June 19th-June 25th // Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

AI was everywhere at Cannes Lions this year
Sources: Adweek, Digiday, eMarketer, PPC Land
June 22nd-25th, 2026

Summary: From ad creative to retail checkout, the AI announcements at Cannes Lions spanned all things marketing. Amazon introduced Alexa+ Agentic Ads, an ad format that lets users complete a purchase without ever leaving the ad. Meta unveiled a tool that identifies a brand's top-performing ad🔒 and generates new creative based on what's working in real time, already integrated into WPP Open and being tested by Unilever. Omnicom is using AI to place virtual branded products inside Netflix content and match ad creative to specific moments in NBCUniversal shows. OpenAI announced that its “clearly in the advertising business now.” AI even showed up on the creative side of Cannes (you know, the thing that The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is supposed to be all about), with Google giving creatives a dedicated space🔒 to experiment with its AI tools and 40% of Cannes Lions entries🔒 using it this year.

Some other announcements of note:

Opinion: Let’s call it the Cannes Lions International Festival of agent-to-agent media buying, or middleware deals, or holding company infrastructure announcements, shall we?

Over the years, Cannes has gone away from creativity and towards tech. Programmatic took over media buying, data integrations took over audiences, algorithms took over content. And now AI is eating all of it.

But as AI matures, perhaps it abstracts all of this away. The buying, the targeting, the measurement, the tech — it runs in the background, agentically. What's left is the part that was always supposed to matter: human insight, culture, and creativity. Thanks to AI, maybe The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity eventually comes back around. At least we can hope.

Claude Tag lets teams delegate work to Claude directly in Slack 

What It Does: Claude Tag turns Claude into a Slack team member that anyone in a channel can assign tasks to. Claude builds context over time by following along in the channels it has access to, works through tasks asynchronously, and can proactively flag relevant information without being asked. It's available today in beta for Claude Enterprise and Team customers.

Quick Take: For marketing teams, Claude Tag could proactively help flag trends, campaign issues, and surface useful data. Take it one step further: if Claude builds context over time by living in Slack channels, it eventually becomes the institutional memory of the entire team.

Google Vids adds custom AI avatars for on-brand video at scale

What It Does: Google updated Vids, its AI-powered video-creation app, to let teams create custom AI avatars with controls for appearance, apparel, and setting, and direct them to interact with objects in specific scenes. The update is designed to help brands produce on-brand video content without studio production. It runs on Google's Veo 3.1 model and is available today for Google AI Ultra subscribers.

Quick Take: Branded video at scale without a production crew is valuable, especially for smaller brands. The democratization of video production due to AI is why SMB CTV platforms are so hot! (Walmart just bought one, Vibe.co, for $1.4B!)

DoubleVerify brings AI-powered ad quality and optimization to Meta and TikTok

What It Does: DoubleVerify expanded its Authentic AdVantage solution to Meta and TikTok, combining pre-bid brand safety controls, AI-powered campaign optimization, and measurement. The goal is to help advertisers protect brand equity and improve performance.

Quick Take: Combining brand safety and performance optimization into a single, AI-powered tool could help marketers significantly cut costs AND drive better outcomes.

The Setup: ThredUP has 4M items on its site at any given time and adds 65K new ones every day. Traditional merchandising isn't possible at that scale, because every item is unique, so there are no bestsellers to restock or standard category pages to build. Helping shoppers navigate its catalog without feeling overwhelmed is a core challenge.

The AI Solution: ThredUP rebuilt its merchandising strategy around personalization, using AI to curate individual shopping experiences at scale. The platform rolled out a suite of AI tools to reduce friction and help shoppers find what they're looking for faster. AI-powered personalization helps ThredUP serve two different shopper types: those who love digging through a vast catalog and those who need curation to avoid feeling overwhelmed. 

The Results: 

• A new tool called Daily Edit can now recommend 100 personalized items daily based on each shopper's browsing behavior and saved favorites.

• AI-powered search lets shoppers use plain English to shop for specific looks, such as "coastal cowgirl outfit for the next Beyoncé concert"

• Real-time personalization adjusts recommendations on the fly based on what a shopper clicks during a session

Why It Matters: ThredUP's AI-powered search is essentially vibe-based shopping, where shoppers describe a feeling or occasion and the tool figures out what that means in product terms. If that becomes the norm, brands will need to rethink product discovery, because deciphering keywords and product attributes may not be enough. Brands will need to create AI-friendly content that describes products in the contextual, occasion-based, and aesthetic language that vibe-based search runs on.

Your Action: Try to surface your products in ChatGPT or Google AI Mode using just occasion and mood-based language. Do your products show up? If they don't, your product content may be optimized for traditional SEO but it’s not giving LLMs enough context to match against those queries. Start identifying your brand's “vibe” vocabulary; pull your best-performing organic social posts from the last six months and look for the words and phrases that are commonly being associated with your brand by your customers. They will tell you how they think about your products in their own language. Either double down on optimizing your AI visibility for this language if you think it helps you grow with the right audiences, or optimize for different language if you want to change your perception and / or reach new audiences. Or both!

​​Amazon is bringing conversational display ads to the open web🔒 - Its AI-powered chat ad units are now running on sites like the New York Times. It’s Amazon’s version of AdSense!

OpenAI sees fewer users dismissing ChatGPT ads as it scales🔒 - The rate at which users close out of ads has dropped 50% since February, a signal OpenAI uses to measure ad relevance. 

P&G built an AI-powered in-house content engine that's driving growth🔒 - At Cannes Lions, P&G CMO Marc Pritchard explained how P&G used AI tools to go from consumer insight to campaign assets for Secret deodorant, resulting in 8% brand growth.

L'Oréal struck a deal with OpenAI to accelerate its in-house AI content engine🔒 - The company's CreAItech system has already cut production costs by 40% and generated 50K marketing assets.

Google Cloud, Zeta Global, and Publicis Sapient help Gap build AI-powered marketing stack - The partnerships aim to unify customer data, automate campaign activation, and make marketing more responsive to customer behavior across Gap’s portfolio.

Spotify rebuilt its ad tech stack around automation and AI to compete for bigger media budgets🔒 - The audio streaming company overhauled its ad infrastructure to make automated buying easier, added generative AI tools for creative production, and is pushing its own measurement to prove performance.

Omnicom built a tool to help brands show up in AI shopping assistants at Amazon, Walmart, and Target🔒 - The generative engine optimization tool analyzes each retailer's AI responses and recommends content marketing ideas to improve visibility.

Agencies are racing to build AI agents for media buying, but brands are doing the same thing in-house🔒 - The same AI tools agencies are pitching to clients are also making it easier for brands to bring media planning and buying in-house, raising the stakes for agencies to show their value. 

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