We’ve got a special Decoder today — I had the chance to talk with Amy Lanzi, the CEO of Digitas North America, in front of a live audience at the Uber Villa at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in the South of France. I know, it’s a hard gig, but I do it for you.

Amy has been on Decoder three times now, and she’s one of my favorite people to chat with — she is clear-eyed about what the advertising industry really is and does for brands and what all the money sloshing around the ad-supported internet really accomplishes. You’ll hear her say that she thinks the traditional chief marketing officer role is done for and that her job is driving business results using data and analytics. 

That might sound straightforward, but it was a shocking statement at Cannes, which is where the entire advertising industry gathers every year, drinks rosé, and convinces itself of outrageous nonsense. This year, the big trends were creators, and, of course, AI. And Amy, alongside her parent company Publicis, aren’t holding back when it comes to calling out the AI nonsense for what it is.

Publicis actually put out an ad before Cannes listing all the false promises being made about AI when it comes to advertising, so I asked Amy about that, and what AI might actually be good for, beyond just generating slop and slop headlines. After all, Meta and the rest of the big platforms were all at Cannes talking about generating more and more ads with AI — something that threatens almost every other company in the industry. 

Of course, we also talked about the creator economy and how all the creators at Cannes were openly calling themselves marketers — essentially turning themselves into small ad agencies of their own. On top of that, the biggest creators in the world almost all launch their own products — something Amy and Digitas see as an opportunity, as those companies will need operational scale and excellence if they’re going to be successful over time.

There’s a lot in this one — like I said, Amy is as sharp as they come, and I really enjoy talking to her about how the money really works.

Okay: Amy Lanzi, CEO of Digitas North America, live at Cannes. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Hello everybody. I’m Nilay Patel. I’m the editor in chief of The Verge and the host of Decoder.

Hi. Amy Lanzi, CEO of Digitas, part of Publicis Groupe.

I’m very excited to be here with Amy. Amy, we have to stop meeting like this. We only talk during Decoder podcasts.

I know. We do. We have to do this more. We both live in New York. We should get together more IRL.

Yeah. We only travel long ways to talk to each other in front of live audiences, which is wonderful. Thank you all for being here. Thanks to Uber for having us. I have a lot to talk to you about. It seems like every year we hang out and the entire advertising industry is in a new form of chaos. And that chaos doesn’t really get resolved. We just move on to the next form of chaos. This year, it’s AI.

Yes.

I don’t think that’s a surprise to anyone in this room. Everywhere here at Cannes, the conversation is about AI. Let’s just get started.

Publicis put out what you would call a fake ad, a documentary ad. It’s called “The Wrong Promises” and it is basically just a series of vignettes of promises people are making in pitches, including “you don’t have to pay us until you win a Lion,” which is incredible. And it says “this is real” at the bottom.

Yes.

Tell me about what you are hearing in these rooms that are leading to these crazy AI promises getting made.

Thank you for bringing up our fun video. It was really designed to stimulate conversations like this. In the business right now, it’s crazy. I’ve been in this business for a long time and we are seeing all kinds of partners offer wild things in the pitch process. 

It’s different than it’s been before, whether it’s all the things that were, of course, hyped in that video, but also just insane commercial deals that are just generally bad for people and the business. And they’re coming in all different types — whether it’s about free AI, free platform, free whatever — that are creating a dynamic that is not good for all of us in this industry. Because we all need to work together. It is a people business and all of those things really, long-term, create a people problem.

Not to get all Toy Story 5 here, but the conversation that you and I are constantly having is about the pressure of the tech platforms on the media ecosystem, whether that’s publishers, whether that’s agencies, whether that’s creators at some point. We’ll come to that.

But the idea that the platforms have enough scale to promise you business results and then deliver them — whether or not that happens, but they certainly can make those promises — is leading to some of these outcomes. And some of these promises about AI and what it might be able to do, is there any reality to that? Or is that just a reaction to the pressure the platforms are putting on the ecosystem?

Whenever this conversation comes about, the promise of AI, I always go back to the promise of programmatic. How many of you remember when programmatic was a thing? No more people, it was all going to magically—

No one in this room admitted that they remembered that programmatic advertising was a thing.

Yes, right, exactly. And that was a time when it was all just going to magically happen and it magically still needs people, still has the nuance of brands and the marketplace and all of the things that we do to define our partnerships and what are going to be game changers. I go back to that because I feel like the AI story is the new programmatic story, with the promise of everything just being absolutely automated, and that absolutely did not happen.

When programmatic was rising, there were all those promises at that time as well and now we are living that. But what is different here is it’s coming from either agency partners or tech and platform partners. It creates a different chaos to where you started.

