand, per Warc chief content officer, David Tiltman. After cornering the market for effectiveness by corralling a pantheon of practitioners, academia and a massive trove of data to keep banging the drum for brand-led growth and best practice in the face of massive flux, Warc’s now aiming to crack the US market, which Mark Ritson says is “way behind” the UK and Europe. But there are fractures emerging within long-held marketing effectiveness rules and playbooks – and disputes among its leading lights. Tiltman says it’s a “paradox” Warc, the Effies and the Lions have yet to resolve. But fusing those siloed effectiveness databases under one roof will help – and that’s exactly what Warc, now under Informa ownership, aims to do next.

P&G CMO Marc Pritchard, virtual professor Mark Ritson, System1, Analytic Partners and some of the world's top creatives are all saying the same thing: Consistency and craft in applying distinctive brand assets and codes pays off – big time. KitKat's Grand Prix-winning out of home ad provides a master template for Australian brands to follow, says QMS chief marketer, Tennille Burt. Here's how to lift it.

Instacart CMO Laura Jones joined the $12.5bn delivery app just as the Covid boom fizzled and easy demand dried up. The tech platform had literally no brand budget and was all performance. So she went to work, reorganising teams, reshaping the brand and reading the effectiveness playbook, chapter by chapter, to the c-suite. They bought it – to the extent that they footed a Super Bowl ad this year that boosted sales 14 per cent and nearly doubled new visitors to the site.  Jones, a former Google and Uber marketer, agrees with Previously Unavailable founder James Hurman that those suggesting brand is dead are way off the mark. Here’s what she did, and why Hurman thinks CEOs should stop listening to “big, confident voices” that are “completely incorrect” about the relationship between brand, advertising and hard financial growth.

L’Oreal has spent five years overhauling how and where its A$23.85bn ad budget is allocated – and last year posted the best operating margin in its history. The firm is fully aligned with Oxford University Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz and Wavemaker on moving beyond blunt reach – and blanket paid media approaches full stop. It’s the latest in a series of evidence and market moves that strongly indicates industry is shifting rapidly away from long-held growth rules and play-books. L’Oreal Groupe chief digital and marketing officer Asmita Dubey, Oxford University Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz and Wavemaker global chief strategy and product officer Stuart Bowden on what next looks like for paid, earned, shared and owned (Peso) media, the category nuances that torpedo reach-based planning – and the structural challenges it presents.

Unilever has unpacked how its massive multibillion dollar advertising pivot to influencers is tracking – getting young people to say they can cook in their Tinder profiles is driving hot stock-cube action, according to the digital, media and ecom boss of its €13.4bn food business unit, Afke van de Klashorst. But as the FMCG giant commits half of its €9.4bn ad budget away from publishers and into creators and their platform hosts, effectiveness platform CreativeX warns half of all media budget amplified influencer campaigns are literally being wasted due to basic branding fails. Time honoured effectiveness ground rules still apply, per CEO Anastasia Leng.

Three top marketers at McDonald’s, Kimberly-Clark and Philips suggest “creative business transformation” is the key to keeping industry alive – and that applies to agencies and consulting firms. Which means some operational and strategic tweaks. Plus the trio offered some tips on what they are looking for from their own teams – and why if marketers are ducking bold choices because they are scared of losing their jobs, they will probably lose it anyway.

Publicis Groupe is building an alternative media and audience reach network to legacy media channels, leveraging the $650m in influencer and creator platform acquisitions it has made in the past year to tap under-utilised and cheaper audience channels for identity-linked advertising campaigns. Gaming is next. It heaps more pressure on legacy media channels under sustained revenue assault from Meta, Google, Amazon, TikTok and retail media networks, which between them are taking upwards of 75 per cent of the circa $800bn global digital ad market. According to WPP Media, the digital ad market commands 81 per cent of total global ad spend, which will surpass $1trillion for the first time in 2025.

