Marc Fischli opens with what Criteo is not. “People still think we’re a re-targeter, which obviously is the birth of Criteo,” he says when we sit down in the Criteo yacht at the Cannes Lions Festival “You arguably could say that we were one of the inventors of the retargeting piece.”

That business made Criteo’s name and then nearly dated it. When Megan Clarken arrived as Chief Executive some seven years ago, the third-party cookie was already under threat, and she pivoted the company towards retail media, largely through acquisition. That business remains one of its two pillars. The second rebuild came about 18 months ago, when Google finally decided against killing the cookie. “That freed up a significant number of engineers, over 100 engineers, pretty much overnight,” Fischli says. The result was a strategic shift back into performance media as a growth engine, coinciding with the arrival of current Chief Executive Michael Komasinski. The products now reaching the market are what that cohort of engineers has been building since.

Fischli runs Criteo’s international markets, covering EMEA and Asia Pacific with a focus on performance media. He joined three and a half years ago after a long spell at dunnhumby, latterly as Chief Client Officer, and Diageo before that, a mix he says now runs through Criteo’s senior leadership: martech specialists alongside retail, CPG and agency backgrounds.

“The battle for the direct contact with the consumer, or the traveller, or the user, is on,” he says. “At the beginning, the LLMs wanted to go into that. I think they’ve taken a bit of a step back, because the retailers are, as they should be, fiercely defensive around that. But the battle is on. Where that transaction happens is where the best data is. Who owns that, and how exclusive it is, is going to be quite important. If everyone knows everything, the value of that goes.”

Strip the company back, and Fischli sees two assets. The first is its commerce graph, which he says knows what people do on the open web and across apps well because everything gets tagged. The second is access to the product catalogues of its retailers and e-tailers at SKU level, alongside 235 retailers on the retail media side, some of which give Criteo visibility into what happens offline in their stores.

“That is probably something we have underutilised as a company for a while, but we are not a data sales house,” he says. “It’s not our data at the end of the day. But what we can do is use this data to have advantaged services for our clients.” In practice that means targeting, creative and, increasingly, measurement and incrementality.

The product architecture built on those assets runs in three directions on the performance side. Criteo GO is a self-serve, cross-channel platform aimed at small and mid-sized advertisers and at the tail brands of large ones. “If you’re a Unilever, you have 3,000 brands. The last 1,000 never really got a proper outlet,” Fischli says. An enterprise version, co-built with agency partners and in beta, is due in 2027, with curation through Criteo’s own and third-party SSPs as the third leg. On retail media, the company is moving everything to auction-based buying and positions Commerce Max, its multi-retailer buying interface, as its answer to fragmentation.

Everyone talks nice at conferences. Then Monday morning happens

At a panel earlier in the week, Fischli was asked why Europe is ahead of the US in retail media. “The answer to that is, of course, in-store,” he says. The American industry started with sponsored products and stayed focused on them. In-store is messy, and the budgets sit with retail commercial teams inside yearly joint business planning negotiations rather than with marketing. The Europeans started in-store. “They’re used to messy stuff. When brands wanted to activate all of that universe, from sponsored product to a screen that happens to be in an aisle somewhere, the Europeans were actually quite well prepared.”

Both sides share a deeper structural problem. Retail media inverts a relationship retailers have spent decades enforcing. “In a retail brand relationship, the retailer normally calls the shots,” Fischli says. “Now retail media is different, because the client is inverse. The brand’s the client of the retailer, and that is a mindset change that people still need to go through.” Walmart understood it early with Walmart Connect. Many retailers in the US and Europe have built retail media networks that sit in marketing, “and it’s not particularly powerful.”

Advertisers have their own version of the gap between intention and behaviour. “The true ‘I get fantastic value out of retail media’ is still more the exception rather than the rule,” he says. “Everyone knows it, and everyone sits at the conferences and talks nice. And then we go back to our offices, and everything goes back to normal come Monday morning.”

Strategy, in his diagnosis, is not the problem; boards are on side, and CFOs love the EBIT impact in thin-margin grocery. Structure and people are. “What is in it for me if I run the commercial team? As long as I do my number, I don’t need to worry about the other guy.” On his maths, if retail media captured even half the share of voice it should, the industry would be two or three times its current size.

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Partnerships and the honesty problem

Criteo’s retail media pillar was built by acquisition at speed, an urgency Fischli says no longer applies. M&A will continue, but selectively and with a higher hurdle. What has changed is the default. “What is the absolute new normal is partnerships. Everyone in the industry has realised, maybe with the exception of the very large American tech companies, that they cannot do everything themselves. You need to be much clearer about what you’re really good at, and be honest with yourself, which is not something this industry is particularly good at.”

Partnerships stall, he adds, in keeping revenue-targeted teams comfortable with overlap rather than at the top, where sign-off is usually easy. Zero overlap is so rare that if it existed, the deal would already have been done.

2,000 advertisers on ChatGPT, with no guarantees

The OpenAI partnership is the test case. Generative and agentic AI have pushed up the value of high-quality data, and when OpenAI decided to move into advertising, there was a live question over whether it would bring the transaction in-house. It stayed open to purchases remaining with the retailer or e-tailer, and that was when the two companies started talking. “They’re not specialists on advertising,” Fischli says. “So we bring that data set, which makes the targeting better, helps with creative, and the measurement will be moving towards much, much better. It helps them grow and kick-start their advertising business. They bring a lot of the tech, and we bring a lot of the data set.”

Criteo is not OpenAI’s only partner, but it was the first advertising technology partner in the ChatGPT ads pilot in March and, according to Fischli, remains comfortably the largest. “There’s a first-mover advantage, and we have by far the biggest. We’ve just announced we have 2,000 advertisers live on OpenAI. This is significant in just a few weeks.”

He describes the relationship as close, particularly with OpenAI’s advertising team, and insists the commercial story has barely started. “Our joint clients haven’t seen anything yet on the true value that this will have. It’s very early days, because the measurement piece, we’re only starting to implement.”

The pace of change makes longer bets pointless. On a travel panel that week, he and fellow panellists compared their predictions from a year earlier. “What was the delta? Oh my god, 75%. Scrap everything.” Criteo’s insurance is integration: an advertiser can compare the value of the OpenAI part of a campaign against the Facebook and retargeting parts in one place. “I won’t quite call it a moat, but it’s definitely still a bit of protection in the short term.”

“One of the things I’m usually talking about is, is the age of the moat over? When digital advertising first started, everyone wanted to create a moat. Some people managed to do that, and it worked well for a number of years. Given the speed of innovation, I don’t know whether the age of the moat is still here. What will win, in my opinion, is not necessarily the people who create the best moat, but the people who remain the most adaptive.”

Six months to democratised MCP

His most testable claim concerns agentic buying. In May, Criteo and Dentsu announced what they call the industry’s first MCP campaign: a Dentsu trading agent orchestrated it end-to-end for a French client through Criteo’s Model Context Protocol, with no one logging into a Criteo interface. “The results are fantastic,” Fischli says. “I think we’re going to see in the second half of this year a positive explosion of the usage of this. Over the next six months, we will see the democratisation of MCP.”

He is dismissive of the wider industry’s claims on this front. “A lot of people are telling everyone they’re investing in this. The amount of people that have done something that truly works is very, very small.” Once democratisation arrives, he expects the industry to catch up within a further six months. “Agent-to-agent will be a true reality when we talk next year.”

Criteo’s protection rests on data exclusivity, and its newest partner sits closer to the consumer conversation every month. On Fischli’s own telling, nobody in this market can answer that question for more than six months at a time.

Andy Burnham became UK Prime Minister without a contest, a challenge or a televised debate, and, as the Spectator noted with some alarm, without taking press questions at either of the set-piece moments of his rise: his by-election victory and his “No 10 North” policy speech. For most incoming prime ministers that would read as ordinary media management. For this one, the national press is entitled to wonder whether it is a preview.

Burnham is the most committed supporter of press regulation ever to enter Downing Street. In 2016, as shadow Home Secretary, he called Leveson Part Two “non-negotiable” and wrote to ministers demanding it proceed, telling Radio 4: “The Government’s only done half the job.” This year, before the leadership crisis broke, he said of the abandoned inquiry: “I haven’t given up on that”, adding that he would revive it if he “had the influence”.

He now has the influence.

The motive is foundational, not tactical

Most politicians’ views on press regulation are positions. Burnham’s are biography. His politics were forged in the Hillsborough campaign, and his view of the national press, above all The Sun, was forged there too. The campaign that made him, the fight to overturn a false narrative that a newspaper printed and defended for decades, is not an episode he can be lobbied out of. When he linked press reform to Hillsborough in 2016, he was describing the foundation of his public life.

That distinguishes him from every predecessor who inherited the Leveson question. Cameron commissioned the inquiry and shelved its second part; the May government formally abandoned it in 2018, over Sir Brian Leveson’s own objection, and saw off a High Court challenge to that decision; Johnson, Sunak and Starmer had no appetite to reopen it. Burnham arrives with the opposite problem: a personal commitment made repeatedly and in public, and a government to run.

The battle lines were drawn before he got the job

The lobbying began weeks before the removal van reached Downing Street. Hacked Off has been open about its hopes; Hugh Grant has pressed the case in person. On the other side, the Telegraph has already run the “war on journalism“ counter-offensive: a panic its critics note is not disinterested, given the paper’s deputy chairman sits on the board of the company that funds IPSO, the industry’s self-regulator. An unnamed industry source has warned that if the government’s media green paper were “hijacked to advance a press regulation agenda”, it would undermine the stated aim of combating misinformation.

That green paper is where intention will first meet timetable. Lisa Nandy’s consultation, launched on 23 June with proposals to make “trustworthy” news prominent in social feeds, closes on 31st August landing directly on the new prime minister’s desk. Prominence for trusted news could be commercially significant for national and local publishers alike. It could equally become the vehicle for a standards agenda, depending on who defines trustworthy and how. The Press Recognition Panel has already welcomed the paper in terms the industry will not enjoy. Whether Nandy keeps DCMS in this week’s reshuffle, and who gets it if she does not, is not a detail this time.

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What he could do, and what it would cost

The instruments vary in price. Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act, the costs-shifting provision publishers spent a decade fighting, was repealed by the Media Act in 2024; restoring it would require primary legislation and a bruising parliamentary fight. Reconvening Leveson Part Two, by contrast, is a decision, not a bill. An inquiry into historic press conduct could be restarted by a government that wanted one.

But wanting one and affording one are different things. Burnham takes office with Labour only just drawing level with Reform after a year behind, a cost-of-living agenda he has promised to put “front and centre”, and limited capital to spend on a fight with the national press that most voters stopped following in 2012. Publishers betting on his restraint has the political arithmetic on their side. The arithmetic, though, is the only part of this that moves.

The paradox: their examiner may also be their defender

The prime minister most likely to reopen the question of how newspapers behave is also the one most likely to defend what they own. Publishers could find their conduct examined and their copyright protected by the same government. No occupant of No 10 has offered them both at once, and how the industry plays it, which fight it picks, which gift it accepts, will be a story in itself.

Most people entered this industry because of their creativity. The uncomfortable question, ten months into Ndidi Oteh’s tenure as Chief Executive of Accenture Song, is how much room is left for it. Her answer, delivered in a recent joint appearance with Creative Chairperson Nick Law, was unequivocal: plenty, but only for organisations that treat creativity as a discipline rather than a department. Disciplined creativity, applied across every part of a business, is, in their telling, the difference between being valuable and being replaced.

That framing is worth taking seriously, not because it is novel (consultancies have been promising to operationalise creativity for a decade) but because of who is making it and at what scale. Accenture Song is, by revenue, the largest creative business in the world: $20bn in its 2025 fiscal year, up from $12.5bn when David Droga took charge four years earlier. When its two most senior figures set out a doctrine, they are describing how a meaningful share of global marketing, commerce and experience spend will be organised.

The company, not the CEO

Oteh took over from Droga on 1 September 2025, after 14 years at Accenture and, from late 2023, a stint running Song’s Americas business. She has been careful not to position herself against her predecessor, describing him as a mentor and team builder with a habit of taking on what everyone else called impossible. Droga has moved upstairs to become Accenture’s Vice Chair; the succession was orderly, and the strategy is continuous.

Around a decade and a half ago, she recounted, Accenture concluded that technology was reshaping how consumers live, learn and socialise, and that it wanted to own the consequences. It began buying and building creative capability under the Accenture Interactive banner, established in 2009: Fjord, Karmarama, The Monkeys and, in 2019, Droga5, the deal that signalled the ambition was serious. In 2022, with Droga newly installed as Chief Executive, Interactive and its more than 40 acquired agencies were stitched into a single brand and renamed Accenture Song; only Droga5 kept its name. The point, Oteh stressed, was never to assemble a holding company in miniature. Accenture set out to be neither a consultancy with an agency bolted on nor a technology firm that dabbles in advertising, but one integrated business spanning marketing, sales, commerce and service.

That integration is the product. Song’s pitch to clients is what Oteh calls harmonised consumer experiences: the same brand behaving coherently across every touchpoint, all the time, rather than in campaign-shaped bursts. “Technology has always needed creativity, and creativity always needs technology,” she argued. The companies that fuse the two with intention, in her view, are pulling away from those that do not, and the gap is compounding. It is a tidy inversion of the usual anxiety: rather than technology eroding creative value, Song’s case is that technology has made creative judgment scarcer and therefore more valuable, provided it is wired into the whole enterprise.

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Paul McCarthy-Brain hears the same objection so often he has a name for it: nobody has heard of his company. “We’re kind of neverheardofyou.com unless you’ve heard of us,” quips the Founder and Chief Executive of Flip-Pay, the Dublin content monetisation company he launched in 2015. “We operate predominantly off referral. Our sales team is small, and we generate more work than we can handle.”

The anonymity sits oddly against the client list. Flip-Pay’s platform took Mediahuis Ireland from zero digital subscribers in February 2020 to 100,000 across the Irish Independent and the Belfast Telegraph by June 2025. It runs HuffPost’s membership programme, Euractiv’s access systems and Press Gazette’s metered paywall.