Publicis and Digitas also have huge investments here. You were early, right? You bought Influential in 2024 to do analysis of how the creator ecosystem was doing. You have Digitas AI, and it’s been two years that you’ve been into that. How do you think about those products and those platforms in an ecosystem that is full of these promises?

For me — and I’ll talk about Digitas AI in particular — we started to make our people better unicorns, as we talked about the last time we met. It was really to say, “Okay, everyone look at what’s on your desk, what’s in your day, and think about what you absolutely could build an agent to do and that way we free up our time to do this.” That’s where we started. And then what was fascinating is the magical things that were able to be built by the young talent in the industry that is solving a working problem but eventually a business problem.

That still holds because every day, as a Gen Xer, I always say, “Hackers wanted.” If you have a hacking mentality and you’re curious, you can actually do better things than I did when I was a hacker in that age. It enables us to use our agents, use our data to get to better ideas, better workflows that are more of a surprise and delight to clients than what you might have brought in the first round. Because you can do many rounds before you actually get to the final product and that’s how you get to the unique outcome.

You can tell that Amy is a Decoder pro because she has led directly to the Decoder questions. I’m very curious if AI, at least in the enterprise context, is a top-down or bottom-up change agent. You just restructured Digitas, right? You put in a bunch of new roles. You have a new chief intelligence officer, a new chief systems officer, and my favorite, a chief transformation officer. He turns into a robot. What are these roles?

[Laughs] I hope he hears this because that’s going to make him laugh. Anyway.

It’s very exciting. The toy line is going to be great. What are these roles for? How are you changing the structure of Digitas?

You’ve always inspired me by asking “how do you structure yourself” and “how do you make decisions?” The first time we talked about it, I had been in this role for just a little bit of time and we had set our culture, which is, “We’re fearless, inventive and generous.” That still holds on how we make decisions.

Org structure-wise, we needed to figure out exactly what you just said: how do we do things in the underpinning of the agency that will enable all of our different practices to be able to scale faster? To leverage intelligence — and, of course, intelligence is code for AI in this story. We are moving — so that’s why we have our chief intelligence officer, which was a pickup from data and analytics — into liberating that into an intelligent platform that all of our agents are built on and then also all of our employees use.

The second is systems thinking. We took the traditional COO role, turned that into a chief systems officer role and really redefined both of those roles because all of our client conversations are really about marketing systems. You need to have someone who can come in and understand that and meet them where they are. Then we think about the marketing flows that we’ll marry to the system that works within some of their tech choices, et cetera, as two examples. The third, the chief transformation officer is — and this is a big conversation here — around clients wanting to transform, particularly CMOs transforming into CGOs.

What is a CGO?

Chief growth officer.

Okay.

Did you not know that? 

I’m a journalist. My job is not to innovate. It’s unfortunate.

[Laughs] Okay.

I just ask the questions. 

That’s why we’re good friends. I make up a lot of things.

Yeah.

I was just coming from the Forbes CMO Council thing and there was a whole conversation on the rise of the CGO. What that means is CMOs, formerly, were really responsible for making marketing magic. Campaigns and media investment. Now they’re responsible for building capabilities and they need a partner to help transform their solutions, so it’s a people problem as well as a tech problem. That’s why we have that discreet chief transformation officer role.

You are a data person, you’ve always been a data person. I’m really curious about that. The idea that the marketing function is now so directly tied to business results, I see it on the tech platforms all the time. You and I have talked about this before.

Mark Zuckerberg will just look every single one of you in the eyes and say, “I’m going to kill you.” He does it without remorse. His vision is that you will just pay Meta and it will make creative for you, it will find the audience for you and they will deliver you business results and almost everything in the middle, from money in to money out, gets automated away by Meta’s intelligence stack.

The idea of the chief growth officer feels of a piece with that. That the marketing function is now a business function and it needs a data layer, it needs all these things. Where do you see the creative fitting into it? Where do you see the classic form of brand building?

It’s a fundamental part of that capability that needs to live, like the marketing capability now, as a system. Brand building and the fundamentals matter more than anything. What you stand for and how you show up, what you’re the answer for, especially with LLMs, is really important and it has to be authentic for the brands to grow.

That’s still the case. You just can’t stop there. It needs to be attached to a system and ideally, you have some data intelligence layer so I’m learning more and more about you and I can then redefine my marketing stories to reshape how I’m showing up if it’s not working, if it’s not selling more candy, if it’s not selling more cars.

How we change faster versus the CMO being responsible for building these campaigns and then moving on — that role is a dying role and it should be. It should be that marketing drives commercial value, marketing drives shareholder value.

You heard it here first, CMO is a dying role.

