Hot Takes from the Croisette: 5 Cannes Signals Every CMO Should Act on Now

Cannes Lions 2026 ran on sunshine, rosé, and a kind of candor that’s hard to recreate anywhere else. This year’s festival felt more open and more fragmented, with creators, entrepreneurs, indie agencies, and first-time attendees adding new energy to the conversation. Across sessions, dinners, beach conversations, and brand-side discussions, the same themes kept surfacing: AI is moving into the operating model, commerce signals are reshaping media strategy, discovery is changing before our eyes, creators are becoming a measurable path to purchase, and creative intelligence is giving marketers a stronger business case in the boardroom.

For brands and retail partners, the opportunity lies in connecting those pieces. The customer journey now spans channels, environments, platforms, and purchase signals that were never designed to work together. The brands making the strongest moves are building connective systems across media, measurement, commerce intelligence, content, and customer experience.

Beneath the activations and award-show energy, Cannes was full of sharper conversations about how marketing leaders can turn the tools and signals they already have into better-informed decisions and stronger business outcomes. Here are the five trends that stood out to us, along with steps marketers can use now.

#1. AI Has Moved from Pilot Season to Operating Reality

If there’s one phrase that echoed across stages, panels, and yacht decks at Cannes, it was agentic AI. The conversation has moved from experimentation to deployment. For commerce brands, that shift matters because AI at its most useful can connect signals, inform decisions, and act across channels in real time.

The strongest AI use cases right now are often the least flashy: research, planning, reporting, forecasting, creative iteration, campaign optimization, and measurement support. Those gains compound when they sit on clean data, clear ownership, and a workflow people use.

Paul Frampton-Calero, CEO of Goodway Group, put useful guardrails around the conversation during the Cannes Claritas panel: "AI will accelerate in some areas and decelerate in others as businesses grapple with the heavy human behavior lift and the high costs of playing in the token sandpit. Not all AI will be created equal."

That’s the part many vendor pitches leave out. Access to AI alone will not create a lasting advantage. The same foundational models are available to brands, agencies, and consultancies. Competitive advantage comes from taking a disciplined approach to your application of AI: choose the right use cases, integrate AI into the operating model, and hold it accountable to a measured and strategic business outcome.

At Goodway Group, this shows up through GOES™, our collaboration and intelligence platform. GOES™ connects signals, teams, and execution in real time, helping brands move from static reporting to always-on intelligence. The goal is simple: help teams act on live signals at the shopper moment.

AI can help solve for machine availability at scale. Mental availability still depends on human judgment, brand strength, cultural awareness, and creative courage. The marketers who get the most from AI will use it to remove lower-value work so teams have more time for the decisions that shape growth.

Before your next AI budget conversation:

• Map every AI tool or initiative to one specific business output. If you can’t describe the output in one clear sentence, tighten the use case before you fund it.
• ‍Assign a human owner to every AI initiative. One accountable person should own results, data quality, and decisions about when the AI is wrong.‍
• Set a 90-day success measure before launch. Track speed, accuracy, cost per output, planning quality, or reporting consistency from the start.‍
• Prioritize planning, measurement, and reporting first. These areas tend to show fast returns and require less organizational change than full creative automation.

#2. Commerce Media Is Bigger Than Any One Network

Commerce media came up constantly at Cannes, although the conversation has moved beyond individual retail networks. Commerce signals now flow through marketplaces, social platforms, loyalty programs, travel companies, financial services providers, delivery platforms, and many other transaction-rich environments.

The bigger challenge sits inside the organization. One team may review retailer performance data. Another owns loyalty insights. Another manages brand media. Finance wants a different set of answers. When those teams work from different information, the brand loses the full picture of how customers discover, compare, buy, and come back.

Customer behavior does not follow the org chart. People move between discovery, consideration, purchase, and loyalty in fluid ways. Brands making meaningful progress are using commerce intelligence across the full customer journey to sharpen planning, creative strategy, investment decisions, retail partnerships, and measurement frameworks.

A brand can win attention and earn relevance, then lose the transaction if retailer search, marketplace algorithms, or AI-assisted discovery don’t connect the shopper to the product.

Commerce media works best when it becomes a growth input for the broader business. Treating it as a channel budget leaves too much value on the table.