In May it powered the Salt Lake Tribune’s removal of its paywall, the most closely watched reader revenue experiment in American local news. This year the company has engaged PR for the first time. “It’s about time we actually told people what it is that we do.”

Micropayments died in the finance department

Flip-Pay’s legal name, International Micro Payment Ventures Limited, records the founding idea. “We actually started off as a micropayments play,” says McCarthy-Brain. He had been investigating whether cryptocurrency wallets could finally make small payments work for publishers. Three years of R&D followed. The first phase dug into why every previous attempt had failed; the second, run with News Corp in the UK and US, explored what a working version might look like.

His conclusion was that the industry had misdiagnosed the problem. The real barrier was moving a reader’s identity and entitlements between publishers without friction, and no vendor had cleared it.

The technologists liked it. Its accountants did not. “The CFOs always found it too disruptive. These are businesses predominantly based on recurring monthly and annual subscriptions, growing 2 or 3%. Something which would cannibalise that business would present too much of a risk.”

The BBC came closer, exploring a journalism wallet for small, regular payments. “They got it straight away. But the BBC is slow. The heads of tech and the director generals come and go. We were one of those cycles, and it ended up going nowhere.”

Mediahuis made the pivot pay

The turn came from Independent News & Media, preparing the Irish Independent’s move to paid access under its new owner, Mediahuis. Flip-Pay won the business against Piano, with a brief that reset its direction.

“They said, we love what you’ve done with the tech you’ve built, but would you go and build the gated community, for the monthly and annual subscriptions? Now we can do everything at the micro level. A day pass, an individual article, an e-paper, all the way through to monthly and annual subscriptions.”

That relationship still defines the pitch: “Really customised boutique implementations for very innovative publishers. That’s where we’re making our bread and butter.” When a client sets what McCarthy-Brain calls a North Star objective, Flip-Pay builds the feature, then folds it back into the platform for every other publisher.

For Euractiv, the Brussels title he describes as “basically the European equivalent of Politico”, that meant a European Parliament integration. Officials log in with EU credentials and get automatic access to pro-level content.

Flip-Pay would rather acquire than be acquired

The sector around Flip-Pay is consolidating fast. Sophi went to Mather Economics in 2023 and Poool to Darwin CX in March. “We’re privately funded. We have no interest in selling. We get loads of venture capital and private equity queries monthly.”

The company went through what he calls a growing-up phase around 2022, taking on ISO, SOC, and NIST certifications. “We stopped being a startup and started being a proper company. We may acquire something, but we’ve no current intention of selling.”

The unglamorous end of the business is growing fastest. In 2024 an introduction from California’s Press Democrat led to an alliance with Teak Systems, pairing Flip-Pay’s digital stack with Teak’s print circulation tools. The target is American publishers on legacy systems such as Naviga, in his words “tech which was developed before the dinosaurs roamed the earth”. That combination, he says, is “growing like crazy” in the US, with Latin America following.

A recurring donation is a subscription by another name

Flip-Pay’s move into donations began with a customer request. “We stepped back and looked at our platform. There’s not an awful lot that’s different between donations and subscriptions. If it’s recurring, basically it’s a subscription. The next question was, how could we deploy paywall tech into the donations flow?”

That means pointing the machinery of dynamic paywalls at the appeal itself: cohort analysis, metering and content-level context. A story about the US government and women’s health services, read by a largely female audience, can carry an ask tied to that coverage.

McCarthy-Brain gives the category’s pioneer qualified credit: “The Guardian is the daddy of this. I think they built it themselves, and it’s quite a blunt instrument.”

His other rule is that the transaction must never leave the publisher’s brand. “The worst thing a publisher can do is link out to a third party. You’re taking your money and giving it to somebody else. It should be invisible to the user.”

“You can’t just stick up a thing saying give us money, donate now. It just doesn’t work. Nobody will. The tech is fine. We’ve got the tech; it works. The hardest period is coming up with the narrative. Why should you support this publisher?”

Converts, he argues, are worth more than the payers they replace. “Subscribers are transient for the most part. If you can sell them on why what they’re doing matters, you’ve got a much stickier subscriber. It’s a different model, but the mechanics are all the same.”

HuffPost tested the thesis at scale, launching voluntary contributions with Flip-Pay in 2023 and evolving them into a tiered membership programme in January 2025.

Salt Lake did its homework before the gamble

The Salt Lake Tribune is the harder case. The Utah Daily has been under nonprofit ownership since 2019. In mid-May it took down its paywall and asked its 32,000 digital subscribers, roughly a third of its revenue, to become voluntary members instead.

Press Gazette framed the move as a gamble with that third. McCarthy-Brain rejects the framing. “They’d done their homework. They tested the waters. They didn’t just jump into this. They engaged with customers. A high percentage said they would convert.”

The conversion was heavy engineering: migrating subscriber data off a legacy platform, rebuilding onboarding journeys and satisfying “a lot of really specific non-profit accounting rules and regulations that you absolutely must follow.”

Early behaviour supports his stickiness argument. “People who may never subscribe are now deciding to contribute.” Lapsed payers are not written off either; they “go into your standard dunning flow, like you would a subscriber, and they can be targeted later.”

Flip-Pay now hopes to work with the American Journalism Project to replicate the model across the US local news landscape. On the Tribune itself, he hedges: “Time will tell. Once we’ve done a couple of years with them, we’ll get some really good solid data.”

The next subscriber may be a software agent

Collapsing Google referral traffic is doing Flip-Pay’s selling for it. His shorthand for what publishers on legacy paywall tech is telling him: “This was fine six months ago, but now what we need is every single bell and whistle available to us at a better price.” “Just having a paywall up is not good enough these days. You need dynamic elements. You need intelligence.”

On AI answer engines, his assessment is blunt. “At the moment, the only tools you’ve got available to you are to block them or to license, and that is pretty much it.”

The bigger shift, he believes, is agentic purchasing: an AI assistant instructed to find the cheapest route to a title’s journalism and transacting through a programmatic interface. That would bypass the A/B-tested checkout journeys the industry has spent a decade refining. “The content will be consumed in a different way, but there will still be the need for news organisations to tell us what’s going on. If that stops, the AI agents have nothing to read.”

AI has also compressed Flip-Pay’s own build cycles (“When you have an idea, we can prototype and iterate in days”). It is feeding retention too: a cancellation call can be scored in real time against lifetime value and engagement, with a custom offer generated on the spot.

In September, Flip-Pay will launch an unnamed AI product with Press Gazette at the Future of Media Technology Conference, born from a call with Editor-in-Chief Dominic Ponsford. “It started with a telephone call, and it spiralled into an enterprise thing.”

The growth has a lopsided shape, and McCarthy-Brain knows it. When his principal investor asked before the summer what could hurt the business, his answer was concentration. The Americas are expanding fast, and Europe is not keeping pace; a move by President Trump against the dollar or the wider US economy could turn that strength into an exposure. So, after a decade of being recommended in private, Flip-Pay is setting out to make itself known in public, in a market where the vendors it wants to displace have been advertising for years. Expect to be hearing more.

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On Wednesday afternoon, while much of the country was preoccupied with England’s World Cup semi-final against Argentina, the Advertising Association gathered MPs, ministers and industry leaders at the House of Commons to mark its 100th year. Damian Hinds MP hosted, opening with a tour of advertising’s place in British cultural life, from the Gold Blend couple (Nescafé’s long-running coffee romance) to Nick Kamen’s 1985 Levi’s 501 launderette and what he called those awful meerkats (Compare the Market), which drew gasps from the audience, before handing over to AA President Andria Vidler.

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy sent her apologies; she was in Atlanta for the match. And as Times Radio’s Kate McCann reminded the room, Andy Burnham is expected to become prime minister by the end of the week. A trade body celebrating a century of continuity was addressing an industry, and a political class, in the middle of a rupture.

Trust gets promoted from reputation defence to growth strategy

Vidler, Chief Executive of Allwyn UK and Advertising Association’s President since March 2025, used her speech to reframe the association’s founding principle. Trust in advertising sits at a five-year high, she said, crediting the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) awareness campaign and the media owners who fund it. The industry the AA serves has also transformed in scale, from 300,000 businesses using advertising 25 years ago to 3.6 million today.

Her argument was that the industry has spent years treating trust as a soft measure for defending brand reputations and should now treat it as a driver of effectiveness. Trusted brands, she argued, grow faster, command price premiums and keep customers loyal.

“We believe that we’re seeing a real shift from the attention economy to the trust economy, where the advertiser that wins is the one that really builds and reinforces trust in every aspect of what it delivers,” This shift to the trust economy means treating trust no longer as a soft measure, but as a hard commercial metric. The king of KPI’s”

Andria Vidler, President of the Advertising Association and CEO of Allwyn

AI adoption is the accelerant. Mobile phones took 16 years to reach 100 million users, she noted; the Internet seven, Facebook four and a half, TikTok nine months and ChatGPT two. With the public using AI to make choices at that pace, trust becomes the basis on which brands are chosen at all. Her prescription for the centenary year: continued backing for the ASA, a business case for trust built on evidence such as the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) effectiveness databank, and a higher profile for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Online Advertising Taskforce and its work on transparency and protecting children. “Advertising that builds trust must be central to every brief,” she said.

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Government backing arrives with a fraud problem attached

Ian Murray, Minister for Creative Industries, Media and Arts, followed with the government’s side of the ledger. Advertising was named a frontier subsector in the creative industries sector plan. The government supported a trade mission to Cannes Lions, where he said UK work took more than 80 awards. Murray jointly chairs the Online Advertising Taskforce, paying tribute to industry Co-Chair Mark Lund.

“There is no place for fraudulent advertising,” Murray said, pointing to the consultation Ofcom published last week on the ad fraud duty under the Online Safety Act and urging the room to engage with it before it closes. The taskforce’s Ad Fraud Working Group, involving the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), DCMS and the Home Office, has reported back on phase one of its work; phase two, developing solutions the industry can apply to the programmatic supply chain, starts now.

Murray also placed the TV green paper published in June, the local media strategy and the ongoing radio review within the same argument: sustainable, trusted media underpins the platforms advertisers depend on. “It’s in all of our interests to put trust at the heart of everything we do,” he said.

The audience, as Times Radio describes it, is in no mood to be reassured

Stig Abell and Kate McCann, Times Radio’s breakfast presenters, read out the mood of their listeners, a self-selecting national focus group that messages the programme in real time. Abell made the commercial stake : “If we don’t have listeners, and if those listeners don’t listen to ads and don’t pay for us, we don’t exist.”

Three themes dominate their inbox. The first is accountability. McCann described listeners spread across ages, regions and incomes, united by unease and by the conviction that politicians answer a different question to the one they were asked. The second, in Abell’s telling, is the establishment: who runs Britain, who is responsible for years of stalled growth, and why anyone claiming authority, whether MP, journalist or brand, should be believed. The third is the economy, sharpened by online calculators speculating about household bills under the incoming government. “The one thing that they hate more than anything else is the feeling that politicians are still lying to them,” McCann said. Her advice, echoed by Abell, was humility: show your work and admit what you do not know.

Stephen Woodford, the AA’s Chief Executive, closed the reception with a toast “to trust in advertising over the next 100 years”, describing trust as close to a universal panacea for politicians, business and the industry alike. That is the tension the centenary leaves open. The AA has data showing trust in advertising rising. The audience described from the same stage has rarely been more sceptical, and by the weekend it will have a new prime minister to test. Its second century opens on that gap: an industry betting on trust just as the public runs short of it.

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Whatever else Cannes Lions 2026 was about, it was about AI. “I asked someone what they thought was the main theme. Obviously, this year you hear AI everywhere. I feel like it’s much more prevalent than last year,” Sascha Eder told me when we sat down at the Palais. It was NewtonX’s second time attending the Cannes Lions Festival and a more organised one, he said: a team of four, a diary of client meetings, and a session on synthetic B2B buyers that put him on stage alongside Jamie Cleghorn, Global Head of Customer Practice at Bain & Company and Zoom’s CMO, Kimberly Storin.

Eder is the CEO and co-founder of NewtonX, the New York-based B2B research intelligence company he started after a spell at McKinsey, where the frustration of advising clients without access to decent data became the founding thesis. The company now works with more than 600 of the world’s largest organisations, including Google, TikTok, Salesforce, Stripe, Microsoft, and Coinbase, supplying what he calls hard-to-get information: the verified professional insight that lets an enterprise, a consultancy or a hedge fund make decisions it would otherwise be guessing at.

The bots reached the research panels before the buyers did

The reason NewtonX exists, Eder argues, is that the market research industry has never fixed its supply chain. “For the last 25 years the industry has been rampant with fraud, and that’s being exacerbated by AI. More bots, even more sophisticated fraud.”

The mechanics of that fraud have evolved fast. “These days you have to deal with sophisticated people impersonating on LinkedIn, you have to deal with bots, you have to deal with AI agents that can simulate a real response in a survey that you almost can’t distinguish from a human.”

His answer is a verification stack rather than a single check. The NewtonX Graph indexes over 1.1 billion professionals, enriched over the years with signals such as IT and advertising budgets by industry and company size. When a client wants advertisers with retail budgets above $20 million, the company pinpoints them, recruits them across multiple channels, then verifies them individually: corporate email, phone, social profile age and authenticity, and topic-specific testing on every project. “There’s not one piece of verification that is bulletproof. It’s really the combination of multiple layers that makes it safe.”

The panel model, in which respondents self-report, is where the rot concentrates. On a panel, he notes, people designate themselves as a CFO one day and a CMO the next to qualify for more surveys. Pre-targeting from verified data closes that door.

Cheaper and faster are conditional claims

Verification is the plumbing. Synthetic personas, the subject of Eder’s Cannes session, are what the industry queued up to hear about, and the appetite is easy to understand. They promise research without recruitment: an always-available simulated buyer that answers immediately and at scale.