The previous version of the CMO. Sure. Just like the whole, we are in a chaotic world. We’re in an area of convergence. If you are a CMO and you’re not thinking about your data layer, you’re not thinking about your full stacks, [you’re not thinking about how] you can get closer to the consumer and get to better creative, better use of creators, you are not going to be doing well in the future. Whether it’s CMO 2.0 or you’re moving into that CGO role, that’s really the future of that type of function in an organization.

The audience here at Cannes knows this, but for the Decoder audience in their cars listening to this, the conventional wisdom was that CMOs only ever had two years on the job, maybe less. You were dead the moment you showed up, you got to execute one big campaign, you found the bathroom and then you were out.

[Laughs] Yes.

I hope you heard everyone in this room laugh.

I did.

That was the most knowing laugh in the world. This seems like a much longer-term role. If you show up as the new CMO and your job is to transform the entire business from the bottom up over and over again, it’s a lot of instability. Do you think these are longer term roles?

If you do this right and you create a marketing system, you will be able to live beyond the two years path, because you’re creating a growth engine. If you only want to do two tent pole marketing campaigns, that’s probably not going to go well after two years.

I basically have two themes that I want to talk about. One is data in scale and one is creators. This sits right in the middle of them. And I just keep thinking about this phrase that I’ve heard Meta use the most, but the other platforms use it a lot too, and it’s “creative is the new targeting.”

I hear that and I don’t make ads. We make two podcasts a week. We don’t do scale at that level, but I hear “creative is the new targeting” and I think that is a demand for output like no one has ever heard before — “We’re going to find your customer for you; you just feed the machine with as much as you can.” 

It seems obvious to me that you have two choices in that world of “creative is new targeting.” Meta’s Andromeda system is the biggest example of this, and it’s that you’re going to feed it with AI creative and you’re going to let them do it, or you’re going to have your own AI creative system or you’re going to let a million creators and influencers do it for you. How do you plug a growth engine into a world where that’s what the platforms are all saying?

The closer you are to your consumers and all the places they’re spending time from a data identity, however you’re systematically doing that, is the most important thing so you can see how they are reacting to… what did you say?

Creative is new targeting.

I’ve never heard this phrase. I don’t like it.

Yeah. I figured you wouldn’t.

It’s terrible, right? It’s terrible for our business — “creative is targeting.” Only because it sounds horrible. Creative is emotional and lovely and magical. How can it be emotional and magical if it’s targeting you? Those are two words that don’t go together.

The brands that are doing really well are deciding not to do that or to do it in a way that feels so contextually relevant because they know so much about Gen Z on [Meta’s products], that they’ve decided that they need to do this to be able to drive velocity for a certain type of brand that feels fit for that brand.

But we are not in a world where we need more content. Does anyone want more content? We are not in a world where we need more content. That idea, creative targeting, assumes that we have endless amounts of content and impressions as a concept. Those are two worlds that still need to be decoupled, but when they’re put together, it needs to be in a way that you are constantly learning. “How did that do? Did I gain more attention from a certain type of growth audience I’m trying to get to?”

Can I push you on this? Not to support Meta’s ideas here. 

Yes, yes.  

Let me just make the argument because you and I have talked about it before. The way, in particular, Mark Zuckerberg talks about it is at some point they know more about the viewer of Instagram than anybody, or they want to know more about the viewer of Instagram than anybody, and they will just deliver the right creative to that person at the right moment.

This is the same argument as programmatic. Only now they have acres of GPUs with which to do it. The argument there is yes, the army of unpaid teenagers will make the fun stuff that you watch and the advertising will just show up magically in the platform and find the right person at the right time.

Again, I read that as, “You should just let Meta make the creative for you.” You just give them a picture of the shampoo bottle and they will put it in the right place, on the right background. For me, it will be pictures of trucks jumping over things and exploding and then shampoo will appear at the end. They’re like, “That’s shampoo for me.” It would work. If any of you need an idea to target me specifically, that would work.

[Laughs] Don’t.

No agency is ever going to make something that niche, but for example, Publicis just bought LiveRamp to take all that data out—

It’s still in the situation.

Oh no.

Yeah. I mean, it’s out there, but the deal is not done.

Presumably the goal of buying LiveRamp, which is a giant data platform, is to lever up against Meta and say, “Actually, we know as much about these customers as you do. We can distill information across all the platforms and we will actually do a better job for our clients of placing the creative in the right place at the right time.” This implies that Meta will participate. Why would they do that?

Because people are complicated. And today, look at how often on this beach there are different players on the beach. Everyone doesn’t stay in this position forever and people are complicated. I would offer that if I started seeing your wonderful ad 50 times, I would say, “I don’t want to see this anymore and I actually don’t like that shampoo.”

