Every year, marketing becomes more measurable, more personalized and more automated, yet brands seem increasingly uncertain about what actually works. The problem isn’t a lack of data. It’s that the industry has become exceptionally good at measuring itself while becoming progressively worse at observing real human behaviour.
Opinion
B2B marketing spent two decades building a vast machine to capture, score and nurture leads, but buyers learned how the machine works and quietly stopped cooperating. The result is an industry generating more contacts, more dashboards and more artificial intent while sales teams increasingly wonder where the actual customers went.
Google may have abandoned its plan to kill the third-party cookie, but the forces making identifier-based advertising less reliable never went away. The smarter question is no longer when cookies disappear, but why marketers are still building around them.
Experiential marketing has spent years chasing scale, spectacle and shareability, but the 2026 World Cup exposed a more important opportunity: turning real-world experiences into something increasingly scarce in modern marketing — genuine trust.
Direct mail may look like a relic of marketing’s past, but the transactional data behind it could solve one of digital advertising’s biggest problems. As AI takes greater control of audience modeling, knowing what real people actually bought may prove far more valuable than another mountain of clicks, browsing behavior and inferred intent.
AI has made personalization more powerful, but it has also made the machinery behind it much harder for consumers to ignore. As people begin making spending decisions based on how brands use their data, transparency is shifting from a compliance exercise into a genuine source of trust, differentiation and pricing power.
Taylor Swift’s wedding announcement started with one message in one physical place, then let the internet do the distribution. For marketers obsessed with reach, targeting and endless content, the real lesson may be that scarcity still creates attention.
Strategy has become the default answer to almost every brand and leadership problem, but the real issue may sit one level deeper. If the market does not understand who you are, no amount of tactical optimization can make it properly value what you do.
Cannes Lions remains advertising’s biggest global gathering, but this year’s festival highlighted a growing disconnect between what the industry celebrates and what marketers actually need.
Falling token costs may prove far more important than the next breakthrough model, determining whether AI remains a specialist tool or becomes the infrastructure that powers every campaign, customer interaction, and business decision.