The brands that stood out at Cannes aren’t stocking up on AI tools. They’re connecting entire systems and keeping creativity where value compounds.
Mindgruve went to Cannes to meet with:
- Retail media and commerce platforms rewriting how products get found and bought (Amazon and Walmart Connect)
- The AI, search, and social platforms where discovery and demand are shifting to (OpenAI, TikTok, Pinterest, Snap, Microsoft Advertising, and Google)
- The streamers and publishers reshaping attention and creator partnerships (Netflix, among others)
Our goal was to see the roadmaps early so our clients can build for what comes next. Five shifts stood out during those meetings.
1. Agentic commerce stopped being a thought experiment.
The concept of an AI agent shopping on our behalf became a reality at Cannes this year. Amazon introduced Alexa+ agentic ads, a format where a shopper can see an ad and complete a purchase inside the same conversation without opening an app, scanning a code, or landing on a website.
The ad and the store have become the same surface. Early beta partners are already live. Agentic commerce could drive up to $1 trillion in U.S. retail revenue by 2030 and forecasts of its impact across the globe run into the trillions. Most brands are still built for shoppers who do their own searching and buying. But discovery is moving off the search bar and the store shelf into conversations with agents who are doing it for us.
Mindgruve spent time on OpenAI’s ChatGPT ads beta as a partner, and the scale on paper is striking: about 900 million weekly active users, with about a fifth of queries showing commercial intent, and an ambition to reach $100 billion in ad revenue by 2030. The reach and intent of the platform are real. But conversion at scale is not yet proven. Although OpenAI is positioning itself as a high-intent, mid-funnel channel rather than an awareness play, by its own account the upper-funnel impact is still harder to measure, with conversion optimization recently rolling out.
Test it for qualified demand. Don’t think of it as a proven performance engine yet. And don’t invest in every agentic format at once. If you sell through marketplaces, this belongs in your next budget cycle, not your 2030 planning.
2. Creators became business infrastructure.
Brands used to ask how to buy an influencer campaign. The savvier question now is how to build a creator ecosystem. Amazon, Netflix, and other platforms court creators to help them earn more inside the audiences they already own (rather than turning them into TV stars).
The industry has entered a creator, earned, and PR era. A polished digital ad no longer carries the same weight with younger audiences. What moves them is watching people they trust use a brand authentically. Brands should trade the traditional media-buy mindset for real relationships with creators. Relationships don’t scale like impressions. They compound, which means they need sustained investment and a team building with them over time, not a one-off engagement. As creators get courted from every side, the brands that win will offer both authentic voices with reach and organic content they can scale.
3. AI moved from experiment to execution.
AI is no longer the spectacle. Access to the tools is table stakes. Many organizations have bought AI, but far fewer have rebuilt around it. The edge goes to teams who rethink their workflows, briefs, approvals, and measurement loops with AI so the technology delivers value rather than sitting idle in a browser tab.
That’s where we’ve concentrated our investment. We built AI into proprietary technology like Sightline, our predictive intelligence platform that runs deep analysis inside Amazon Marketing Cloud to tell brands what happened, what they should do next, and why. We hand the task of pattern-finding to the machines to give our strategists more time to work on positioning and make judgment calls that no LLM can handle.
4. As content flattens, trust and craft are appreciating.
Cannes was saturated with conversations and presentations about AI, but the paradox was that the work celebrated most was deliberately, defiantly human-made. The quality of the output gets diluted when everyone generates from the same handful of AI models. So whatever can’t be commoditized becomes more valuable. That’s why public relations, earned media, live experiences, and the creative craft took home the most awards during the week.
Brands have optimized to return on ad spend and let a discount-driven number tell them they were winning for years, even as the brand underneath eroded. Contribution margin per incremental customer acquired is the more honest metric, because it’s earned from new customers rather than customers who would have bought from the brand anyway. When AI can manufacture infinite cheap output, the durable assets are the ones that build trust and pricing power rather than just clicks.
5. Performance measurement finally caught up.
Reach is not necessarily synonymous with performance. What matters much more today is signal fidelity: attributing every impression to a known user and device so that a brand can identify exactly which of its ads drove the sale.
That strategic insight was the focus of a panel discussion between Sönke Hansen (SVP Commerce Europe at Mindgruve), me and Chris Conetta, who leads DSP supply at Amazon Ads. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) has established itself as the data clean room for answering pressing questions about signal fidelity, connecting ad exposures with real-world outcomes while staying privacy-compliant. And it’s the same engine we plug into Sightline to measure true incrementality instead of taking credit for demand that already existed.
For two decades, the industry optimized for attribution, arguing over who gets credit for a sale. The real question is creation. For Sönke, this is precisely where the leverage for sustainable growth lies: “Last-touch attribution is one of the biggest value destroyers in our industry. It bluntly rewards the final click and ignores all the touchpoints that previously did the heavy lifting along the customer journey.”
We saw the impact of this powerful, full-funnel approach in our work for one of our clients, a premium European brand in a high-consideration, seasonal category. A deep dive into AMC revealed that an upper-funnel channel (which many people declared dead) was the strongest driver for new customer acquisition. The results:
- 95% increase in new-to-brand customers
- Significantly higher average order value (AOV)
Connection is the strategy.
Agentic commerce, creators, AI in the workflow, earned trust, and honest measurement are the same development seen from different angles. Growth in 2027 will come from integrating all the systems of strategy, data, media, marketplaces, and technology, and keeping human creativity where value compounds.
The brands that make those connections now will hold the advantage in the future. We left Cannes more convinced of that than when we arrived.