That’s what happens when it’s just left to go on its own without someone thinking about suppressing messaging, without understanding consumers better because you actually win hearts and minds when you’re doing something that’s not as expected. Because people are complicated.

It’s like we say to our clients, “You need to work with all of them because all of us spend time in all these different places for different reasons. Why does someone choose to spend time on Pinterest versus [a Meta product] versus Amazon versus Walmart Connect? All of them are different roles, in terms of how the platforms work for you and your life. So why would you put all of your dollars in one place?”

For me, those players are shifting in and out depending on what we think that growth audience is doing and how they’re thinking about intersecting with that category.

Are they good at participating in an ecosystem in that way? This is something that strikes me every time.

Some of them are and some of them are not. The more they start to see headwinds, they lean more into participating. Ideally we want to do data collaboration with these partners because it’s better for our clients that we can say, “We knew more about this growth audience on the platform — I’m not going to say X because I’m not saying X —- on platform Y. We know more about them and this is—”

No one knows anything about X.

Right. “And this is how we’re going to grow your brand.” That’s a good joint story for a platform and an agency partner to come in to talk about because we’ve been able to actually share data and look at that in a way that’s beneficial for the consumer in the end.

There are only two business models, right? Bundling and unbundling. In the agency world, there’s a lot of bundling going on right now, right?

There’s a lot of bundling going on.

Obviously Publicis is huge. Omnicom just bought IPG. CAA is out here saying they’ve invented creators this year. I don’t know if anyone heard. They’re very proud of themselves, but they have a $250 million fund to take stakes indirectly in creator businesses.

There’s a lot of scale. There’s a lot of bundling going on. What do you think is driving that?

It’s the desired state of a system. Hence why we have a chief systems officer and there are capabilities that we built. Last time or two we met, I talked about building the commerce capability and the acquisition of Profitero that I led. That was really to get to a unique set of data so we could build a better commerce capability and advise our clients on how they should be investing in some of these retail media partner spaces at the time. How to win the digital shelf was really the business problem to solve when we made that acquisition.

That holds true for the acquisition of Influential. How do we create “creator” as a channel? How do we harness the creator in a way that’s also easier for clients? If you don’t bring those things into a bundled offer, it’s actually really hard for clients because there are seven different versions of Profitero calling on them. There are seven different Influential partners, or those types of partners that are calling on them, and then you’re looking at a decentralized set of technology, and it’s, again, ideally not tied into a single data identity spine.

The more you have them connected, the more you can actually say, “Did this really work? Did it really drive someone to buy more things?” That’s the reason why the capabilities are now being bundled. Think about them as capabilities versus assets in this conversation.

Talk more about Influential. That was a big acquisition two years ago. I’m assuming it’s been integrated. That was the big creator play for you. I know you were instrumental in that acquisition.

It feels like the creator economy has taken on a new shape this year. We are hearing more and more about the biggest creators in the world and the biggest platforms. Influential was much more of a scale play, right? It had an idea that you could go and do a lot of analysis of what was happening on these platforms at massive scale. How’s that working out?

It’s working out very well because we have taken their technology and connected it to our identity so that I can now see you, I can see who you follow, and then I can understand how to get closer to you or have either the type of right creator choice or right creative decisions that can get you to feel an emotional connection to my brand.

It’s also really that the creator as a channel is also super efficient. You can also have creators talk in a way that is a little more authentic to the audiences, where a brand maybe can’t go out with that message. But it’s very complicated. Before we had Influential, it was very hard. Every different brand partner had a different creator solution. We still are interoperable. We work with other ones that are out there like CreatorIQ, but it is easier for us if it’s connected into our system because then we can get to see if it actually worked faster.

What’s the step after the creator interaction? You open one of these platforms, you scroll some videos, you see some creator telling you to buy some product. Is it then to go search? Is it then to go open a retail app directly?

You mean for the consumer?

Yeah.

I mean, it depends. One of the hottest topics we’re getting right now is TikTok shops, which is another interesting topic we can have another day and that’s because creators are saying, “Don’t you want to buy this thing?” It’s a one-click opportunity to go get it.

For us, when some brands that are more used to selling through traditional retail channels, it’s a pretty big lift to build that out. It still is. But the desired state is, “I want to buy your kit of parts, whatever you’re talking to me about in your creator video, and I want to be able to buy it and do it then.” That’s a move we’re starting to see. We also just see “follow me and learn more about me as a creator.” It’s actually a cheat for CRM because if I’m a brand and you’re one of my power influencers and I want to really have an owned relationship with you, this is a way for us to get closer to you as a brand.

