By Ryan Nelsen, CMO, StackAdapt
Every June, Cannes Lions becomes the global stage for advertising’s most ambitious creative work. Brands, agencies and platforms gather to celebrate the campaigns that captured attention, shaped culture and raised the bar for what marketing can make people feel.
The work deserves that celebration. Great creative still has the power to build memory, spark conversation and give brands a place in culture.
Yet the conversations around Cannes are increasingly extending beyond the awards stage. Marketing leaders are also asking a more consequential question: did the work matter for the business?
That question is becoming central to the role of the modern CMO. Creative recognition, cultural relevance and earned attention remain powerful indicators of a campaign’s resonance.
At the same time, marketing budgets are under greater scrutiny, and leadership teams want to understand how major brand investments connect to growth.
- Did the campaign drive incremental reach?
- Did it influence consideration, acquisition or retention?
- Did it move customers closer to purchase?
- Did it create value that can be defended in the boardroom?
The next era of creativity will be shaped by marketers who can answer those questions with confidence.
Measurement should be viewed as a validation of creativity’s value. After all the strategy, talent, production and emotion that go into a great campaign, every team wants to know whether the work made an impact.
That desire comes from respect for creativity, because the best ideas deserve to be understood in terms of the outcomes they create. When marketers can see how a message resonated, which audiences responded and where creative quality influenced performance, they gain a clearer picture of why the work mattered and how to build on it.
AI is making that connection more possible.
Marketers can now analyze creative signals at a speed and scale that would have been difficult to imagine a few years ago. They can test variations across messages, formats and audiences; identify patterns in what drives engagement and action; and connect performance data back to creative decisions with greater precision.
AI can help teams understand which visuals, offers, calls to action and storytelling approaches are contributing to outcomes across the funnel. Used well, these capabilities give marketers more insight into creative effectiveness and more room to optimize while a campaign is still in market.
This matters because the media environment has become far more complex.
A single campaign may run across CTV, retail media, social, programmatic display, commerce media networks and multiple closed ecosystems. Each channel may come with its own reporting structure, attribution logic and performance metrics.
Marketers are often left trying to reconcile disconnected signals into a coherent view of effectiveness. That fragmentation makes it harder to understand which investments are working, how channels are influencing one another and where creative is making the greatest contribution.
The solution begins with designing campaigns for measurement from the start.
Creative strategy, media strategy and business objectives need to be connected before launch. Teams should align on the outcomes that matter, the audiences they want to influence, the signals they will track and the hypotheses they want to test.
This approach gives creative work a stronger foundation. It also gives marketers a clearer way to evaluate performance across both brand and business impact, from attention and recall to conversion lift, incrementality and long-term customer value.
The future of great advertising will still be bold, emotional and culturally relevant. Cannes will continue to celebrate ideas that break through, move people and show the industry what is possible.
The opportunity ahead is to pair that creative ambition with better evidence of impact. As AI improves marketers’ ability to understand, test and optimize creative performance, the industry can move toward a more complete definition of excellence: work that captures attention, builds meaning and proves how deeply it mattered.