Eder’s definition carries a condition that most of the market skips. “A synthetic persona is an AI model that is built, especially in the B2B space, on real verified buyers. If you try to sell to an IT buyer that sits in mid-market finance companies, the model learns from those. The premise of synthetic is it’s cheaper, it’s faster, it’s immediate, and you can do much more at scale, but people tend to forget these things only hold true if the model actually works.”

​He is equally deliberate about what the technology is for. “It’s not about whether synthetic research is better than real research. It’s about the use cases where teams don’t use any research at all, where they guess the answer, or wait weeks or months to run a real study.”

​On familiar territory, the pitch is arithmetic. “Instead of launching 100 ads, assessing them and paying $50,000, you can launch 1,000 ads, have the synthetic personas pre-filter them down to 20, launch those, spend $10,000 and have as much or more conviction than the old method.”

​He tells clients to walk away when the concept is genuinely new. “If you say, here’s the new hardware device OpenAI is launching that’s supposed to replace the iPhone that no one has ever seen, and you ask a synthetic audience, that’s not going to work, because it’s a brand-new concept.” The same logic applies to money. A new product line with $100 million to $500 million behind it gets primary research, no argument.

​Agencies may be the buyers most exposed to that trade-off. Demand from them has exploded in two years from a standing start, and for independents priced out of enterprise-grade B2B data, he is blunt about what synthetic offers. “B2B data is expensive, high quality is expensive, but this is one of the areas where synthetic can provide a lifeline. Is it the same as primary research? No. But is it better than these agencies not having access to any data? Yes.”

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Nobody wants to talk about stale personas

Verified data ages, and a persona trained on last year’s market is quietly answering last year’s questions. Eder concedes this is the part of the pitch the industry avoids. “Nobody talks about it, either because they don’t want to do it or because they’d rather not talk about it. The reality is you’ve got to update the personas every few months.”

NewtonX builds proprietary personas for clients and refreshes them roughly quarterly, using what it calls persona shells: behavioural and attitudinal segmentations for specific buyer types, enriched with the client’s own data. Refreshing every three months, he argues, still costs less than running a heavyweight brand tracker.

Validation is done the hard way: the company splits a real audience in two, builds the model on one half, runs live research on the other, and compares the results. “Confidence, depending on the topic and the audience, can vary anywhere from 85% to above 95%, which is extremely high in some cases. I would argue even 55% or 60% would be more than sufficient, because the trade-off is not making a decision based on any data at all, and there your confidence gets close to zero.” The effort is led by a VP of Research and Innovation who previously ran research at Salesforce-owned Tableau.

Half the buying committee never shows up in the CRM

Push on the hardest objection, that B2B purchases are shaped by politics, budget cycles and relationships that never appear in survey data, and Eder does not retreat into the model. “People are irrational. People say one thing and do another.”

His response draws on the multi-year buy-ability research NewtonX has fielded for LinkedIn and Bain, which mapped how enterprise buying committees behave. “You have the buyers everyone thinks of, and then you have hidden buyers, people in the background nobody is aware of, but they influence the decisions. If you’re not aware of it, you’re at risk of losing out.” The published findings put roughly half of decision-making influence with those hidden buyers in procurement, finance and legal. Personas built on that foundation can model committee dynamics to a degree, he says, but only because the primary research identified the dynamics first.

​That insistence on primary data is also what separates B2B from consumer work. Consumer synthetic tools benefit from an ocean of training data; B2B does not. “People say, well, synthetic worked for B2C, so if I train my model on the web, I’m sure I can ask it to be a procurement specialist. That’s where the model doesn’t have the data, but makes up the audience nonetheless, and gives you a confident-sounding answer.”

The replacement narrative did not survive contact with the data

NewtonX’s study with The Wall Street Journal, which surveyed 82 brand marketing VPs on generative AI, went in carrying three hypotheses: that marketers expected AI to replace people, that it was already generating strong returns, and that cost-cutting was the point. “All three were debunked.” Marketers wanted efficiency and better campaigns; the returns were prospective; and the head-count story kept collapsing on inspection. “In many cases the hiring actually goes up when you deploy AI, because you now need new roles. You go from individual contributors to agent orchestrators. The skill sets change, which is also an argument for people not being replaced but needing to be reskilled.”

The business behind the argument is in credit. NewtonX raised a $32 million Series B at the end of 2021, taking total funding to $47 million, reached profitability within two years and is funding growth organically, with around 200 staff, a London office building out its European presence, and a fresh citation from Gartner as a frontrunner among synthetic population and behavioural simulation startups.

Everything Eder sells depends on buyers who ask what the model was trained on, and he is candid that only the sophisticated ones do. The rest of the market is being offered an ever-cheaper way to hear a confident answer from tools trained on the same polluted panel data that created the crisis in the first place. Twenty-five years of fraud sits underneath them, and nothing at this year’s festival suggested the industry is in a mood to slow down and check.

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The Advertising Association has appointed Nathan Ansell, Chief Customer Officer at Waitrose, as its next President. Ansell joins the AA Council this month as President-Elect and takes the chair in spring 2027, when Andria Vidler completes her tenure.

The president-elect structure gives Ansell the better part of a year inside the organisation before he assumes the role, a longer runway than Vidler received; she was announced in February 2025 and installed on 1 March.

The client side keeps the chair

Alessandra Bellini was Tesco’s Chief Customer Officer when she took the post in 2022. Vidler arrived from Allwyn UK, operator of The National Lottery. With Ansell confirmed, two of the AA’s three most recent presidents will have been supermarket customer chiefs, and all three have come from the advertiser side of the membership. When the AA, a body that also represents media owners, agencies and trade associations, makes its case to government, it wants the argument fronted by the people who buy the advertising.

As President, Ansell will work with Chief Executive Stephen Woodford to lead a council of industry leaders drawn from media owners, agencies, brands and trade bodies. The association’s priority workstreams include building public trust through its Value of Trust campaign, supporting recruitment and retention through All In, and climate action through Ad Net Zero. The President also fronts the AA’s engagement with government and its push to grow UK advertising exports.

Woodford said: “Firstly, I would like to thank Andria for her continued outstanding leadership and commitment during her time as President. She is helping to guide our work at a vital moment for the industry, championing responsible advertising and its contribution to economic growth, and emphasising the need to build public trust, inclusion, and sustainability into everything we do.

“I am delighted to welcome Nathan as our President-Elect to succeed Andria next spring. He is one of the UK’s most respected customer and marketing leaders, with exceptional experience across retail, FMCG, agencies and brand transformation. He is a champion of brand-led growth, with a deep understanding of consumers, data-led insight and responsible business and will be a huge asset to the Advertising Association and to our members as we continue to demonstrate the value of responsible advertising to the UK economy and society.”

Regulation has filled the in-tray

Ansell inherits a policy agenda that has thickened through Vidler’s term. Restrictions on less healthy food and drink advertising came into force in January after repeated delays; advertisers are still absorbing the compliance costs across TV and paid online media. The government’s industrial strategy identifies the creative industries as a growth sector, giving the AA a door to push through. On AI, from synthetic content to automated buying, neither government nor industry has settled its position.

Public trust, tracked by the association’s think tank, Credos, remains the foundation on which every other argument rests. The AA’s pitch to ministers has stayed constant throughout: advertising drives growth well beyond its own borders, and restricting it carries costs the Treasury should count.

“I am looking forward to stepping into the role of President at the Advertising Association from next spring. It is a tremendous honour to be appointed, and having seen first-hand the transformative impact that responsible advertising can have on businesses and communities, I am eager to collaborate with our members to build on the fantastic work already underway. Together, we will lead our efforts in promoting a more trusted, inclusive, and effective advertising landscape that delivers real value for everyone and demonstrates the essential contribution our industry makes to the UK economy.”

Nathan Ansell, incoming president of the Advertising Association

“It is a privilege to serve as President of the Advertising Association and to work alongside Stephen, the AA team and members from across the industry. Advertising plays a powerful role in building trusted relationships with people and supporting growth for businesses and the wider economy. Nathan brings impressive customer, commercial and brand expertise to the AA, and I look forward to working with him as he prepares to take over the role.”

Andria Vidler, outgoing president of the Advertising Association

Waitrose form travels with him

Ansell sits on the Waitrose management board with responsibility for the supermarket’s end-to-end customer strategy, spanning communications, loyalty, content, creative direction, store development and digital execution. He rejoined the business in 2023 as Customer Director, 25 years after his first retail role there, and was promoted to Chief Customer Officer in 2025. His earlier career included senior roles at Marks & Spencer, House 337, Heinz, Birds Eye Iglo and Red Bull. At Waitrose, he has overseen the Christmas campaigns Sweet Suspicion and The Perfect Gift and expanded the Dish podcast. He sits on the ASA’s Industry Advisory Panel and appears regularly in Campaign’s Power 100.

The presidency is a figurehead role. Woodford’s team runs the machinery; the President opens doors in Westminster and sets the tone of the industry’s public argument. What Ansell cannot control is the shape of the industry he will speak for. Consolidation among the holding companies is redrawing the agency side of the AA’s membership, and AI is unsettling the economics of the media owners who sit alongside them. A government prepared to regulate advertising category by category shows no sign of stopping. The industry Ansell fronts in spring 2027 may not much resemble the one that appointed him this week.

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The Publisher Summit in London put the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph, Hearst UK, The Nerve, Stylist, dmg media and the Reuters Institute on one stage for a day on audience relationships. Nobody declared a theme, but one emerged: publishers are deliberately shrinking what they make to deepen who they reach, just as the destinations those relationships depend on come under structural threat.

The Guardian’s famous donation model is quietly becoming a subscription business

Liz Wynn, the Guardian’s Chief Supporter Revenue Officer, opened the day in conversation with WoodWing’s Craig Llewelyn-Williams, and began with how close the paper came to not existing. A decade ago, by her account, losses ran at roughly £100m a year against a trust that could only absorb so much. The reader funding model that Katharine Viner and then Chief Executive David Pemsel backed met scepticism inside and outside the building; digital reader funding now accounts for 45% of turnover globally.

The voluntary contribution is the best-known part of the model, yet more than 100% of recent revenue growth has come from subscriptions, Wynn said: the app, the digital edition and the Feast cooking app are growing while contributions have flattened.

Her strategy rests on motivation, habit and the conversion moment. Motivation comes from brand distinctiveness; 99% of readers surveyed on site can correctly identify that the Guardian is not funded by a billionaire.

Habit comes from direct connection, a marketable audience grown from under a million to more than eight million in a couple of years via newsletters and registration gates that machine learning aims at the most engaged 2-3% of readers. Conversion is packaging, donation and subscription side by side at the moment someone decides to pay.

When the Guardian launched Feast, it discovered it could not reliably email people who like food; a new customer data platform is now doing the unglamorous deduplication. On US expansion the product and commercial logic stay identical everywhere, with customisation confined to the last mile by a small New York team.

Cutting a fifth of the output turned out to be a growth strategy

Press Gazette’s Charlotte Tobitt moderated the panel on quality over quantity. Anna Sbuttoni, Deputy Head of Digital at the Times and Sunday Times, described an audit that found a quarter of published stories drew fewer than 2,000 views from subscribers and guests. Two years of sometimes bruising daily conversations with the news desk followed. The Times has since cut around 20% of its output, from more than 200 stories a day to about 160, and this year has brought four consecutive months of record traffic, at which point the internal conversation moved off traffic altogether.

The north star is daily habit, measured as daily over monthly active users, while its Ted dashboard ranks stories by subscriber engaged minutes and flags how many readers reach halfway. Some 84% of Times subscribers read digitally only, 70% in the app.

As for what replaced the culled stories: a piece marking the end of coal power in Britain, rebuilt as a visual feature with archive footage, became one of the most read articles of its day and took half a million views on Apple News. The reporter admitted he would previously have filed a quick story and moved on.

Malcolm Coles, Audience Growth Director at Hearst UK, was blunter about method. Any journalist pitching a story must now log a proposed headline, the reason for writing it and the traffic it is expected to attract. The discipline exposed a basic confusion: plenty of writers believed they were writing for SEO while their traffic came from Google Discover, which rewards different headlines.

Cuts ranged from 20 to 70% of articles, and traffic rose. Just by doing less, he said, everything Hearst does works harder. His team used AI to prove withholding headlines depress engagement time; readers click, discover the trick and leave.

The Telegraph applied the same logic to newsletters. Maire Bonheim, Head of Newsletters, has cut the portfolio from around 40 to 26 over 18 months, judging each title on purpose as much as audience size; the survivors are products. Cables, a foreign desk hybrid of columnist, correspondent’s dispatch and curated links, is among its best performers.

The old logic of one newsletter per desk has gone; portfolios are organised around reader interests, with Royal Editor Hannah Furness anchoring hers with a weekly reader Q&A. When Nic Newman asked from the floor whether newsrooms should reorganise around personalities, one panellist confessed to reading a sports newsletter purely for the writer’s voice despite finding sport boring.

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Triple the industry conversion rate, without a paywall

Sarah Donaldson, interviewed by Esther Kezia Thorpe, traced The Nerve to the four-day strike over the Observer’s transfer to Tortoise; around 60% of journalists, by her account, chose not to move across. Five of them, senior editors Donaldson, Jane Ferguson and Imogen Carter, Creative Director Lynsey Irvine and investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, launched the title with their own redundancy money after finding that potential investors either wanted proof of performance first or wanted control.

It took 8,000 sign-ups inside a fortnight and 1,000 paying members in its first week, roughly triple the industry’s typical conversion rate, while free to read on a Guardian-style contribution model. Donaldson credited two engines: Cadwalladr’s organically built audience, the sort of direct relationship the New York Times now chases by making its slightly awkward journalists do vertical video, and a mission people consider worth funding. The team chose Beehiiv over Substack, which she described as a social platform pulling readers into its walled garden.

Better audiences beat bigger ones

Sarah Ebner, the Telegraph’s first Head of Newsletters and later the FT’s Director of Editorial Growth and Engagement, now consulting independently, delivered the session that pulled the day’s threads into a single argument. Her premise: the organisations that succeed from here may not have the biggest audiences, but they will have the strongest relationships. Fly-by visits no longer pay, and readers want to be connected as well as informed.