The reason I ask that question is I’ve run around the past two or three years asking every web host and web company why anyone should make a website now. If I was a new creative and I was starting The Verge over again in 2026, I would not make a giant fancy desktop website. I would probably be a TikToker. My dancing is pretty good. It’s not great, but I would probably start there.

The answer from all the web companies I’ve gotten is, “Oh, because you want to do retail and you want to escape fees on platforms. You want a different fee structure.” The best answer I ever got was from the CEO of Squarespace, who said, “A lot of people start websites with us just for the appearance of legitimacy.” Having the dot com — or I guess the dot ai now — gives you an appearance of legitimacy that a customer will go and transact against versus just dropping a TikTok shop and who knows what sort of Temu product you’re going to get.

I look at that and I say, “Okay, you’re going to go to the web.” That’s a move everybody wants you to do and the web is fundamentally under threat by agentic search, by AI overviews — everything everyone knows about. Do you see that changing in your funnels?

Interestingly, we are seeing more and more briefs for revising websites.

To do generative engine optimization (GEO)? 

Yes and no. It’s actually pretty interesting. This is something that the market talks to you, clients come in, they look for new things. Who would have thought, if you asked me at the end of last year, “Are you going to do a lot of website work?” I would have said no. We’ve seen a lot of it for two reasons. One, the future of websites is knowledge sites. Websites were built to contain a bunch of random information that didn’t really enable you to show up well in a single response to an LLM’s prompt.

So part of it is that, but also if you’re going to be a real brand and it’s literally your legitimacy point, you really need to have your own assets. You want to own that and eventually you don’t always want to have to funnel everything like packaged goods through a retail partner. You want to be able to have your own relationship. That doesn’t mean everyone’s going to buy from that site, but the idea is that it is a site that, one, does its job of feeding the LLMs but also builds your brand and gives information, too. Old websites pretty much weren’t really built in a way that makes sense for modern consumers.

Who are you giving information to? Is it consumers? Is it AI agents?

Both.

Is it just Google?

No. I mean, yes. If you have to build, we build for machines and humans.

What do you think happens? Every time I go to Google I/O, I sit down with CEO Sundar Pichai and I ask him. Every single demo of search for years now has ended in a transaction. I don’t know if you have noticed this.

Every Apple demo ends with trip planning. Every Google demo ends with trip planning that ends in buying shoes. You realize the audience is partially Verge readers who just love tech and partially it’s other developers. And then a huge part of it is industry analysts and their investors and they want to see the revenue return on every single feature that Google announces and so they all end in transactions.

Over time, those transactions have taken place closer and closer to Google’s core platform. This year they announced intelligent shopping carts that are just going to track prices and execute a purchase for you. You’re talking about rebuilding websites. There’s a world in which the website is just the backend database for a very complicated Google system that is doing all of the things that you’re talking about. Is there a hedge against that or is that train just on the tracks?

It’s a little bit of a hedge against that. I would say that for many of our packaged goods friends, one of their biggest threats is Amazon. That is the Google in this story because if you are so dependent on a partner like Amazon that also can — and we like our partnership with Amazon — but they also are a place where, because of the size of their marketplace, if you’ve built a brand that has a story, is a known brand, some of these marketplace brands can immediately win because of how you’ve invested and built the category.

So you need to have your own assets to be able to think about what is your next story, what is your next move so that you don’t get commoditized. That applies to both Amazon and Google, to a degree.

Do you think they’re competitors in this space in that way? 

I don’t know. I don’t do any shopping on Google, so I don’t know if I would compare them to that. 

Have you ever planned a hiking trip on Google? They’re great at it.

[Laughs] Actually, no. I use this thing called Mindtrip. It’s my favorite. I learned about it in The New York Times. You go to Mindtrip and it’ll magically plan your trip. It’s pretty good. It can do most things and then it breaks in certain areas.

But this idea that you’re going to have a bunch of agents just planning the trips for you, buying all of the gear that you might want, or tracking prices for you, which is another big promise that everyone has. And then the brands might pay for preferred results in all of those spaces. That does seem like a more direct competitor to Amazon than not, right?

Absolutely, it does. I just think there’s the planning part and the transaction part. Those are two different things. I think on the planning, you’re competing. Amazon is trying to get up. They’re going to get added transaction into that planning component — when you think about all the things that they’re doing with their own creators and even just their move on full funnel and content, that’s really to make Amazon your total destination. But I think in the agent-to-agent buying space, the concept of trust is still very important. What you’re willing to do and not to do, I think as a consumer is still TBD.

Here’s my wonkiest tech question for you. Google is very, very proud —

[Laughs] This is hard. Oh, Lord.