Three of the world's top ten advertisers just generated hundreds of thousands of assets via AI at a fraction of the cost and time humans require, with a claimed 40 per cent performance boost. A group founded by one-time Havas Global CEO David Jones is creating entire brands in a day, end-to-end, and claims those assets are scoring "well above the top 10 per cent of ads ever tested by System1". Platform algorithms are rewarding fresh content with greater reach and lower costs – which means fault lines between traditional marketing science and effectiveness rules are rapidly shifting, reshaping the landscape.

Packaging up lots of fragmented audience channels with consumer attention thresholds lower than what many say is effective – including the work from Dr Karen Nelson-Field and Amplified Intelligence – is a reality, says Analytic Partners' VP, Dr Grace Kite. "Aggregate Attention" in a study by Havas Media Network and Lumen shows "seeing lots of little ads is a perfectly good substitute for lack of attention on any one ad," Kite posits. Equally Tom Roach, a one-time understudy to 'The Long and Short of It' co-author Les Binet at Adam&EveDDB, now at Jellyfish, challenges System1 – and Mark Ritson's Cannes keynote – that ad wearout doesn't exist. Instead, we're facing an emerging "battle between the theorists" of ad effectiveness and the all powerful platforms whose algorithms reward freshness – daily. 

Pepsi completed its $1.95bn acquisition of pre-biotic US soda challenger brand Poppi in May with all the fanfare of a new shiny breakthrough coveted by the marketing profession – creator-influencer Alix Earle, with circa 10m followers across TikTok and Instagram, played a central role in the deal as a Poppi collaborator and investor that reportedly tipped Pepsi’s decision to buy Poppi over archrival Olipop – along with the brand’s blend-in of traditional TV ads. Poppi rolled the dice on a TV ad in this year’s Super Bowl and new data from System1, which measures consumer emotional response levels to advertising and creative work, outlines the best explainer yet on the grand tension emerging between traditional brand advertising and what works in the creator economy.     

The open web’s only challenger to Google – and increasingly Amazon – in automated advertising trading exchanges has warned Amazon’s powering global ad business is lifting Google’s strategy by luring advertisers to consolidate their digital ad buying using its demand side platform. Amazon’s $60bn advertising business is growing faster than its online commerce juggernaut – the allure for brands is the promise of an advertising and data tie-up to Amazon’s vast online shopping customer base via Amazon's commerce focused search. But the problem is anticompetitive self-preferencing of Amazon’s own advertising assets across its global shopper juggernaut and Prime video streaming service, now with ads, according to Jed Dederick, chief revenue officer at US$33bn listed rival, The Trade Desk. “We’ve seen this movie before,” he told Mi3 at the Cannes Lions Festival last week. “This is Google’s playbook that came out in the antitrust trials”. Dederick should know – he was called by the US Department of Justice as an expert witness in its successful case last year against Google’s market manipulating adtech stack – the DoJ is seeking to break up Google’s ads and data products from its YouTube and search units, which it hopes will create a more level playing field for publishers across the open web. 

Amid a Cannes festival heaving with influencers striking corporate deals, and an officially unspoken nervousness about what comes next, EY Parthenon's Karen Crum, an ex-genetic scientist and global strategy lead at Ogilvy and McCann, was presenting hard data that underlines how badly corporates have underestimated brand risk. Now she's taking it broader – and with it, brand – deep into corporate boardrooms and investment markets. Suncorp's brand and customer chief Mim Haysom and Tassal's chief commercial officer Matt Vince back that push – but already have the buy in from their CEOs and CFOs because they have proved brand is massively moving the growth needle. Tassal's global parent company boss thinks it can lead the global marketing function; Haysom has full autonomy to drive strategy through brand. But both Australian marketers see some new risks – and opportunities – coming out of Cannes, along with some unmoved fundamentals. Here's there take-outs, take-homes and watch-outs.