Her instruction was to stop renting audiences from platforms and own them, moving people up a ladder from anonymous visitor through registrant and subscriber to member and advocate, and asking where your organisation loses them.

Two tests ran through everything. Would anyone be sad if you disappeared? And what is the value to the reader, as opposed to the publisher? People no longer pay simply for access, she argued; they pay for identity, belonging, participation, expertise and trust.

Voice carries much of that weight. Martin Lewis is the most trusted man in Britain despite the large team behind MoneySavingExpert, because people follow people. Journalists who refuse to be front and centre can remain great reporters, but a newsroom now needs some who will.

An FT newsletter’s reader replies dwindled when a rotating cast wrote it, then returned three weeks after a permanent writer arrived; the audience, she said, got its confidence back. When Stephen Bush mentioned in Inside Politics that he struggled to find shoes to fit, readers flooded the inbox with recommendations, behaving like a community.

The caution came from her Telegraph days, when an article featuring a YouTuber drove thousands of sign-ups who vanished within a month because the paper offered them no onward journey. There are vanity metrics, she observed, and there are also vanity articles: pieces a reporter wants to write, an editor finds interesting and nobody reads. Denmark’s Zetland, membership-led and firmly quality over quantity, supplied her case study. She closed on scale: smaller, more engaged audiences can be more valuable than big anonymous ones, provided the product matches the promise.

The app users who pay nothing may be the ones worth watching

Pugpig Chief Executive Jonny Kaldor opened the app session with benchmarks from his company’s portfolio. A median publisher app sees just under ten sessions per user a month; the top performers exceed 40. Audio listeners visit roughly twice as often, and game players at the best apps average 80 visits a month. His most telling observation was commercial: 92% of these apps carry a paywall, yet about half of their audiences pay nothing and keep returning, a free, engaged pool that starts to look like acquisition.

Stylist has organised itself around exactly that logic. Felicity Thistlethwaite, Head of Digital at The Stylist Group, said the business has declared itself app first this financial year. The app holds nearly half of Stylist’s subscribers, delivered half of last month’s acquisitions and converts at around 2.5%, so its 2.5 million social followers are deep linked straight into it.

Puzzles, launched free and now largely paywalled, correlate with users reading 51% more articles, and listeners to the BeyondWords AI narration, labelled written by Stylist, narrated by AI, are nine times more likely to return.

dmg media splits the job in two, explained Senior Product Manager Debora Hedy Amato. Mail Editions is a hard-paywalled digital newspaper for readers who want a day-shaped product with puzzles attached; the main Daily Mail app is a hybrid she called the title’s habit engine, leaning on the 60% of traffic that already arrives direct.

A golden metric blending page views, dwell time, deeper engagement and subscription revenue governs the paywall, and the stickiest subscribers use phone, tablet and web together. Both were sceptical of chatbots; Stylist’s community expects its writers to answer, and the Mail points its AI at narration and comment moderation instead.

Everything the day agreed on is, by Newman’s charts, under pressure

Nic Newman of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism closed the summit with data spanning 48 countries. News websites and apps are no longer the main source of news for any age group. The UK holds up better than most, but its youngest readers are migrating to platforms and, increasingly, to AI.

He demonstrated the problem live, putting heatwave questions to Claude and receiving filterable charts in seconds; answer engines already replicate services publishers assumed were theirs, and agents will soon anticipate questions nobody has typed. Content, he argued, is becoming liquid whether publishers like it or not, reassembled into whatever format each reader prefers.

His survey of around 280 publishers points the same way the summit did: more investigation, human judgement, community and live experience; less commodity news. The migration to audio and video is partly defensive, narrative formats being harder to summarise, and he urged publishers to fold AI prompts into their own sites, pairing human curation with machine answering.

Then came personality. A Financial Times chart by John Burn-Murdoch shows only 17% of Facebook content now comes from people users know, and around a fifth of American adults get news weekly from creators. The general population rates creator media easier and more entertaining but less trustworthy; its actual users rate it more trustworthy than institutions.

Little wonder 76% of surveyed publishers plan to get their journalists behaving more like creators. The destination, he suggested, is a show-and-talent model with newsletters, clips, events and subscriptions hanging off fandom.

Which left the summit’s consensus in a place Newman made no attempt to smooth over. Every session had treated the direct relationship as the answer, and his own charts show the front doors those relationships depend on losing their pull with each new cohort of readers. The room applauded both.

That is the bet, then: deeper relationships, built faster than the front doors close. Nobody on stage claimed to know whether the timing works. The publishers cutting hardest and connecting deepest have simply decided not to wait to find out.

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I asked Isobel Sita Lumsden to name the most important thing TikTok announced at the Cannes Lions Festival. “You’re asking me to choose between my children,” she said, changing the subject.

TikTok’s Global Head of Business Marketing gave this interview one-to-one, between back-to-back sessions, fluent and warm. One line she offered without being asked and would happily have repeated: an instruction to the industry to fall back in love with creativity. She delivered it in the same week TikTok launched Symphony Agent, an AI tool built to turn a written brief into campaign-ready video in minutes. She sells both ideas at once: the romance of the craft, and the machine that shortcuts it.

Her job is to sell TikTok’s commercial story to those who decide where budgets go: the CMOs, media directors and holding company executives. The pitch is polished to the point of reflex. It is also a contradiction the platform has not resolved.

Isobel Sita Lumsden, TikTok’s Global Head of Business Marketing

hosts a session at The Cannes Lions of Creativity Festival, June 2026

A global brief that answers to the sales team

Lumsden has spent six years at TikTok, most of a career in B2B advertising, most of that European before the global remit. She recounts the shift with ease. She frames it as a matter of scale, and says the principle holds at any size. In Europe, the job is building consistency across markets that behave differently; what works in the UK will not necessarily work in Italy. The global version is a centrally scaled hub that puts the brand first, then leaves regional teams free to run the tactics that only make sense locally. She moved, on her own account, seamlessly between the two. She thinks in systems.

What those systems serve is sales. Her marketing, as she puts it, is built for scale and efficiency and kept tightly aligned to the sales strategy. That is the correct position for a business-marketing lead, and it reframes everything that follows. When she talks about creativity at Cannes Lions, she delivers a message that runs a function which exists to convert attention into revenue. In her hands, the work carries commercial weight before an artistic one.

TikTok’s whole Cannes Lions presence leaned on creativity as a moral good, a return to craft after a decade of programmatic efficiency. TikTok is not asking the industry to make better work for its own sake. It is arguing that better work, made on TikTok with TikTok’s tools, produces outcomes its competitors cannot match. The enthusiasm is genuine.

The tool that shortcuts the thing she is championing

Symphony Agent is the centrepiece, and she calls its creative developments genuinely capable of making a huge difference to advertisers. TikTok describes it as agentic AI with cultural intelligence, built to produce TikTok-first campaigns at speed. It combines a brand’s goals with signals from top-performing content and live trends, then generates video, surfaces existing creator material and points to the creators worth working with.

It runs across three platforms. In Symphony Creative Studio, a brief becomes a storyboard through a chat interface. In Content Suite, its search reads thousands of clips to find the ones that fit. In TikTok One, it handles creator discovery by filtering the marketplace based on audience overlap and content style. TikTok has wrapped the system in AI labelling, invisible watermarks and moderation filters.

For Lumsden, this is the argument behind the rhetoric, the idea she reached for when she would not name a favourite: a constant loop between what brands ask for and what TikTok builds, with AI now inside every core product. Symphony Agent is that loop for the people she sells to.

The difficulty is the message sitting next to it. The same week that unveiled a system for compressing creative production asked marketers to rediscover the slow, human part of the work. The tools handle speed, she argues, and humans stay central to the creative strategy. It is the answer every AI vendor now gives, and reasonable enough. But it is also the claim the industry will test hardest. A machine that writes a storyboard from a product brief is not doing what TikTok spent the week celebrating: a person making something because it means something to them. To her credit, she did not pretend the gap was closed. The company is betting both statements can be true at once: that creativity is sacred, and that most of it can be produced by prompting.

The collapsed funnel is the argument that lands

Underneath the creativity message is a harder commercial claim, and it is the one media buyers came for. Asked whether TikTok can take a larger share when spending is so concentrated among the three largest platforms, Lumsden did not argue for displacement. TikTok is complementary, she says, and full-funnel: strong on brand, now pushing into the mid- and lower-funnel where conversion happens. The platform has dressed this up in a campaign called Funnel HQ, with regional “chief funnel officers,” and she plainly enjoys the joke. The serious purpose beneath the joke is to tell planners that TikTok is no longer only a brand play.

Told that the funnel felt like tired language (first click, last click, a model the business has half-outgrown), she agreed without hesitation. The terminology is not going away, she said, and she clearly wishes it would; she and her team wanted to talk about loops, or about no funnel at all. What she offers instead is the collapsed funnel: on TikTok, the distance between discovery and action can close in a single moment, with someone finding a product and buying it without the staged journey the funnel assumes.

The same instinct runs through how she talks about search, and here she is unmistakably a user. TikTok is not a social graph, she says; it is a discovery graph: people arrive without checking who they follow, ready to be shown something. She lights up describing her own habit of searching a city before a trip and getting real people showing real places instead of a page of links. For brands, she frames it as an opening. For TikTok, it is one more route from discovery to purchase with the middle removed.

That compression is the tension the creativity message never escapes. The craft Lumsden wants the industry to fall back in love with is slow and personal, built over time. The platform she sells runs on collapsing exactly that distance. Symphony Agent and the collapsed funnel are the same instinct applied to different problems: take out the steps, speed up the outcome. The creativity campaign asks the industry to value the steps.

Built with the holding companies it competes with

TikTok does none of this alone, she is keen to stress. TikTok’s approach, in her phrase, is to build with the industry rather than for it. “We love partnerships,” she says. Canva, whose integration TikTok showcased during the week, is both a creative and a marketing partner, used by thousands of brands inside TikTok’s own tools. WPP and Dentsu sit on the same list. The pattern is a platform threading its commercial strategy through the agency groups and software companies it also competes with for attention and budget, then treating that overlap as leverage.

It suits her. She is a relationship marketer first, a product one second, more animated by who TikTok builds with than by any single feature. But it also concentrates the risk. If the holding companies come to doubt TikTok’s argument about creativity and compression, they are close enough to the product to say so, and central enough to its distribution to matter.

She left for the next interview with two instructions for the industry, and they do not sit easily together. Fall back in love with creativity, and let the platform close the gap between an idea and a sale until barely anything is left. Her task for the coming year is to make the market believe those are one argument. TikTok has built the tools to win on speed. At Cannes, it insisted it can win on craft as well, and whether both can be true is the question it has set itself.

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Xavier Niel, the telecoms billionaire who used to co-own Le Monde and still sits on its board, is among the largest backers of Mistral, France’s national AI champion. So, when the newspaper set out to license its journalism to the AI companies, the logical move would have been to sign with the home team. Le Monde went instead with a selection of American firms, OpenAI first among them, and its board member did nothing to stand in the way. “He did not tell me you must sign with this one,” Louis Dreyfus, the paper’s Chief Executive, told me. “That is not how he works.” No newspaper in Europe has done more to make AI pay, and Le Monde has done it on its own terms.

Le Monde was founded in December 1944, and journalists have owned a significant stake in it since the start. That inheritance shapes everything Dreyfus has built since three investors recapitalised the near-bankrupt group in 2010 and asked him to run it. The newsroom holds veto rights over strategic decisions. Since 2010, the group has been led by a duo, a Chief Executive and an Editorial Director who share authority; the Editorial Director today is Jérôme Fenoglio. No Editorial Director can be appointed without 60% support from the newsroom, or removed mid-term without its approval.

Employees hold a third of the seats on the supervisory board, and the controlling owner is a foundation barred from selling its shares without the journalists’ consent, a French cousin of the Scott Trust that sits behind the Guardian.

Dreyfus is unsentimental about why any of this matters commercially. “If people doubt your independence, they stop paying for the news, and 80% of my revenue comes from readers. I cannot afford to lose their trust.” He likens it to a fashion house, where the Artistic Director and Chief Executive each hold a veto over the other. “It is difficult for people who are not in our industry to understand. They ask who the boss is. Well, there are two bosses.”

He is not a journalist himself, a point he treats as an asset after 33 years in the business, some of it spent running magazines in New York at Hachette Filipacchi, where each title paired a publisher with an Editor-in-Chief and lived or died on that pairing.

The first to sign

Le Monde was the first French publisher to sign a content deal with OpenAI, and Dreyfus says it remains the only one. The opportunity came at a conference in Paris where Sam Altman was speaking. Dreyfus put up his hand. Altman had said ChatGPT needed reliable data; Dreyfus pointed out that producing reliable content was his business, and that he charged for it, so there was a contradiction in wanting the data but expecting it free. Altman said he was open to talking. An email a few weeks later opened negotiations that closed in two months, brisk for a platform deal.

The terms did the work Dreyfus wanted. All Le Monde content surfaced in ChatGPT carries the source and a link back to the site or app, driving traffic and revenue. Anything the paper did not want scraped was ring-fenced: wire copy from news agencies, photographs, and video made by its own teams. Perplexity approached afterwards, its position slightly different because it runs no model of its own, and Meta, a long-familiar partner, followed. None of the agreements is a revenue share. Each carries a minimum guarantee with a small variable on top, giving Le Monde a fixed additional income for several years. Because the group pays no dividends, Dreyfus can route that money back into the newsroom, hand it to journalists, or offset past losses.

Niel’s backing of Mistral never became a thumb on the scale. Dreyfus says there was no pressure to favour Mistral, or any French option. Niel lets the chief executives of his portfolio companies run them as they see fit; when Dreyfus mentioned he was talking to Altman, the response was to wish him luck. An investor spread across that many businesses, Dreyfus adds, learns to leave a profitable one alone, and Le Monde has been profitable for a decade.

He is careful about what he will not confirm. Asked about reported expiry dates and headline values, he said he had disclosed neither. “I never mentioned any deadline, nor the amount,” he said, and he expects the platforms to renew.