Where to start this week:

• ‍Run a commerce data audit across your teams. List every commerce data source your organization can access, including retailer, loyalty, first-party transaction, basket, and category data. Then identify which teams can use each source.
• ‍Ask whether retail media performance informs your broader media strategy. If retailer learnings stay inside a separate report, turn those insights into planning inputs for audience, creative, and channel decisions.
• ‍Brief your planning team with commerce data. Purchase signals, basket composition, category penetration, and retailer behavior should shape creative and audience strategy from the beginning.
• ‍Use commerce signals to pressure-test investment choices before budgets are locked. Look at category penetration, basket behavior, loyalty trends, retailer performance, and margin context to decide where media can create the most business value.

#3. Discovery Happens Long Before the Product Page

Cannes is calling it the Recommendation Era, and it may be the most important shift in consumer behavior since the rise of search. Consumers often arrive on product pages with decisions already forming. Research, comparison, and trust-building are happening upstream in places brands don’t always think of as media.

Traditional search still matters; AI-assisted discovery now matters too. Shoppers are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Search, retailer search, and retailer AI tools what to buy, which brands to trust, and which product is best for a specific need. Reviews, creator recommendations, retailer-generated content, social conversations, and product detail pages all feed that discovery environment.

The implication is hard to ignore: content quality has become part of the media strategy. Product detail pages, retailer content, review volume, structured product data, and claim consistency are now some of the most valuable assets a brand owns. Customers rely on them, and AI discovery systems use them as signals.

A weak product detail page or inconsistent product information can hurt performance before a shopper reaches the shelf. It can also shape how AI systems describe the brand. Once a recommendation model builds a pattern around a category, changing that perception takes time.

This is one of the most underestimated shifts in the market. The gap between brands that invest in content infrastructure and those that treat product content as a maintenance task will become more visible over the next 12 to 18 months.

Content and discover audit: 

• ‍Search for your product the way a customer would. Use Google Search or another search engine, a major retailer search, and at least one AI answer engine such as ChatGPT or Perplexity. Ask, "What’s the best [product] for [use case]?" Note where your brand appears, how it’s described, and which claims or details are missing.
• ‍Score your product detail pages against five customer questions: What problem does this solve? Why is it a strong choice? Why should I trust the brand? What do other customers say? Where can I buy it?
• ‍Review retailer content at least twice a year. Many brands refresh paid creative often while product pages sit untouched. Images, descriptions, A+ content, comparison charts, claims, and FAQs need regular attention.
• ‍Check consistency across your top retailer pages. Compare product names, images, claims, descriptions, specs, and availability across the retailers that matter most. Inconsistent content creates friction and reduces trust.

#4. Creators Are Commerce Infrastructure Now

One of the clearest commercial shifts at Cannes was the way creator, affiliate, retailer, and media partner roles are blending.

Creators are now distribution networks, trust signals, affiliate engines, content partners, and retail media connectors. A creator who can drive discovery on social, send a shopper to a retailer, and support a transaction in the same content experience has become a strategic commerce asset.

The brands taking this seriously are treating creator relationships with the same discipline they apply to retail media buys or loyalty programs. That means planning creator programs around conversion rates, basket size, new-to-brand acquisition, promo performance, in-store lift, and retailer priorities. Reach and engagement still matter, although they’re only part of the story.

Measurement needs to catch up with the way the ecosystem now works. A creator program without a commerce signal attached leaves too much learning behind. Affiliate links, retailer landing pages, promo codes, loyalty integrations, and lift studies can help connect creator influence to real business contribution.

Build creator commerce into your strategy:

• ‍Map active creator relationships to commerce outcomes. For each partnership, identify the measurable signal attached to it: affiliate link, retailer landing page, promo code, marketplace storefront, new-to-brand rate, or in-store lift study.
• ‍Evaluate creators on conversion metrics and audience fit. Look at cost per transaction, conversion rate, basket size, repeat purchase behavior, and category credibility alongside reach and impressions.
• ‍Bring the creator and retail media teams into the same planning conversation. Creator-driven commerce performs better when it aligns with retailer priorities, promotional calendars, inventory levels, and category pushes.
• ‍Build a repeatable playbook for top retail partnerships. Define the standard setup for commerce signals, measurement, reporting, and learning loops so each program gets easier to scale.