I got it. It’s fine. Because again, is AI top-down or bottom-up? I understand how it’s bottom-up. We’re going to empower all of our smartest people to do agentic things in our workplaces. And then there’s top-down, which is that Google is very proud of its universal cart standard, where agents are going to be able to access carts across domains and compare prices and do all that stuff.

That’s a corporate decision. That’s a strategy decision and they’re pretty proud that everyone’s on board. Their argument to me is, “Well, we just needed something. And this is the something.” I hear the tech industry say, “We just needed something.” And I think, well, of course, but it’s this something that you control and everyone might need something, but no one is thinking it through.

At the end of this, one player will control it. When your clients and partners think about, “We’re going to adopt these standards for agentic workflows, for how commerce will be done in the future,” is there any pause to say, “Google’s going to control the standards again?”

Yes and no. The clients I speak with today are not as worried about Google as a commerce partner as they are about the transformation of their more traditional partners, like Amazon or other retailers, that have transformed from being a retail partner to being media partners.

That transformation is occurring over there, their media partners —

It’s changed this dynamic of what a retailer does and what a supplier or manufactured brand does. That dynamic has changed and that makes the negotiation between them such that they need each other to grow. When they’ve transformed into media partners, this changes that equation significantly. This is the whole retail media conversation. “Are they a media partner or are they our retail partner?”

Yeah.

That’s still much more the conversation. 

Has AI changed the dynamic of that at all?

Yes, because the more AI-oriented products they have, the more it puts focus on media investments with them because of these magical products. It’s not necessarily solving a core shopping problem.

So let me flip to the other side of this, because so far we’ve talked about tech and data and scale, and I think that is the promise of AI. “We’re going to automate everything. It is going to be magic. We’re going to do programmatic again.” All you need is data and they need your money.

The other side of this — and I’m just walking around here at Cannes — is creators everywhere. Something vastly more human, vastly more bespoke. My theory — and I was just wrong on this, so I’ll cop to it — I thought creator rates would fall drastically this year, as there was more AI content, as the platforms got more and more punishing about what would work on their algorithms, as they started doing their own content.

Instead, I look around and everyone here at Cannes is just so proud about how the cost per minute of video is skyrocketing again. What’s going on?

Again, it’s all about supply and demand. Once creators start moving into a more famous space, then suddenly they’re worth more. Last time we talked about this, we talked about the difference between a creator, an influencer, and a celebrity. I still think that holds true. 

Unilever went out, probably this time last year, saying that they were going to spend 50 percent of their dollars with all creators versus creative. To me, an interesting conversation is, “What is creative now?” If you’re putting it all in the hands of a creator, what does it mean to be a brand that delivers creative and how do you make those things work together?

Because we can’t have another thing that also prices us out of the market and you get to a point where you’re ceding so much control to the voice of the creator that that’s probably not going to build your brand over time.

The creators see themselves as marketers, at least the very best ones here. I mean they’re here at Cannes.

Small business owners.

They’re all small media businesses of their own. Some of them are very large media businesses of their own and they’re very open that what they do is marketing for brands. That comes right up against agencies. It comes right up against your creatives. All the creators know they want more control. They want the brief from the brand. They want business results. And they say, “Leave me alone to do it. I’m just going to do it however I want to do it.” What’s that dynamic like as you start working with the bigger and bigger creators?

We still hold true to brand fundamentals. Strategy matters. What the consumer insight is for that brand has to be something that’s an exchange between a brand and a creator in order for the creator’s work to really build what’s unique about that brand. It’s still the idea of freedom and a framework that that creator is briefed on. They control how they’re going to do it, but there are some tone and voice and things that, if a creator’s actually going to buy into this, they need to buy into that. That still is really the exchange. That’s always been the exchange. Do you remember when UGC started in Tongal? Do you remember that whole thing?

It was the same thing. I was working on Johnson’s Baby and we were trying to figure out how to really create authentic first-time expectant mom stories. We had this great debate about how we’re going to get the new creators — like mom bloggers, was the language — to get them to tell these stories. So we had this: this is what the brand stands for, here are some things, but you need to buy into this and believe in it. That exchange still exists. We just call them creators now. And then you can do it in a more scaled way, through a system like Influential.

I guess maybe my new prediction is that we’ll see a more barbell shaped creator economy, where the biggest creators are making more and more money than ever and the middle gets squeezed. Either you’ve got to get big, you’ve got to be able to command rates because you’re a celebrity, or you end up towards those UGC rates, where you’re just doing infomercials on TikTok and that’s the business. What’s left for the middle?

It’s a really good question. I don’t know the answer to that. I do think there’s so much demand for this space and there’s a lot of demand for the middle. So you could use it as a way to eventually launch yourself into this upper echelon of creators. Someone said to me that creators are daytime stars from soap operas, which I thought, “This is pretty interesting.”