At the WAN-IFRA Congress in Marseille, Dreyfus had told the audience that ChatGPT referrals convert to subscriptions at 17 times the rate of Facebook. Dreyfus puts that partly down to the deal itself, since every citation carries a link out. He rejects the assumption that chatbots will sate readers and remove the need for the source. People do not subscribe to learn who won an election, he argued; they subscribe to understand a war.

The audience arriving this way skews young, which he reads as an option for the future. Paying subscribers tend to be over 25, and the cohort now living inside these tools will age into that bracket.

Paying the newsroom

Dreyfus is proudest of a different decision: sharing the licensing income with the people who produce the work. He treats the output used by the platforms as eligible for neighbouring rights, and under an agreement with the Le Monde trade union, journalists receive 25% of it. Ordinary copyright at the paper is split evenly between company and staff; neighbouring rights, being a different instrument, are set lower.

His reasoning is practical. France has few independent newsrooms with the money to hire, so a Le Monde journalist is likely to stay for a career. He does not want a company that grows richer while the newsroom feeding it does not. There was a trust dividend too: when the deal was announced, reporters went looking for their own bylines in ChatGPT to check for errors and found the company quick to correct them.

Volume, not price

When Dreyfus arrived in 2010, audited circulation was roughly 240,000 and the newsroom numbered 310.

Fifteen years on, Le Monde has more than 680,000 subscribers and 570 staff journalists, having nearly doubled its newsroom and nearly tripled its paid circulation. A target of a million total subscribers has been discussed, though he resists the idea that the paper has missed it. “I don’t know if we missed the target,” he said. It is a goal for some point after next year, and not being listed or paying dividends, he has time. The gap will close mainly on volume, not price; average revenue per subscriber has risen every year. The harder task is convincing readers who assume Le Monde is not for them that it is accessible and less elitist than its reputation. The danger is it’s a very profitable paper talking to a small audience.

Le Monde in English, launched in 2022, is the clearest test of that ambition. It carries about 16,000 subscribers, roughly half in the United States, priced low on purpose as a second subscription beside the New York Times or the Washington Post, not a replacement. Dreyfus frames the investment as marketing: the task is to make English-speaking readers aware that it exists, and he wants international readers to reach around 15% of the digital base over time, up from about a fifth today. The edition is not machine-made. Its translation runs on OpenAI, chosen for quality over DeepL, not for any commercial reason, with more than 10 English-speaking journalists on staff editing the output. It currently carries a few adverts, which Dreyfus expects to change, given an affluent audience that luxury brands want to reach.

Selling the playbook

The most unusual move is Le Monde’s decision to sell its own expertise. Le Monde Insights, run by Chief Digital Officer Lou Grasser, packages the group’s experience in building a digital subscription business; licensing know-how is harder to sell, bound up in non-disclosure agreements, but subscriptions are teachable. The group also sells Sirius, the content management system it built in-house from 2014 and named after the pen name Hubert Beuve-Méry used for his wartime columns. It runs at Le Temps in Switzerland and Nice-Matin in the South of France, and Grasser fields enquiries from foreign publishers most months. Building a CMS is awkward for a newspaper, as Dreyfus concedes, but the reward is a product made by and for journalists. He is relaxed about competing with the likes of Arc XP, the platform spun out of the Washington Post, reasoning that a publisher which built a tool for its own survival may read the market better than a technology company would. “Considering the trajectory of Le Monde, I think people can trust us,” he said. To him, publishers in different markets are not competitors at all.

Dreyfus has run Le Monde for 15 years, long enough to have steered the last great transition and to be well into this one. He thinks AI is the larger shift and the more interesting one, because this time the paper is early rather than catching up. When he took over, its digital operation already existed but leaned on free content; now he has the chance to shape the rules before they set.

What he has not answered, and perhaps cannot yet, is whether a business this dependent on reader trust can absorb the tools it has let in. The deals bring money and, for the moment, traffic. They also hand a generation its news through an interface Le Monde does not own. Dreyfus is betting that readers will still want the reporter in Gaza and will keep paying to reach them. In Marseille, he sounded weary of being asked about AI. But few publishers have engaged it this early, or so thoroughly on their own terms.

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Sir John Hegarty has spent his career insisting that advertising only works when it is worth watching. At Cannes Lions this year, in a Day 4 session at the Debussy Theatre titled “Stop Working in Advertising. To Engage You Need to Entertain,” he sharpened that into an accusation. The industry, he said, has spent two decades building something audiences actively try to escape, and then acts surprised when they do.

“Brand is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world,”

“It’s a corner of someone’s mind.” Culture is what makes that corner valuable: land a brand in culture and it lifts sales, share price and the fame that pays for both. The problem is what the industry now does to get there. Data, tracking and attention-harvesting are formidable tools bolted to a losing strategy. “People are paying good money to avoid advertising,”

Sir John Hegarty

A worse product, and the research agrees

“We are making a worse product. There’s no question about that. All research points to it.” Audiences are disillusioned with advertising and say so plainly. He set that against a flat commercial truth: “I’ve never read a business book that says, to succeed, make a worse product.”

The line he drew was between what people reject and what they choose. Nobody is abandoning Netflix, or the World Cup, or anything they love. They are switching off the work that gives them no reason to stay. “They’ve fallen out of love with us,” he said.

Promotion has crowded out persuasion

From craft, Hegarty moved to economics. Advertising has quietly rewritten its own job, he argued, swapping persuasion for promotion: the difference between telling someone a thing is worth trying and pushing it in front of them until they look. He tied that to the growth problem economists have chewed over for twenty-five years. Advertising is supposed to create desire, build brands and move people to act, and in doing so to drive an economy. Take out the persuasion and the machine still turns, but it stops producing the demand that once justified it.

The lesson the industry won’t take from television

His prescription came from the business next door. Entertainment is winning the attention age, he said, because it worked out long ago that engagement depends on being entertaining, above all when the subject is one nobody asked to think about. He distilled the whole argument into a line he joked he could tour the world on: “do stuff people like.” Then he reached for recent television series, Adolescence, which turned a warning about technology and teenage boys into a drama people argued over. Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV drama about the Horizon scandal, forced a twenty-year injustice into national conversation that two decades of reporting had not. A story did the work the facts could not.

The evidence, he said, is not in dispute. He cited Ipsos research showing that storytelling, distinctiveness and humour outperform the alternatives several times over, then asked why so much of the industry behaves as though it distrusts its own numbers. His answer was generational. A cohort of marketing directors raised inside the digital era knows how to launch a brand and establish it, but “they don’t seem to understand how to build the brand and go beyond the boundaries of what social media can do.” The value, he reminded them, was never in the idea or the product. “It’s in the brand. That’s where the value resides.”

He granted the industry one recent success. Adidas’s five-minute World Cup film Backyard Legends, narrated by Timothée Chalamet, earned his praise as proof that long-form persuasion still moves people when the craft holds. The reproach behind it was his own generation’s discipline: they once compressed a persuasive idea into sixty seconds and shifted opinion with it. If a toilet-paper company such as Who Gives A Crap can turn a grudge purchase into something people discuss, he asked, what is anyone else’s excuse.

Put creativity at the top, or expect nothing to change

The structural argument was the one Hegarty plainly cares about most. Walking the Croisette, he said, he found brands occupying the beach and almost no ideas on it. Fixing that means changing who runs the companies. He recalled advice from Pixar’s John Lasseter, that a creative company must have creative people at the top of it, and described the inverted pyramid he ran at BBH, himself at the bottom and staff above him, his job to stop anyone getting in the way of a transformative idea. His reform for the executives in front of him was only half a joke: rename the CEO the Creative Executive Officer.

He finished on the project he is betting on. Agenda Earth, launched on World Environment Day with the United Nations, is a band made up of endangered animals that sings about the climate instead of lecturing about it, an attempt to hold attention on a permanent crisis the calendar shrinks to a single day. It is his own reply to his own brief: entertain, and the engagement follows. On AI, which he could not get through a talk without raising, he was sharp. The tragedy, he said, is that business leaders treat it to cut costs rather than widen what is possible, a collaborator mistaken for a tool. He insisted he remains an optimist, though his closing line was aimed at an audience he thinks has grown too content to be merely tolerated. The industry, he said, will have to be loved more to succeed. Whether a business built to measure everything can bring itself to be liked is the question he left on the stage.

The world’s biggest brewer has spent a decade turning award-winning creativity into a repeatable system. At Cannes, CMO Marcel Marcondes shared the five lessons behind it, and the one question it still cannot answer.

Cannes Lions awards its Creative Marketer of the Year each June. Until this week, no company had won it three times. Marcel Marcondes, CMO of AB InBev, opened his session at the Lumière Theatre on Monday morning with a football metaphor to explain what crossing that threshold means, Brazil in 1970, the moment a country stops collecting trophies and starts embodying an identity. “As of now, everybody has creative effectiveness in their blood.”

Whether that claim holds is something the company will demonstrate over the next few years. What Marcondes spent the session doing was outlining the operational machinery that got them there: five lessons from a decade-long attempt to institutionalise creative effectiveness across 500 brands in more than 50 markets.

Before the awards: build the infrastructure

When AB InBev set out to become what Marcondes described as “the most creative, effective company in the world,” it held two Lions. The ambition was met internally with scepticism, including from Marcondes himself. The starting diagnosis was honest: growth through M&A had left the company with enormous portfolio depth and limited capability to build any of the brands it was acquiring creatively.

The response was organisational. A global creative capabilities function was established, with a team whose sole mandate was raising creative standards at scale. The system built around that function has four components: training senior leadership to brief and assess creative work; a “brain trust” process where promising ideas are stress-tested by a designated external group before being refined; ongoing external assessment of creative output against industry standards; and an internal awards programme to surface effective work and replicate it across markets.

Around 2,400 people across the AB InBev organisation have been through this training. The output: from two Lions at the outset to more than 100 in the past five years, across 33 brands and 17 markets. Among those, the first ever Cannes Lion for Tanzania as a country, and a Titanium that was the first of its kind for China. Marcondes presented the geographical spread as the point, not the volume of awards, but evidence that creative effectiveness had become a distributed capability rather than one that depends on which market or which brand happens to have the strongest team.

Creativity is not self-justifying

The second lesson concerns whether creativity must justify itself commercially. Marcondes quoted his CEO asking, in direct terms, what the point of winning awards is if the work is not solving commercial problems. AB InBev now formally evaluates creative work against business outcomes, and Marcondes made the case through the example of its light beer built around what he called the “superior” combination of social and active lifestyles.

The product credential is specific: 95 calories and 2.6 grammes of carbs per serving, roughly half the carbohydrate count of a standard light beer. The creative platform follows the product logic rather than chasing cultural relevance for its own sake. Sponsorships are concentrated around sports consumption occasions. Work developed during the pandemic built digital environments to bring live match experiences to disabled fans. A Formula One campaign put real cars against virtual equivalents.

Marcondes presented each of these as the result of asking what creative tools could do to a defined business problem, not what would generate conversation in Cannes. The commercial endpoint he cited was the brand becoming the highest-volume beer in the United States.

Consistency is the most undervalued discipline in brand management

The third lesson is consistency. Brand managers change strategy because they want to leave a mark. Agencies pitch restages because they need fresh work. Companies chase cultural conversation because they want social traction. All of this, he argued, is ego, and ego is the principal enemy of sustained brand equity.

The analogy was football loyalty. An Arsenal supporter does not switch to Chelsea. Brands have constituencies who resist the club changing its colours, and yet the people managing those brands rarely resist the urge to change things.

Corona served as the illustration. The brand’s positioning, “outside is our best side”, has not shifted. When the brand turned 100 this year, the creative work did not announce the milestone by declaring how long it had been around. It demonstrated what the brand has always stood for. Corona has been the most valuable beer brand in the world for three consecutive years. Marcondes attributed a material portion of that to the compounding effect of holding the line over time. “Consistency compounds over time. For those who manage to have the discipline of staying consistent in the long run, it is gold.”

Advertising is the entry point, not the destination

The fourth lesson is about reach in a different sense. AB InBev has formalised what it calls “mega platforms”: recurring experiential programmes attached to major cultural properties where a brand’s proposition can be executed across multiple formats and touchpoints simultaneously. The internal decision framework for each platform requires three conditions: a genuine connection to consumer passion points, a clear link to beer consumption occasions, and enough commercial infrastructure to support multi-format execution at scale.

Stella Artois and tennis is the current example. The brand’s “perfect serve” proposition, pouring as craft and ritual, maps onto the central mechanic of the sport. At Roland Garros, the execution was built around the clay court environment; at Wimbledon, which started today, the brand adapted its own visual identity to comply with the tournament’s all-white dress code, producing packaging stripped of its traditional colour to fit the occasion.

The underlying argument is that advertising builds awareness; experience builds what advertising is supposed to lead to. Marcondes has made that distinction part of the approval process for every major brand programme.

What the framework does not resolve

What the four covered lessons have in common is that they describe an operating model, systematic, repeatable, designed to function across scale, rather than a creative philosophy. The risk that an operating model built to win Lions eventually produces work designed to win Lions rather than to sell beer is the harder question. AB InBev has earned the right to face it.

Five days covering official and partner events at Cannes Lions, a press room filled with conversations, and parties every night with some serious contrarian beliefs. This is my download from the world’s biggest marketing, advertising, and tech event.

1. AI is the plumbing, not the pitch

The debate about whether AI would change creative work is over. At Cannes 2026 it was barely a question: AI is embedded in production at every serious agency and brand, and executives still framing it as an emerging opportunity are already behind. The conversations are about governance, quality control, and differentiation at a moment when everyone has access to the same models. Capability is table stakes. What you do with it is the competitive variable.

2. The next sale might be made by an agent

AI agents are moving up the consumer journey, filtering options, synthesising research, and making recommendations on behalf of users. As this behaviour scales, the question of how brands position themselves to machine reasoning as well as the human psychology becomes commercially significant. A creative strategy built for emotional resonance may perform entirely differently when the first decision in the chain is made by an AI agent. Nobody has solved this, but the agencies starting to work on it now will be in a materially different position from those that wait.

