Brands in Cannes should get back to basics
Opinion
While AI is a genuine addition to how people discover, it’s not a reason to look away from the platforms where desire begins, writes the MD at Vudoo.
The industry has decamped to the Croisette, and for good reason. Cannes Lions has long been a celebration of storytelling and the triumphs of creative execution. This year the programme is heavy with AI, from sessions on machine creativity to panels decoding why certain ideas endure. The obsession is understandable. It is also a distraction from a more basic question that too few brands are answering well.
Inspiration is still the starting point for every purchase. The problem is that the focus on AI is taking away our attention from where inspiration actually happens.
The basics still live on social
For all the noise about conversational discovery, consumers still spend a disproportionate share of their attention on social platforms every single day, making these channels places where inspiration occurs, and products are seen and coveted.
This is particularly vital given that NielsenIQ projects Gen Z’s spending power will reach $12trn by 2030, and this is the audience largely driving the way commerce and media now blend. They begin their journeys in social feeds, taking cues from their favourite creators, forming intent well before they open a search bar or an AI assistant.
The dilemma for retailers is not which platform to choose. It’s how to use social properly once they are there. Brands are already spending heavily on social, with around 80% of marketing leaders planning to shift their budgets toward it.
The shortfall is in execution rather than budget. Social runs on discovery and impulse, and some 81% of consumers say it prompts spontaneous purchases year-round, yet many brands still route those shoppers off-platform to a separate cart.
AI does not replace influence
The more useful way to think about AI is as a discovery layer that sits downstream of social inspiration, rather than a substitute for it. People increasingly turn to large language models to research and compare products they first encountered elsewhere. That is a useful role, but also a narrow one.
OpenAI’s decision to rethink its Instant Checkout feature and instead move toward connected retailer environments is proof of this. AI is exceptional at discovery and curation, but on its own, it is not the place where desire is created or where transactions are completed. The inspiration still tends to start on social, the discovery often runs through an LLM, and the purchase needs a frictionless landing point.
These aren’t competing investments. A brand that allocates more budget to AI-driven discovery while neglecting the social environments that generate intent is optimising the middle of a journey it never properly started.
AI raises the value of getting social right, because the better the inspiration at the top, the more there is for discovery to work with further down.
Brandformance starts at the point of inspiration
I expect much of the Cannes programme will circle back to brandformance – the idea that brand equity and performance can finally work as one. Merging teams on an organisational chart won’t deliver it. Unity holds only when the media itself can guide a consumer from interest to action without sending them away.
This is where the social basics count most. Social is built for discovery-led engagement and scroll-based behaviour, which makes it the natural home for inspiration.
The weakness has been the handoff. Too often the route from a social moment to a purchase passes through a destination URL, a fractured landing page and a third-party cart, and intent leaks at every step. Closing that distance is the kind of operational fix brands should be implementing, and it sits closer to marketing fundamentals than to any of the AI-focused sessions on the main stage.
Gen Z makes any neat digital-versus-physical story more complicated, and in a way that rewards getting social right. Their journey to purchase might start online, yet in-store purchases still account for almost half of what they spend, according to NielsenIQ’s data. They treat digital and physical as one continuous experience, and they expect a quick route from one to the other.
The 2026 mandate: get the fundamentals right
Once upon a time, industry events were dominated by future-gazing. What we are seeing now is operational urgency, and advertisers and media partners want practical answers they can act on this quarter, rather than vision statements for 2030.
The most valuable sessions along the Croisette this year will be those about the oldest discipline in marketing: meeting consumers where their attention already is and capturing inspiration at the moment it strikes.
Social still carries most of the attention, and while AI is a genuine addition to how people discover, it’s not a reason to look away from the platforms where desire begins. The brands that remember that, and invest accordingly, will be the ones turning inspiration into outcomes long after the festival ends.
Sarah Lawson Johnston is the managing director, global revenue and partnerships at Vudoo