Because they’re in your house?

Because they’re just so on. It’s not noise but they keep you company, they keep you busy and then all of a sudden, one of those people becomes a movie star. Which, to me, is a little bit of that middle of what you just articulated, where we know the creators. I’ve watched my daughter over the years, and I’ve watched all of her creators [grow]. Emma Chamberlain was a creator on YouTube who’s now a star, doing Estee Lauder ads or whatever she’s doing. She’s really a celebrity now, but she started as a tiny creator making adorable shows on YouTube.

One of the things that you and I were briefly talking about before we came onstage was at some point creators hit a scale where their businesses need to be businesses. That’s where you might need an agency to come in and actually operate your business. That scale is still pretty huge. It might just be MrBeast at that scale, and he needs to operate a full business.

But I see lots of creators. I think it’s fascinating that the creative economy is the only one where people routinely transition from selling bits to selling atoms. It’s crazy to me that the Paul brothers are like, “Bottled water is a good business to be in.” Historically not a great business to be in. Shipping water around the world is vastly more expensive than just making one more video, but there’s no business in making one more video that scales.

You have to make physical products and sell them to people and that scales. Is that becoming a bigger and bigger line for you? “We’re going to go find the biggest creators and make them products and scale that up”?

The last time or two we met, I had predicted that, at some point, there are going to be these creators that become enterprises, let’s say a MrBeast that actually needs an agency, and it has happened. We are now starting to see briefs from these scaled, started-as-a-creator businesses that have now turned into enterprise businesses, where they need an agency partner and they also need someone to help them to figure out how to invest their media so they can grow. They’re like real brands. 

MrBeast himself cannot flip over the bars at Walmart. 

I just think people need consultants. You need someone to help you.

No one has ever looked me in the eye and said, “People need consultants,” before.

[Laughs] I call myself a consultant. Look me in the eye. Yes.

I have here Accenture just bought Whalar, which is like an all time nonsense Decoder phrase, but okay.

Yes. You, as an enterprise owner or as an owner of a company, you need help to figure out how you’re going to get to your next growth path. This is what’s happening with some of these businesses. 

These creators that have turned into an enterprise who are wondering, “What is next? Gee, it’s expensive to ship water all over the world. What do I do? How do I do this? What types of partners do I go to? How do I figure out ways to grow my brand in unowned ecosystems?” Because that’s the quickest way to grow your brand, not just in your own channels.

There’s this term that I’ve been hearing called the influencer cliff. I want to give credit. The TikToker who came up with it is named Carmen Vicente. I’m only giving her credit because no one gives me credit for Google Zero. 

[Laughs] I do.

I’m trying to reinitiate karma into this world. It’s her term. It’s great. If you’re listening to this, we’ll put the video in the show notes. But her thesis is that creators can do the branded content because the audiences are there for the real content and they will tolerate the ads in support of the work that they’re there to see. And then when the creator transitions to selling their own product, this misaligns the audience from the creator, and when the brand integrations get too overpowering, it misaligns everybody, and then the creators have to issue apologies and they’ve fallen off the cliff. I see this all over the place.

I see this with tech creators. I see this with fashion creators. Once you start shilling the product directly, your relationship changes, something goes horribly wrong, maybe you backtrack all the way. There’s some class of creators that’s able to do it, that makes the transition to selling products directly. You’ve seen a lot of these now, you’ve seen the briefs. What qualities let you take that next step?

I think a unique product is really important, versus a me-too product that a creator has decided they wanted to sell. That’s important. You’ve seen some creators where it’s that they’re into sports or they’re an athlete, and they’re moving into a space that they feel like this is something that made them a better athlete and is a unique part of the market.

If someone’s following for that, then that makes sense that you would buy into that. When it feels like someone woke up and wanted to just put their persona on a certain brand and it doesn’t feel like it’s been their talk track to you as your friend, then it doesn’t work.

Do you see any particular products that are going to change categories?

One of the things that I think that has been really interesting but is not talked about, is actually a unique example and more of a celebrity example, are brands like Fabletics, Kate Hudson’s brand. It’s super interesting. It’s right in her lifestyle play and her desire to be healthy and all of that. And it was really her launching Fabletics, not her endorsing Fabletics. That’s not really a good creator example. I have to think more about that one.

I’m very curious because I think that’s coming.

Yes.

As particular rates at the top end of the curve go up, the idea that you can just launch your own brand and collect those margins directly, I get it. It makes rational economic sense. But I’m wondering if the audiences are going to take that at scale.

Even if you just look at traditional brands that are trying to scale DTC-like brands, it is very hard to do because it’s very hard to be found and the distribution part is very expensive. There is a reason why Walmart is incredibly successful, because they’ve solved the route to the consumer. And that is very challenging and expensive to try to build that out, even if the product is incredible.