3. The creator economy has outgrown the footnote

Ten years ago, a young person with creative ambitions would have aimed for a junior role at a production company or agency. That same person today is more likely building their own brand, contracting directly with clients, and outearning a peer in a holding company by year two. This is not a content management challenge. It is a structural shift in where creative talent goes, how it is commissioned, and what brands are competing for when they want to reach audiences. The creator economy is not adjacent to the marketing ecosystem. For many brands, it is the marketing ecosystem.

4. Social has closed the funnel

The platform companies spent years trying to close the loop between discovery and purchase. It is closed. Social has become a retail environment, and the brands performing best on it have stopped pretending otherwise. The awareness-consideration-conversion model assumes a journey that no longer describes how a growing share of purchases actually happen. People see, want, and buy without leaving the app. Media planning that still treats social primarily as a brand-building channel is working from the wrong map.

5. Sport is running the playbook everyone else needs

Some of the most strategically useful sessions at the festival were in the LIONS Sport programme, which would not previously have been the obvious place to look for insight. The sports industry has built mechanics for fan engagement, long-term loyalty, and direct audience monetisation that most consumer brands have not come close to replicating. It has also moved faster on data and personalisation than most of the advertising sector. Marketers looking for models that work outside their own category are not spending enough time there.

6. Martech complexity has passed the point of manageable

The technology landscape for advertising and marketing is more complex than at any previous point and it is not stabilising. Synthetic personas, deep behavioural analytics, AI-driven segmentation: these are available now, not hypothetical. The problem is that most teams cannot deploy them effectively. The gap between what the tools can do and what organisations extract from them is widening. That gap is where competitive advantage is currently being conceded.

7. The big three have a ceiling, and premium print is above it

Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon remain dominant. There is no credible near-term challenge to that. But the working assumption that these three platforms are sufficient has started to erode. Inventory saturation, algorithmic unpredictability, and renewed interest in brand-building as a discipline distinct from performance marketing have created genuine space for other channels. Premium print was discussed more seriously at Cannes than it has been in years: not as nostalgia, but as a high-attention, high-trust environment that reaches audiences the platforms cannot reliably supply.

8. Nobody has a replacement for the agency billing model

The time-and-materials structure on which most agency-client relationships are built does not survive the AI transition intact. Work that previously required a month can be done in a week. Clients know this. Agencies know clients know this. What nobody has agreed is what comes next. Outcome-based fees, IP licensing, subscription retainers: all were proposed during the festival, none adopted at scale. Agencies are confronting the same structural problem consultancies are starting to face. The business is built on charging for time and expertise. AI compresses both. There is no clean answer, which is why nobody offered one.

9. Data privacy has become a commercial argument

Regulatory pressure on data handling is not new. What has shifted is how some organisations are framing it: not as a compliance cost but as a differentiator. In financial services, healthcare, and premium publishing, demonstrable privacy practice is beginning to feature in purchasing decisions. The brands that build privacy into the product, and tell customers so, are starting to see the payoff in their numbers.

10. The agency market has fewer real choices than it looks

The Omnicom acquisition of IPG created the world’s largest marketing services group. WPP has had a difficult run. The practical effect is that the number of genuinely independent, large-scale agency options available to major clients has contracted. At Cannes, holding company executives made the case for scale. The harder questions, about conflict management, talent spread across competing accounts, and what consolidation means for the client in the room, were asked more quietly. For mid-market clients in particular, the leverage position is not what it was two years ago.

For more stories on the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity you can access this below.

Sport appears at Cannes Lions each year as a stand-in for something larger. After several years of Stagwell’s Sport Beach, the festival made its own deliberate move into the business of sport this year with the launch of LIONS Sport. The two LIONS Sport panels I attended made that ambition clear, drawing parallels between elite athletic performance and senior business leadership.

The first panel brought together IBM VP for Sports and Entertainment Kameryn Stanhouse, Wimbledon Marketing and Commercial Director Usama Al-Qassab, and five-time Grand Slam champion Maria Sharapova to discuss how technology is reshaping the fan and athlete experience. The second, moderated by Sportico Editor-in-Chief Scott Soshnick, paired Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Driver George Russell with Marriott International President and CEO Anthony Capuano to examine how high performers manage pressure.

Across both sessions, the same argument emerged from different angles.

The technology should disappear

IBM has been Wimbledon’s technology partner for 36 years, with a recent renewal extending the relationship into a fourth decade. The partnership began with a website in 1995, added an app in 2009, and introduced AI in 2017. Al-Qassab summed up the rationale in one phrase: “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

In practice, that means reaching people who cannot get to SW19, Wimbledon’s grounds in South West London, in their own languages and at their own level of tennis knowledge. For those on site, the aim is for technology to recede into the experience rather than interrupt it.

“Many out in tech want the tech to be the entire story,” “The players are the story; you are our actors and actresses. How can you achieve deeper engagement by using technology to enhance entertainment, enjoyment, and education? That’s what’s important to us.”

Usama Al-Qassab, Marketing and Commercial Director at AELTC/Wimbledon

IBM’s current Wimbledon work includes Match Chat, a generative AI tool that lets fans ask real-time questions during matches, and pre-match projections that combine ATP and WTA rankings, unstructured online discussion, and broadcast commentary to forecast outcomes. IBM cited an accuracy rate of about 80% for projecting the men’s final winner at the US Open over three consecutive years. New for this year’s championship is a “key moments” feature, designed to identify not just who was winning or losing at a given point, but when momentum shifted and why.

For Sharapova, the technological shift across her career has been stark. “The only piece of data I had in 2004 is probably how fast my serve was,” she said. At 17, she won Wimbledon with a coaching staff that spent hours manually reviewing film to produce a two-to-three-minute summary of an opponent’s patterns. Today, that analysis is generated automatically and live, while the match is still being played.

On what this does to the fan relationship, Sharapova said: “The more informed a fan becomes, the better your experience as an athlete, because you know that everyone in the audience knows the game. They know the momentum swings, they know a person’s favourite shot. That just makes you so into the game.”

Al-Qassab added a point specific to Wimbledon’s position. As the club approaches its 150th year, it remains a not-for-profit working tennis club, which shapes its approach to technology partnerships. Its player portal, now in development, is designed to give a qualifier ranked 200th in the world access to the same data as the WTA or ATP number one. “We think that’s vitally important to be able to democratise and help those players come through.”

Preparation reduces pressure; instinct handles the rest

George Russell’s framework for managing pressure is methodical, almost clinical, until he acknowledges where it breaks down.

“Anybody who says they don’t feel the pressure or relative nerves, they’re either lying or they don’t care. You care so much about this dream of ours.” His response is preparation: simulator time, strategist conversations, sleep, jet lag routines, and physical conditioning. “If I’ve ticked all those boxes, I then think the rest is almost out of destiny. I’ve done everything that I can in my power until this moment.”

He has worked with a sports psychologist for six years. He described the “emotional hangover” on the Monday after a race, regardless of the result, as one of the sustained psychological demands of competing in 24 races across 20 countries in a season.

The deeper tension he identified is between data and instinct in the car. Between races, he studies simulation data, weather forecasts, and historical race analysis. Once race weekend begins, that process stops.

“Whatever I have learned, I am going to rely solely on my instincts for the next three days. As soon as you start driving consciously rather than subconsciously, that is when you lose that last sort of killer instinct.”

George Russell, F1 Driver, Mercedes-AMG Petronas

The distinction is not unique to motorsport. Al-Qassab made a similar point from the fan perspective: data can enrich the experience before and after the match, but the players are the story on court. When the ball is in play, the data steps back.

Capuano’s point about data took another form. Before a visit to Silicon Valley, Bill Marriott, the company’s long-standing Chairman, told him Marriott had what he believed was the deepest and widest data lake of any consumer-facing company in the world, yet had never properly used it. The intuition was clear; the organisation had not yet found its way into the resource.

Pressure is a team sport

Elite performance is not carried by one person alone. It is distributed across a team, and how that team operates under pressure determines the outcome.

For Russell, the example is literal: leaving the pit lane at more than 200 miles per hour on tyres fitted by people he trusts completely, in a car shaped by thousands of decisions he did not make. “You’ve got to have that trust in your team, but then they’ve got to have the trust in you to deliver the goods where the pressure is at its highest.” He has been at Mercedes for five years and part of the wider team for ten.

Capuano became Marriott’s CEO in the early weeks of the pandemic, after the death of his predecessor. Revenue fell 92% almost overnight. The company raised $10 billion in liquidity. The advice he received that night was blunt: “You’ve got to compartmentalise, because tomorrow morning 600,000 people are going to wake up, put on a Marriott name badge, and expect you to lead them out of the biggest crisis we’ve ever faced.”

His point about risk culture followed from that. Informed risk-taking must be celebrated as actively as success, or the only institutional incentive is to say no. “In most big businesses in the entire history, no one’s ever lost their job for saying no, and that’s a tough cultural norm to break through.”

Russell offered a parallel from the 2022 season. A year after winning the constructors’ championship, Mercedes tried to close the performance gap too quickly, without enough data to support its decisions. The team moved backwards. The lesson, he said, was patience: the courage to tolerate short-term pain when the analysis points to a longer-term fix.

Russell’s closing statement was the session’s clearest: “Pressure is a privilege. It goes back to the point of doing something that we love, that we care about, that we’re passionate about.”

Across both sessions, the gap remained visible between Russell’s framing and how most organisations treat pressure: less as proof that the work matters, and more as a risk to contain. Neither panel closed it.

Takeshi Sano, Dentsu’s CEO, held two sessions at Cannes Lions Festival on the second day of the festival: first a press lunch with industry journalists, then a public session on the Debussy stage in the afternoon conducted by CNBC’s Julia Boorstin. Taken together, the two appearances amounted to his most extended public statement since taking the global CEO role roughly 100 days ago. He continues to run Dentsu Japan simultaneously, a dual mandate unchanged since his appointment earlier this year.

That Japanese foundation, built over 125 years and the most stable part of a business undergoing significant international restructuring, ran through the core of his argument at both events.

Cannes Lions has become a specific kind of stage for the heads of the major holding companies, a place where differentiation claims are made in front of people well placed to test them. This year that pressure carries added weight. The merger of Omnicom and IPG has further consolidated the competitive landscape, and the question of where Dentsu positions itself within it was one Sano addressed directly in both sessions.

The tiger, revisited

In the months before Cannes Lions, Sano attracted attention with remarks framing Dentsu as a “tiger” rather than an “elephant”, shorthand that prompted considerable debate about whether Dentsu, now the smallest of the four major holding companies by global revenue, can compete at the level of the largest players. Asked at the press lunch to address the analogy, he redirected it.

“Dentsu is a global, scaled business. I believe we are the right size. However, the point of the tiger analogy was never about size: it was about being agile, strong, flexible, muscular. Agile enough to move fast and expert enough to have real impact.”

Takeshi Sano, Dentsu’s CEO

Clients, he said, choose Dentsu’s people, ideas, and results rather than the scale of its holding company. He named several: Vodafone, BMW, Netflix, Tapestry, Adobe, and Salesforce. In an AI-enabled world, he argued, that dynamic may be shifting further in Dentsu’s favour. As AI commoditises certain capabilities, agility may matter more, not less, than the resources that accrue from consolidation.

AI and PI

Sano returned to one framework throughout both sessions: AI alongside what he calls “PI”, or People Intelligence: his shorthand for the human judgement and relationships that AI cannot replicate. The pairing appeared in the press lunch and again on stage with Boorstin and is clearly a worked position.

His argument is that AI expands the range of possibilities available to an organisation but cannot exercise the judgements that create real value. He identified three things he considers inherently human: defining an organisation’s direction, identifying the real issue beneath a client’s stated problem, and building the collective consensus needed for large-scale action. “The real question is not what AI can do: it is what our people and clients choose to do with the time it gives back to them.”

The practical application is Dentsu. Connect 4.0, a composable, interoperable marketing operating system built on proprietary intelligence from decades of campaign data rather than generic AI. Sano described its architecture as designed around openness and composability rather than client lock-in, which he framed as a practical expression of client centricity rather than simply a product decision. Competitors pushing closed systems, he said, cannot offer what decades of embedded campaign knowledge produce.

Restructuring with pace and discipline

Asked about the most significant challenges facing the industry, Sano named three: pace of change, the complexity of operating across an increasingly integrated set of disciplines, and the risk of sameness. The first calls for agility; the second, simplicity; and the third, the risk he sees as most acute in an AI-driven environment where similar tools tend to produce similar outputs, distinctiveness.

On complexity, he has acted. The number of international entities has been reduced since 2021, regional leaders have been given direct accountability, and the layers that slowed decision-making have been removed. The Japanese operation, which Sano led before taking the global role, is the reference point. “We are not trying to export a Japanese model. What is transferable is the mindset: building trusted relationships, working across disciplines, and aligning around the client’s long-term success.”

On the pace of the international rebuild: “The Japan story took time and consistency. We will apply the same approach internationally: execution with pace and discipline, not a transaction.”

One year from now, he described success as an international business with its own distinct competitiveness: clients growing with Dentsu, integrated solutions delivered at scale, and the people building it proud of what they have achieved.

Where Dentsu sees the opening

Sano pointed to the convergence of culture and commerce, across sports, entertainment, and retail, as the biggest opportunity Dentsu is well placed to pursue. The more technology saturates daily life, the more people crave real, emotional experiences, he argued, and Dentsu’s combination of creative, media, data, and cultural capabilities positions it to connect those experiences to measurable commercial outcomes.

The proprietary data underlying all this matters, but it is not the real moat. Culture, in Sano’s framing, is the thing that cannot be acquired or replicated quickly. “Our combination of AI and PI, and a 125-year culture of mutual respect and collaboration, means that as AI commoditises, our people become the true differentiator. That culture is not something you can acquire overnight.”

The bet he doesn’t believe

Sano’s most critical comments came in response to a question about frustrations. Sano offered a sharp assessment of the wider industry and a candid one about Dentsu.

