By Pio Schunker, Co-Founder, The Actionists,
Last week, the global marketing industry descended on the Croisette — sweltering under a red weather warning — to celebrate its greatest achievements and latest obsessions. We applauded agentic AI. We awarded bold creative. We marveled at retail media innovations and end-to-end automation platforms. We shuddered at the sweating masses on Le Croisette. The rosé flowed, and the announcements multiplied. Yet one question was conspicuously absent: what business problem did any of it actually solve?
Marketers today aren’t struggling because they lack award-winning creative or cutting-edge technology. They’re struggling because growth is harder to achieve, attention is harder to earn, and brands are harder to differentiate in a world where every competitor has access to the same tools.
Inside boardrooms across the world, CEOs and CMOs are wrestling with fundamental questions: What is limiting growth? What is eroding relevance? Where will the next competitive advantage come from? Yet much of the marketing ecosystem, from agencies and consultants to technology vendors, continues to behave as though every business challenge can be solved with a platform, a tech capability, a content creator, or a campaign.
That disconnect from the business strategy should terrify us.
We’ve been here before. When social media emerged, marketers declared it a free broadcast medium to their generation of choice, no media spend required. Then they discovered you had to pay to play, staff accordingly, and that reach without strategy was just noise at scale. Then came performance marketing, which genuinely moved the needle, until brands starved the top of the funnel to optimize the bottom, winning clicks while losing relevance.
This year, creators dominated Cannes. When deployed strategically, these partnerships can be extraordinarily effective. But for many brands, they have become another shiny penny, embraced as a strategy rather than evaluated as one tactic in service of a broader business objective.
Now AI has taken center stage. The pattern is remarkably familiar. A new capability appears, and before anyone has clearly defined a specific business problem it might solve, entire organizations are restructuring around it. Staffing is being cut. Content is being generated faster than ever. The promise is that marketing can finally become less of a cost center. The assumption is that efficiency equals strategy. It doesn’t.
What’s striking about Cannes Lions 2026 is that the industry believes it has matured past hype. The conversation has shifted from possibility to implementation, from “What could AI do?” to “How do we deploy at scale?” That sounds like progress. Only it isn’t. Because moving from hype to implementation without passing through business strategy is just a more sophisticated version of the same mistake. You’ve simply accelerated the execution of the wrong answer.
Tactics are not strategies. Capabilities are not solutions. Technology, no matter how sophisticated, is not a substitute for business thinking. The industry’s thinking must start where every CEO and CMO starts, with the business problem. Until marketing engages with the business problem first, it will continue to optimize around activity rather than impact, just with faster, shinier tools to do so.
Cannes will continue to celebrate innovation. As it should. That’s its job. Ours is to make sure innovation serves the business, not the other way around. Because a shiny penny is still just a shiny penny if it doesn’t create business value.
Pio Schunker is co-founder of The Actionists, a strategic growth consultancy that bridges the gap between traditional management consultancies and advertising agencies. The firm helps organizations unlock growth by bringing together the rigor of management consulting with the creativity of modern marketing. Previously, he held senior global marketing leadership roles at Samsung and The Coca-Cola Company.
