Story by Zeynep Tatar
Cannes now resembles CES in a beach suit. The marketing professionals who are old enough remember that Cannes was a celebration of storytelling. Now it has transformed into market place of dashboards, data partnerships, and deal flows. A sparking proof: Amazon Ads has a bigger beachfront than most creative agencies. Google and TikTok placed their AI labs. Even Unilever's activation this year was more fin-tech showcase than feel-good film.
The creative heads still wear linen shirts, but they come with performance metrics in their pockets.
A few years ago, you went to Cannes to ask "What's a great idea?" Now, CMOs go to Cannes to ask: "What works, and how fast can I get results?” Marketing's most pressing identity crisis is awakened. Brand leaders are caught between algorithmic logic and human emotion, between quarterly KPIs and long-term brand essence. This isn’t just a shift. It’s a collision.
Let’s start with the view. You’re walking past the Croisette, welcomed not by a touching brand story but by a shiny installation from Walmart Connect. A panel on how retail media is transforming purchase journeys is drawing bigger crowds than any film screening. There's no film, actually. The movie is in your cart.
Amazon Ads turned its beach into a full-funnel ad tech experience. Its message? We know what your customers watch, what they search, and most crucially what they buy. The engine wheel is real.
Carrefour showed how its own retail media network has helped brands reduce campaign waste and push direct conversions. It wasn’t understated: Cannes is no longer just where CMOs toast their agencies. It’s where they meet data vendors, retail partners, and AI engineers to figure out where their budgets will go next week.
This is the performance invasion. Some numbers: Amazon’s revenue generated from advertising rose 19% year-over-year to 13.92 billion dolar in Q1. DSP investment (Amazon’s demand-side platform) for brands like keto-friendly snack and cereal brand Catalina Crunch and drinkware brand Corkcicle has doubled. These aren’t experimental budgets but real reallocations. Think on your traditional media plans again.
What changed? The macroeconomic climate, at first. In an era of radical uncertainty, brands don’t want faith-based marketing. They want click-throughs. They want ROAS. And they want a narrative that proves itself in a dashboard.
What about AI? If 2023 was the year of AI curiosity, 2025 is the year of AI necessity. Shannon Lewis of CMDC tell it well: "AI is no longer a curiosity. It’s a renaissance.” But even in the renaissance, people burned things. Behind the celebratory panels, you could sense real tension. If everyone has access to the same AI tools, how will brands differentiate? What does creativity mean when the machine can automatically produce 500 TikToks in 3 minutes?
Alexander Chen adds his view: "AI does not have taste. That’s what still sets you apart.” So, while this wave is sweeping away, CMOs are left with a dual pressure:
- Use AI to speed up production and lower costs, or risk losing efficiency points to the CFO.
- Guard brand identity from becoming templated to death.
That balancing act is exhausting.
Let’s talk about those CMOs who are not your 2015 Mad Men whisperers anymore. They’re full stack operators. They speak data, flirt with UX, know media buying, and lead brand repositionings. But they’re also tired. Why?
Because they’re being paralyzed by three directions at once:
- The board wants proof.
- The team wants purpose.
- The world wants speed.
This year at Cannes, I heard a phrase more than once: "budget turbulence." It’s the feeling of knowing your spend can shift dramatically month to month based on macro indicators—a political change here, a TikTok scandal there, or a new consumer sentiment pivot. Especially in Türkiye, at least 3-4 unexpected crises are always on the table.
The new model is rolling reallocation. Dynamic budgeting. Adaptive media. The old days of "lock the plan, execute, celebrate in June" are dead. 5 years marketing budgets are the fairytales we talked to juniors.
This is where we return to our metaphor. CMOs today are Prometheus figures. Like in Aeschylus's play, they brought fire; the fire of transformation, of data, of creative power. But now, they’re chained to the rocks of CFO control and algorithm checks.
Because the convergence is real. The entire system is under reset: Radical uncertainty have made CFOs louder voices in marketing plans. GenAI has shortened the production cycle but risks flattening the creative perspective. Retail media is swallowing budgets once owned by brand teams. Consumer trust is declining, and cultural relevance is harder to manage at scale.
This isn’t just an industry update. It’s an identity crisis. It’s Cannes realizing that it is no longer just a temple of dreams, but also a laboratory of limits.
Creativity has always lived with tension. But now that tension has metrics. This year in Cannes, the best sessions weren’t the big stage interviews. They were the conversations in between—CMOs whispering about reorganisations of marketing teams, creative heads sharing anxiety over generative sameness, agency heads admitting their best cases now start with data, not drama.
We need agility at most in marketing. The winners of the next era will be those who do both: Who dare to make, and know how to measure. Who stay authentic and know the CFO's language.
Who balance the pressure to perform with the courage to still surprise.
If you came to Cannes for escapism, you came to the wrong beach. But if you came for a confrontation with the future, this was the best show in town.
And if CMOs are still Prometheus, then maybe this time, they understand that they have to find a way to break the chains—without losing the fire.