On the industry, he was blunt: “Too many agencies remain fragmented internally, slow to integrate AI, and unwilling to take real accountability for client outcomes end-to-end. That is a disservice to clients.” More pointedly still: “The industry has placed a large bet that scale plus AI equals client value. I am not convinced. What makes a business grow is rarely the size of its agency.”

On Dentsu itself: “We have historically been better at doing than at telling. That frustrates me: Dentsu has 125 years of genuine innovation, and we have not always brought that story forward with the confidence it deserves.”

The combination of a pointed industry critique and a candid admission about Dentsu’s own communication record is an unusual pairing for a new CEO at his first major public appearance in the role. It suggests an appetite for making a direct argument over managing a position. Dentsu has 125 years of material to draw on for the case Sano is making. What changes now, he suggested, is the confidence with which it is made.

TikTok held its Cannes Lions press briefing in the garden at the Carlton Hotel this week with a consistent message: creativity is not a campaign input; it is their business engine. The pitch is not new. What was different this year was the product depth behind it: creator testimony, a brand case study from Canva, and the launch of Symphony Agent, TikTok’s most ambitious AI creative suite to date.

Creativity as a compounding multiplier

Isobel Sita Lumsden, Global Head of Business Marketing, set the tone. TikTok users are not passively scrolling. “You don’t check TikTok. You watch it.” Brands entering that environment cannot rely on reach alone. The audience is choosing to be there and engage with creators.

Creativity, she said, is not an input to a campaign; it is a “compounding multiplier.” It converts attention into engagement, engagement into affection, and affection into commercial outcomes. The model TikTok is proposing is participatory rather than adjacent: brands are expected to engage with culture rather than run alongside it. Creator content, community response, and brand activity reinforce each other. Getting it wrong is more visible than on platforms where audiences are not paying close attention.

The creator who built a community

Marisa Hammonds, Global Head of Creator Marketing, sat down with creator Henry Smith (@henryhenryhenryhenryhenr), one of five creators present at the session. Smith spoke on stage; the others, Jeremiah Brown and Emmanuel Duverneau among them, were in the audience. Together they represented a deliberate cross-section of the communities and content categories TikTok wanted to showcase.

Smith spent six years in politics and government relations before becoming a full-time TikTok creator. He came home in the evenings and made videos to make himself laugh: no trends, no hashtags, no posting calendar. He went full-time in March last year and now operates Henry Henry Henry Henry LLC, his California business. He knew he had built a community rather than an audience when strangers began stopping him and asking how his mother was or following up months later on a difficult period he had once posted about. They were not watching content. They had absorbed him as someone they knew.

His output has not changed materially since he started. “I don’t think you’d be able to tell the difference between a post from last week and one from two years ago”, he said.

The Sephora partnership illustrated the commercial value of that. He made a video saying men should feel comfortable going to Sephora. Sephora noticed, sent branded merchandise, and built a long-term partnership from that first video. The brand had not briefed the content. They recognised something already working and joined it. The partnerships that have worked best, he said, are those where brands understood his audience before the first call.

“Go where the warmth is” was his advice to creators starting out. The same logic, applied to brand strategy, shaped the rest of the morning.

What creator-led strategy looks like at scale

Lachlan Stewart, Canva’s global head of social, joined David Kaufman, TikTok’s head of product operations for North America, to demonstrate what creator-led strategy looks like at scale.

Canva has operated on TikTok since 2020 and now runs ten localised channels across priority markets. The rationale is straightforward: creative culture does not translate directly across borders. What resonates in Brazil will not work in Italy. Separate local voices, built with local insight, produce engagement that a centralised global feed cannot replicate. The decision about which markets get a dedicated channel is driven by TikTok audience data showing where meaningful communities around the brand already exist.

The more telling example came from Content Suite, TikTok’s tool for surfacing organic content brands did not commission. Stewart described finding a student creator posting about using Canva for university work: no brief, no partnership, not content a media planner would identify as ad-ready. Yet it became Canva’s best-performing growth campaign asset last year. Canva is now using Content Suite systematically to find similar content for performance campaigns rather than waiting to commission them. The content did not look like advertising, which was exactly the point.

Symphony Agent: removing the friction

Moritz Bartsch, global head of creative operations, closed the session with the product announcements. Symphony Agent is now integrated across three of TikTok’s creative platforms. Where Canva mined Content Suite by hand, Symphony Agent is built to do the same automatically.

In Symphony Creative Studio, brands can describe a campaign brief in natural language and receive a full creative storyboard within minutes, drawing on trend data and audience signals. What previously took days takes a conversation.

In TikTok One, it addresses creator discovery, filtering the marketplace by audience overlap and content style to produce relevant recommendations at speed. In Content Suite, it replaces manual search, allowing brands to surface organic content from users already talking about their product and to build custom creator networks from their own affiliates and ambassadors within TikTok One. The system includes AI labelling, invisible watermarks, and content moderation filters throughout. A new integration with Dentsu’s AI-powered media activation platform joins existing Symphony connections with WPP and Adobe Express.

Bartsch was deliberate about the framing: Symphony Agent is meant to remove the friction that stops creativity from scaling, not to replace the creativity itself. “We want to help marketers spend less time managing processes and more time creating.”

The creative process TikTok spent the morning celebrating (slow, personal, community-rooted, built by someone making videos for themselves with no audience in mind) is not what Symphony Agent is designed to produce. Generating a storyboard from a product brief in minutes is a different activity from what made Henry Smith’s Sephora partnership worth having. TikTok did not address that gap directly. It is the question the industry will keep asking.

On the Equativ boat at Cannes, executives from Hearst, TIME, The Guardian, Axios and The Washington Post set out how publishers are rebuilding for an agentic web that already shapes traffic, citations and trust.

Dominic Ponsford, Editor in Chief at Press Gazette, noted early in the session that there is no news beach at the Cannes Lions Festival. The observation is not new, but at Press Gazette’s News Yacht session, held on the first day of the festival and co-sponsored by Q5 and PA Media, the absence felt more pointed than usual. The discussion that followed skipped the festival’s usual futurism and went straight to the infrastructure publishers are already building for an AI-mediated web.

Katie Vanneck-Smith, Chief Executive of Hearst UK, was blunt about what publishers stand to lose. AI content needs to be labelled the way food is labelled: consumers should be able to see the composition of what they are reading. The publishers that survive will be the ones that have worked out what makes them distinctively human rather than the ones that have simply achieved the fastest AI output rate. The relationship a reader has with a trusted brand (’I’m a Times reader, and read Red Magazine, that’s part of who I am’) is not something a content machine replicates, and treating it as a given is precisely how publishers lose readers.

The agentic web is not coming. It is already here.

Mark Howard, Chief Operating Officer at TIME, started by walking through what two years of aggressive infrastructure investment looks like in practice. TIME has four LLM partnerships, runs Tollbit and Scalepost through its Fastly CDN, and joined Cloudflare’s Independence Day protocol last July, blocking unknown bots by default and shifting to an allow list. Unrecognised crawlers are routed to a paywall. Unsurprisingly, none currently pay.

The more consequential development is what TIME calls the markdown page: a stripped version of its content, metadata-rich, served specifically to bots. The company is now appending additional data to these pages, described variously as content enrichment or context forwarding, and building material explicitly designed for LLM consumption that no human will read.

Howard also described a product built around the gap between brand self-presentation and LLM reality. TIME queries the four major AI answer platforms and compares what they say about a brand against what that brand says about itself. The delta is typically 15 to 40%. TIME is now building branded content programmes to close that gap, routing content through its markdown pages where its domain authority with LLM bots is already high, and extending the approach to YouTube for long-tail discoverability.

“There are now two customers,” Howard said. The human web: pages designed to load fast, display well, monetise through advertising. And the agentic web, where bots are no longer simply bad traffic but are actively informing purchase decisions, and in some cases making them directly.

Publishers account for 84% of AI citations. Most have not factored that in.

Isabel Perry, Global EVP of Strategy at DEPT, pushed back against the standard pessimism. While Reddit is frequently cited as dominating AI responses, publishers themselves capture 84% and consistently appear within the top three channels by category. DEPT clients are reporting 60 to 70% zero-click rates from Google search; that part is real. But publisher authority inside LLM outputs is, by the data, growing.

Perry called the strategic response generative engine optimisation: building author credibility, brand consistency, and positive sentiment systematically across all channels, because language models look for patterns and authority signals rather than ranking. Jacquelyn Cameron, Chief Revenue Officer at Axios, gave the most commercially concrete version of that argument. Axios writes in Smart Brevity: what’s new and why it matters, placed up top. That structure naturally aligns with how LLMs scrape content. The top 30% of any article is what gets retrieved. Axios is building on that commercially with a brand library product that lets companies use Axios as a vessel to position authoritative information in front of the models that shape purchase decisions before a buyer sends a single signal back to a brand.

Trust as asset, trust as problem

Imogen Fox, Global Chief Advertising Officer at The Guardian, anchored the trust discussion in data rather than aspiration. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report, cited in the room, confirms that trust in news brands remains low. The Guardian is partly insulated: 1.4 million paying supporters across 180 countries, with traffic growing including in the US. But Fox was clear this is a brand dividend that not every publisher can draw on, and that the platforms still refuse to share the granular AI referral data that would let publishers properly measure what they are losing.

The Guardian’s structural response is SPUR, an initiative establishing standards for responsible licensing, alongside a firm editorial commitment to human-centred journalism.

Compass, not GPS

Karl Wells, Chief Revenue Officer at The Washington Post, described a different internal challenge: how to give journalists useful data without turning data into instruction. The Post built an audience behaviour score, a single unified metric combining monetisation drivers and engagement signals, to create common language across newsroom and commercial teams. Journalists track it and compete on it. It simplifies without dictating.

The framing that emerged from his conversations with Executive Editor Matt Murray was compass rather than GPS. Data provides direction and context. It does not provide routing.

Subscriptions ask too much of new audiences

Wells was direct about the Gen Z problem. Asking a younger reader to subscribe before they have formed any relationship with a publication is structurally flawed: the commitment implied has no equivalent in how that generation accesses anything else. More flexible entry points are not a concession to lower standards. They are the only commercially rational path to building audiences that will eventually convert.

Nichification is part of the answer. “We’re no longer talking about how everyone consumes news,” Cameron said. “It’s about how everybody forms their reality.” Axios is built around that insight. Future operates across more than 175 specialist brands for the same reason: depth of relevance earns the relationship that precedes the transaction.

The creator economics question has no clean answer

Hannah Blake, Managing Director of New Media at Mail Metro Media, was candid about creator retention. Journalists take salaries. Creators carry audiences that may outlast any employment relationship, and flat payment structures don’t reflect that value. Mail Metro is experimenting with commission models and joint ventures, Goal Hanger cited as one reference point, where talent shares in revenue rather than simply receiving a fee.

“We haven’t got the full answer yet,” Blake said.

The session’s closing observation came from the same direction. When AI content is sufficiently pervasive that human provenance becomes a premium, physical events and in-person activations stop being margin items and start looking like strategic assets. People will seek human interaction in proportion to how synthetic their digital environment becomes. Whether that translates into sustainable commercial strategy before the window closes is the question nobody at the session could answer.

New measurement and creative tools, launched at Cannes Lions, aim to make sustainable advertising the default. The figures suggest the industry is moving the other way.

Sustainable advertising has never been better measured however it is barely being practised. At Cannes Lions on Tuesday 23rd June 2026, its second day, Ad Net Zero pushed harder on the measurement, launching the third edition of its Global Media Sustainability Framework and a creative toolkit called Every Brief Counts.

The Global Media Sustainability Framework (GMSF), now at version 1.3, extends coverage to emissions from 95% of global media spend. For the first time, advertisers and agencies can use GMSF-aligned tools to view sustainability performance and compare the impact of different media decisions across markets and channels. The framework covers digital, TV, out-of-home and print; guidance for audio and cinema is coming. It has been developed with input from a broad industry coalition including Dentsu, Google, Havas, Meta, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe, TikTok and WPP.

The framework’s expansion matters as fragmented measurement has been one of the structural problems in sustainable media planning. Without a common methodology, comparisons between channels and markets were unreliable, and sustainability reporting was largely a compliance exercise with little bearing on planning. The GMSF attempts to fix that.

Sebastian Munden CBE, Ad Net Zero Global Chair, described the update as a milestone, arguing that “sustainable advertising delivers commercially through greater effectiveness, smart efficiencies and waste reduction.” The commercial framing is deliberate: sustainability positioned as a business argument rather than a value one

Every Brief Counts makes the creative case

The second tool targets an earlier stage in the advertising process. Developed by Dentsu Creative UK, Every Brief Counts is a voluntary toolkit for creatives, strategists and brand teams to incorporate more sustainable behaviours into the advertising they make, drawing on publicly available climate science including the IPCC AR6 Chapter 5 report and Project Drawdown.

It launched as a pilot in late 2024 and is now scaling. Participants to date include Channel 4, Havas UK, ITV, JCDecaux, Meta and Sky Media.

Kantar evidence cited by Ad Net Zero shows that ads depicting sustainable behaviours outperform others on both short and long-term effectiveness and tend to be more distinctive within their category. If that holds across a larger sample, it makes the business case for Every Brief Counts cleaner than most climate-linked creative arguments manage to be.

Jessica Tamsedge, CEO of Dentsu Creative UK, said the toolkit was designed to “hardwire sustainability into the creative process” rather than treat it as something separate from core business delivery.

The headline number goes in the wrong direction

The difficulty with the announcement is the data sitting alongside it. The Sustainable Behaviours Ad Tracker, run by the Advertising Association, Ad Net Zero and Kantar, shows that just 4.3% of ads currently feature sustainable behaviours. That is down from 6.1% in the tracker’s first report, published in April 2025.

Ad Net Zero has built a framework covering 95% of global media spend and a creative toolkit backed by the biggest names in the industry. In the same period, the share of ads showing sustainable behaviour has fallen by nearly a third.

The press release does not address this directly. The working assumption appears to be that better tools produce better outcomes over time. That may prove true. But the immediate picture is one of infrastructure running well ahead of adoption.