"Avoid the pornography of change" was virtual Professor Mark Ritson's take on research by System1's Andrew Tindall that he thinks deserves a place in the marketing effectiveness pantheon of greats – because it spells out to marketers how to make great ads that drive a 12x profit multiplier over "shit" ads. Based on overlaying the Effies database with System1's ad testing data, it's a simple formula: Go back to basics with tight positioning, charge ads with emotion, pack them with brand codes – seven is the "magic number" – and run them for years. "You're taking your cakes out of the oven too early. Leave them in. Let the emotion work, let the codes work. Save money on creative, put it into working capital, make more money from your advertising." Here's the data to prove it, what good looks like – and what's so bad it deserves a "brown Lion" as Ritson underlines a back-to-basics theme running deep through a Cannes festival stalked by AI's impacts.

After making Barbie a cultural phenomenon, Gap Inc boss Richard Dickson is trying to repeat the trick. Except it’s not a trick. Few CEOs take the stage at Cannes to talk about brand, but Dickson knows better than most the direct correlation of brand to revenue, profit and growth. He transformed Mattel through a brand-led framework that culminated in a film that grossed $1.45bn and reversed sales declines. Now he’s writing another codified playbook for Gap – and it’s working. The group is consistently taking market share, margin is healthier and the last two quarters have seen shareholder dividends boosted 10 per cent. Dickson says CEOs that deeply understand their brand make better daily business decisions because it guides those decisions through turbulence and quarterly earnings pressure. “It's an incredible time to run any business, with all the uncertainty and all the challenges that we all have. But the best gravitational pull to make decisions is really looking at a playbook and a brand vision,” per Dickson. “That is what gets you through any hard times and out the other side.”

The Cannes Lions festivities are officially done and dusted. Check out the full list of brands and agencies from Australia and New Zealand that have won on the world stage at this year's Festival of Creativity - plus every Grand Prix in every category. Telstra and New Zealand Herpes Foundation end the week at the top of the tally, thanks to Grand Prix wins, while local work for Volkswagen, 1001 Optometry, Samsung, Netflix, Bristol Myers Squibb, Made By Dyslexia, Vogel's, Coca-Cola, Export Ultra, Legacy Australia, 2Degrees, 36 Months, Suncorp, 7-Eleven, Toyota and Meat & Livestock Australia was likewise recognised as world class. 

Procter & Gamble CMO Marc Pritchard delivered an unapologetic brand building 101 at Cannes, urging marketers to get off the "content hamster wheel" and get back to basics on craft, consistency and consumer insight, or watch growth tank. But Analytic Partners and Jellyfish presented counter-evidence that suggests the old marketing rules around attention and wear-out may no longer apply in a platform dominated world, requiring a rethink of some key effectiveness fundamentals.

Nestlé’s first ever global CMO spent 25 years in agencies. Now she’s rewired its marketing function around “lost” creativity, built an end-to-end content engine and is “in the midst” of merging data and insights functions. A Grand Prix at Cannes and multiyear marketing budget increases signed off by successive CEOs suggest its paying off. But Aude Gandon says the marketing funnel is now obsolete – requiring some fundamental shifts in approach.

A swathe of Australia's domestic market is banking on safe brand platforms, low risk personalisation and 'good enough' customer experience to deliver incremental growth. But global marketing, customer and brand bosses at Amazon, Mars and $50bn healthcare giant Novartis set the tone at this year's Cannes opener: creativity wins and marketers and agencies should be actively encouraged to embrace risk – within reason – or watch growth flatline. Plus Mars thinks it has cracked below the line attribution that MMM can't yet do. Amazon's brand chief thinks she has "atomised" a recipe for creativity and is giving her teams free rein on the "biggest out of home network in the world" – it's delivery boxes. But she's not yet handed over all the big calls. Novartis marketing and CX chief Gail Horwood has driven a full flip to bold brand platforms and creativity over the last 18 months – a reversal of decades-old regulatory tip-toeing. It's working.