#5. Creative Intelligence Is Raising the Bar

Creative was everywhere at Cannes, as it always is. The more meaningful shift was how often creative emerged as a real differentiator in a media environment where platforms, targeting, and optimization tools are becoming increasingly similar.

As buying platforms, AI tools, retail media networks, and performance levers become more widely available, creative carries more weight. It has to build the brand, move customers closer to purchase, adapt across environments, and give leadership a clearer reason to keep investing.

That is where creative intelligence is becoming a real advantage. Brands have more ways to understand which messages, formats, products, offers, visual cues, and audiences are driving response. That intelligence depends on connecting data sources that many organizations still manage separately: audience insights, media performance, commerce signals, search behavior, creative metadata, retailer activity, and sales outcomes.

Rapid MMMs, faster ROI reads, and more accessible incrementality tools are also changing the creative conversation. Marketers can get earlier signals about creative performance, make changes soon after launch, and provide leadership with stronger proof points on why those changes matter. That reporting is especially valuable for marketing leaders who need to defend creative decisions with supporting analytics.

AI-generated creative is getting more sophisticated, and major platforms are embracing AI creative tools at an incredible pace. For brands with smaller budgets, this opens the door to content volume, versioning, localization, and production quality that may have been difficult to afford before.

The opportunity is to use AI and measurement to expand creative capacity, learn faster, and give teams more evidence for the decisions that shape performance. Human judgment still matters. Brand standards, cultural context, claims, tone, and quality control matter even more as creative production gets faster.

A CFO who only sees creative as a cost center will struggle to value the work. A marketing team that can show how creative decisions connect to search behavior, retailer engagement, consideration, store traffic, incremental sales, or ROI has a stronger boardroom argument and a better chance of protecting the work that builds demand over time.

Build creative intelligence into your process:

• ‍Tag creative assets by message, audience, product, offer, format, claim, and visual approach. Creative intelligence depends on knowing which parts of the work are influencing performance.
• ‍Define the early signals that will trigger a creative decision.Choose indicators such as branded search lift, retailer engagement, consideration movement, conversion rate, store traffic, incremental sales, or ROI.
• ‍Use rapid measurement to adjust creative while campaigns are still live. Faster MMM, ROI, and incrementality reads can help teams make changes soon after launch and explain those decisions with stronger analytics.
• ‍Apply AI creative tools where they can expand capacity without weakening the brand. Prioritize versioning, localization, resizing, and testing variations, while keeping human review central to strategy, claims, and final creative quality.

What Cannes Made Clear

The jigsaw puzzle has more pieces than ever. The problem is assembly.
- Paul Frampton-Calero, CEO, Goodway Group

Across the Cannes conversations, one throughline stood out: CMOs are looking for better ways to connect the signals, systems, and partners they already have so marketing decisions can move closer to customer behavior and measurable growth.

Most brands have valuable data, creative talent, technology, retail partnerships, and channel coverage. The harder work is assembly: connecting media, measurement, commerce intelligence, content, and customer experience so those pieces reinforce one another.

That’s where Goodway Group's independence matters. Independent agencies can make decisions faster, build around the client's business problem, and remove layers that slow progress. In a market shaped by AI, commerce media, AI-assisted discovery, creator commerce, creative intelligence, and stronger financial scrutiny, speed and accountability are clear advantages.

Goodway Group brings that thinking together through our Connected Commerce OS, built around Commerce, Connection, and Consulting. GOES™ serves as an AI-enabled collaboration and intelligence platform that helps teams turn continuous signals into clearer decisions.

Some clients need sharper channel execution. Others need help integrating media, data, commerce measurement, and customer experience into a single operating model. Many are rethinking how marketing should work as AI and commerce media change what’s possible.

The common need is confidence: knowing where growth is coming from, where to invest, and how marketing can connect with audiences in ways that create meaningful business impact.

Turn the Cannes Signals Into a Plan for Your Business

Goodway Group is offering a complimentary Connected Commerce Readiness Session for brands ready to pressure-test their setup. In one focused conversation, we’ll assess where signals may be disconnected, identify high-value opportunities across AI, commerce media, discovery, creator commerce, creative intelligence, and measurement, and map a clearer path from media investment to measurable business outcomes.

Schedule your session: info@goodwaygroup.com

Connected Commerce that moves the modern shelf. This is Goodway Group.

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