Stephanie Helen Scheller, Managing Partner Sustainable Solutions EMEA at Omnicom Media Group, identified scale as the priority: “The real opportunity now is scale, embedding these approaches into everyday planning and creativity so that sustainable choices become the default, not the exception.” The emphasis on scale is itself an admission that embedding has not yet happened.

A dual programme: London and Cannes

Ad Net Zero is also running a content programme at London Climate Action Week for the first time, alongside its established Cannes Lions presence. The dual positioning is a deliberate attempt to reach sustainability and advertising professionals in the same fortnight. Whether the audiences overlap enough to accelerate adoption is what the programme is implicitly trying to test.

What this means in practice

The GMSF expansion is the more immediately useful of the two announcements for agencies and advertisers operating at scale. A framework covering 95% of global media spend, aligned with carbon accounting standards and designed for cross-market reporting, addresses a real and longstanding gap.

Every Brief Counts is a harder sell now, not because the argument is wrong but because the uptake problem it is trying to solve is structural. Better tools for creatives do not resolve the brief-writing and commissioning decisions that determine whether sustainability appears in a campaign at all. Those decisions happen earlier, and further up the hierarchy, than any toolkit reaches.

The GMSF now has the coverage to make measurement credible. The question is whether credible measurement changes commercial behaviour. The trend line, for now, suggests it has not.

Every year the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report lands somewhere between industry wake-up call and annual confirmation of what publishers already know but would rather not say out loud. The 2026 edition, the fifteenth in the series and based on surveys of nearly 100,000 people across 48 markets, belongs firmly in the first category. The direction of travel has not changed. But this year several trend lines crossed thresholds that matter.

Three findings stand out at a structural level:

• Social media and video networks have overtaken both television and owned news websites as the most widely used source of news globally, for the first time.

• Trust in news has fallen to its lowest recorded point since the report began tracking it in 2015.

• Interest in news has declined so sharply that a quarter of the global online population now qualifies as casual or passive consumers at best.

In the UK, all three trends are present, and playing out against a domestic backdrop of specific institutional turbulence that the report captures with unusual directness.

Platforms Win. Publishers Lose Ground They Built.

The headline finding is one the industry has been bracing for. Across 48 markets, 54% of respondents now use social media or video networks as a source of news each week, ahead of television news (52%) and news organisations’ own websites and apps (51%) for the first time. Add in AI chatbots and the combined third-party total reaches 56%.

The trajectory is what matters. Use of TV news and of news websites and apps has each fallen by 12 to 13 percentage points since 2020. Social media and video networks have held broadly stable in absolute terms, meaning the shift into the lead is as much a consequence of legacy source decline as platform growth. The effect is the same regardless of cause: publishers’ branded digital properties, which took years and significant investment to build, now reach a smaller weekly audience than the platforms where their content frequently ends up.

“Even the most digitally advanced news organisations are increasingly having to contend with the reality that in most countries intermediated third-party consumption platforms are more popular than the branded digital properties publishers themselves have built.”

The proportion of people relying solely on social media and video for news has doubled since 2020, from 6% to 12%. For those individuals, the direct relationship between a news brand and its reader has been replaced by an algorithmic intermediary.

Younger audiences are already beyond this point. Key data on under-35s:

• 52% say social media, video networks, or AI chatbots are their primary news source, 32 percentage points ahead of the next most popular option.

• 56% of those not currently reading newspapers say they have never read one regularly.

• For 18–24-year-olds, news websites and apps have declined faster than television as a source of news.

This is not lapsed behaviour waiting to reactivate, but a generation that never acquired the habit.

The Search Traffic Problem Nobody Wants to Name

Adjacent to the platform shift is a quieter crisis in search referral traffic:

• Google organic search traffic to news sites fell 33% globally between November 2024 and November 2025.

• The United States saw a 38% drop over the same period.

• Publishers surveyed expect traffic from search engines to almost halve over the next three years.

The ongoing rollout of AI Mode and AI Overviews into Google’s search product is diverting users who might previously have clicked through to publisher sites. Hard news queries are largely excluded for now, but the direction is clear. Google Discover is also presenting problems: Reach, the UK’s largest commercial news publisher, reported a 46% drop in Discover traffic in the second half of last year as the platform shifted weight towards user-generated content and video.

This is why many publishers have deprioritised audience reach as a success metric in favour of depth of engagement with a smaller, more loyal audience. The strategic logic is sound, but the revenue model that sustains it is still being worked out.

AI: Fast Growth, Low Trust, Low UK Uptake

Weekly use of AI chatbots for news increased from 7% to 10% globally, a significant proportional jump but not the explosion some had anticipated. What the data show:

• 16% of under-35s now use AI chatbots for news.

• South Korea, Greece, and Spain saw AI chatbot news use double year on year.

• The UK sits at 4% usage, the lowest of any market surveyed.

• Trust in AI news answers in the UK is 6%, against a global average of 20%.

The UK’s low figures appear to be at least partly cultural. UK consumers have a well-established relationship with public service news providers and a correspondingly higher scepticism towards newer, less accountable sources.

Where AI chatbot usage is growing, the behaviour is revealing. The most valued feature, cited by 42% of AI news users, is the ability to ask follow-up questions. This suggests a use pattern oriented around explanation and contextualisation rather than simple headline delivery, the kind of depth that good journalism should, in theory, also provide.

Trust: The Worst Number in Fifteen Years

The global trust figures are the starkest in the report’s history:

• Trust in news has fallen in 29 of 48 markets, reaching a global average of 37%, the lowest since tracking began in 2015.

• Nineteen markets saw trust drop by 5 percentage points or more.

• In the United States, only 25% of people say they trust the news most of the time.

• Concern about misinformation is up 4 points globally to 62%, with jumps of more than 5 points in 11 markets.

The report identifies multiple contributing factors: declining trust in institutions broadly, direct political attack on journalism, and a compositional effect as more consumption migrates to social media and AI, categories that have always scored lower on trust. People are aware of the misinformation problem yet keep using the platforms anyway. Convenience, once again, appears to trump concern.

The UK: A Market Under Particular Pressure

The UK data deserve close reading on their own terms. The domestic context in 2026 is unusually fraught, and the numbers reflect it:

• Trust in news overall: 30%, down 5 points from 2025 and 7 below the global average.

• 50% of UK respondents say they avoid the news sometimes or often, up 4 points year on year.

• 73% distrust news on social media. 77% are worried about misinformation, among the highest figures of any market.

• AI chatbot use for news: 4%. AI news answer trust: 6%.

The most significant domestic news-industry story of the past year, the BBC crisis triggered by a leaked internal memo about a Panorama edit of a Trump speech from January 2021, sits squarely in this context. The resignations of BBC News chief executive Deborah Turness and Director-General Tim Davie, a subsequent $10bn defamation suit from President Trump, the appointment of former Google EMEA president Matt Brittin as Director-General, and an ongoing Charter review have created a period of acute institutional uncertainty for the UK’s most trusted and most widely used news brand.

The BBC, ITV News, Channel 4, and the Financial Times remain the most trusted brands in the UK. Trust in individual brands is described as ‘little changed’; the overall trust drop appears to be driven by systemic factors rather than brand-level failures. The gap between trust in specific institutions and trust in news as a system is a pattern the report has documented for several years. In 2026, the gap feels sharper.

“The processes underway in 2026 affecting the UK’s largest public service and commercial broadcast and print providers could amount to the biggest reshaping of the news landscape in the UK for a generation.”

Commercial restructuring adds further complexity. The Daily Mail publisher DMGT’s accepted £500m bid for the Daily Telegraph, a proposed merger between Sky and ITV’s broadcast interests, and the Daily Mail’s aggressive move into creator-led video for younger audiences are all reshaping the competitive landscape simultaneously. The report does not editorialise; it does not need to.

The Audience That Still Exists

Against this backdrop, the report is clear about what the data do not say:

• Highly engaged ‘news lovers’ remain a durable audience. Their engagement and willingness to pay are largely undiminished, even as their numbers have shrunk.

• 17% of online adults in the tracked basket of 20 countries pay for news, flat year on year.

• 45% of respondents still prefer news that does not take sides. 46% believe impartial news is better for society. Both figures are more than double the proportion who prefer news reflecting their own point of view.

The desire for credibility and accountability in journalism has not disappeared. The question is whether news organisations can deliver on it from a position of declining reach and compressed margins.

What This Means for UK Publishers

The strategic implications are not comfortable:

• The subscription funnel is narrowing as direct traffic declines.

• The audience discovering news via owned properties skews older and is no longer growing.

• The monetisation potential of platform-distributed audiences is structurally weaker than on-site.

• The BBC, whose Charter settlement funds journalism infrastructure across the country, is in the middle of an existential negotiation with a government that has not yet signalled its intent clearly.

The 2026 Digital News Report does not offer publishers a way out of these dynamics. What it does, in 174 pages of methodology-driven rigour, is confirm that the challenges are systemic and accelerating. The platforms are winning the distribution war. Trust is corroding at system level even as individual brands hold on. And a generation is arriving that will need to be reached on entirely different terms, through entirely different channels, if it is to be reached at all.

The full report and interactive data tools are available at the Reuters Institute website. The UK chapter is written by Jim Egan, formerly Chief Executive of BBC World News and bbc.com, and a former member of the FT Strategies leadership team.

Pinterest has announced four new AI tools for advertisers, timed to coincide with Cannes Lions Festival. The launches range from a protocol-level integration designed to put Pinterest’s data inside the tools agencies already use, to an experimental standalone shopping app. Underlying all four is a single ambition: to make Pinterest’s taste and intent signals available wherever advertising decisions are made, turning the platform into infrastructure other tools build on rather than a destination people visit.

Pinterest MCP opens platform data to partner tools

The most operationally significant of the four is Pinterest MCP, an implementation of the open Model Context Protocol standard that gives partner platforms standardised access to Pinterest’s campaign data, keyword insights, and analytics. That is the infrastructure move in its purest form: Pinterest’s signals made usable inside platforms it does not own.

Advertisers and agencies increasingly manage campaigns through AI-assisted tools and copilots. Pinterest MCP is designed to make Pinterest’s signals, particularly its intent and taste data, available within those environments without requiring teams to switch platforms or build bespoke integrations. The protocol provides access to trend data, campaign analytics, and keyword insights, connecting Pinterest’s proprietary audience signals to AI-driven workflows in partner tools.

Alpha partners include PMG, Pacvue, Innovid by Mediaocean, and Omnicom’s Jump 450. Their feedback has shaped the protocol’s development across reporting, campaign planning, analysis, and execution. The rollout is currently available to select partners globally, with broader access to follow.

“Pinterest MCP helps us integrate Pinterest directly into the workflows our teams are already building, making it easier to analyse performance, uncover insights and act on opportunities without switching tools,” .

“What makes Pinterest especially compelling is the strength of its intent signals. People come to Pinterest to plan what they want to do next, creating valuable context that helps marketers make smarter decisions.”

Chris Ivey, President of Jump 450/Omnicom Performance

Performance+ moves creative selection to the asset level

If MCP sends Pinterest’s signals outward, Performance+ turns them inward, applied to the platform’s own inventory. Pinterest is updating its Performance+ creative product with a new AI model that selects at the level of individual assets rather than ad units. The previous model committed to a single creative variant per ad. The updated version evaluates a wider pool of assets for each impression and identifies whichever variant is most likely to perform at that moment.

In testing, the approach increased click volume by 7.5% against the previous model. The update also includes new ad review tools, giving advertisers greater transparency into how their creative appears on the platform, alongside more granular creative reporting breakouts. Pinterest Performance+ creative is available globally.

Business Assistant makes trends visual

Where MCP and Performance+ work behind the scenes, the next tool puts the signals in front of advertisers directly, as finished guidance. Business Assistant, Pinterest’s AI collaborator inside Ads Manager, is currently in closed US beta. It draws on platform-level trend data and an advertiser’s own account performance to surface planning guidance and optimisation recommendations.

The visual format is a deliberate design decision. Rather than returning analysis in text, Business Assistant uses graphs to represent trend data and surfaces relevant Pins alongside performance information. Launch materials illustrate a spike in “clean beauty routine” searches rendered graphically, with the Pins driving that trend displayed alongside for creative reference.

A mobile version pushes proactive notifications on trend activity, performance changes, and optimisation opportunities. Pinterest has not given a timeline for wider rollout beyond the US beta.

Ask Pinterest tests the conversational layer

Ask Pinterest, the most experimental of the four, is a standalone US app that takes Pinterest’s Taste Graph into more conversational, multi-step discovery scenarios outside the main Pinterest experience. It pushes the signals furthest from home, testing whether they can anchor a product of their own.

The stated target is decisions that don’t resolve through a single search: furnishing a room over time, finding a genuinely personal gift, planning a dinner party within a budget. The app is designed to retain context across sessions, handling the kind of extended, open-ended research that structured keyword search handles poorly.

Pinterest is explicit that Ask Pinterest is a test environment. What it learns from user behaviour will feed back into AI-powered features in the main product rather than operate as a standalone business.

Where Pinterest positions itself

“The future of discovery won’t be driven by keywords alone. It will be shaped by context, taste, and trusted recommendations. Pinterest has a unique advantage because people come to our platform to plan, curate and take action on what they want to do next. We’re building AI experiences and infrastructure that tap into those signals in more useful and relevant ways.”

Lee Brown, Pinterest’s Chief Business Officer

Across the four launches, Pinterest is claiming different parts of the advertising stack. MCP addresses agency and partner workflow integration. Performance+ targets creative efficiency at scale. Business Assistant handles campaign planning and trend monitoring within Ads Manager. Ask Pinterest is a longer-term test of whether a taste-signal platform can extend meaningfully into standalone agentic commerce.

Pinterest’s differentiation will be tested as Google, Meta, and the frontier model providers build their own discovery and recommendation infrastructure at scale. Its signals are genuinely distinctive, but whether advertisers conclude they are complementary to what the major platforms offer, or ultimately substitutable by it, is a question these launches do not answer.

Pinterest will be back at the Pinterest Manifestival at Carlton Beach Club at Cannes Lions 2026. RSVP to attend at PinterestCannes.com.