You mean distribution of product out in the channel?

Yeah, of product.

Because I was going to ask about that. You talked a lot to the web. I feel like I have to ask you because I brought up Google Zero. Is that true in your world as well? It’s definitely true on the publisher side that traffic from Google is going down. Is discovery traffic to all those websites going down as well?

To publisher websites, yes. We are definitely seeing a change in partnerships from our publishers that are trying to understand how they can create custom content that is not as dependent on search, but it’s definitely something that is a big conversation that’s happening here.

I would say in this case, if you are a publisher and you really have an authentic, true voice, people will follow you. They’ll come find you. Versus if you’re trying to fight it out in search, that’s going to be very difficult.

All right. Well, I’ll be in the bar at the Carlton later, if you want to find me. Okay. We’ve got a few minutes left and then we’re going to do some audience questions. But I have a lightning round for you.

[Laughs] Okay. This hasn’t been a lightning round? Oh my gosh.

This hasn’t. No, this is the depth. All right. I have talked to a lot of tech CEOs and AI CEOs over the past year, and there’s a furious debate over whether AI has a marketing problem. Sam Altman will say, “We got to do better marketing. We got to buy a podcast for $200 million.” Great haircuts from those guys. I think about them every single day.

I don’t mean this as an insult. Those are some of the best haircuts in the world. I’m working on it. I don’t know if $200 million of podcast haircuts is going to fix it for OpenAI. Sundar Pichai will tell you it’s not a marketing problem. Satya Nadella will say we have to earn social permission. Do you think AI has a marketing problem?

I think AI is misunderstood. It’s a marketing problem and the problem it’s solving. I’ll say that one of my favorite people to follow who talks about AI — my friends here are going to know what I’m going to say — is Shelly Palmer. If you follow Shelly Palmer, he published something recently about AI being electricity and how electricity is really what fundamentally changed the industrial revolution. 

The companies that were fast — and he referenced Ford in this — to really reshape how they work and were able to get to more efficient production as well as speed to market, will win. I think that’s the lost conversation on AI, which is, for me, all of us have too much to do on our computers and our desktops, if you think about it. You can use AI to do those things, and you don’t call me because you’re like, “Hey, did you clean out your email box?” Things like that are not necessarily game changers that are advancing all of us. 

Also we have a lot of busywork because all of the work is distributed everywhere. The more we can use AI to connect those things and get those things done enables us to do more things like this. Once we use AI to transform the way we work and to be more efficient in how we’re getting to the outcomes, it’ll then make time in all of our lives to do the things that are going to be game changers. It’s a marketing problem and a misunderstood problem.

Is that going to stop the kids from booing at college graduation ceremonies?

I think so. Right now — and my daughter’s a third-year — they’re worried about their jobs because all they hear, to your point about a press problem or PR problem versus marketing problem, is that AI is going to be the thing that replaces all of them. I would say we want new young talent because if I watch my 12-year-old, he’s been doing Google Slides since he was eight, because of COVID.

All of them got right into Google Classroom and they all learned how to co-work and use many different apps at once and produce presentations easily. Anyone that’s coming out of school we want — we want bright, curious hackers. We’re not not hiring them because we need them. We need people as the lifeblood of our business.

Do you think AI creative is going to get good enough?

I do not.

No? Ever?

I do not. I think the minds and complexity of humans make great stories that you are attracted to. I’m not using the word creative. I’m using stories. I think AI enables you to be able to get to those concepts faster or to get to higher production more efficiently.

I went to an event and it was fantastic. It was a case for Virgin Cruises and they were talking about building these beautiful long-form content stories. The creatives were talking about how they used AI to be able to get to the concepts faster, curate from static art to digital art to really make these beautiful, multimodal boards, to bring this to life faster. But it wasn’t the core of the idea. They had thought, they had used their brains to come up with the idea.

It’s interesting. In our newsroom, we do a lot of first drafts now with AI — of art, not writing — because it lowers the stakes on saying things are good ideas or bad ideas and just that has empowered people to have more ideas. I see a lot of that. I would challenge you: I think at some point the bottom end of the creative, the UGC world, that stuff gets taken over.

For everyday creative, I’ll give you an example: product display pages that are when you search on Walmart or Amazon and that page gives you all this information. If it’s not done with robots, you’re not doing it right because that’s like looking at the back of a packaging.

If you really do it right, you can make it dynamic. It knows what you bought the last time and it can be magical, but that’s like everyday creative that we need in order to get to personalization. We should be using those tools to be able to do that versus someone making those in an analog world, which is where we all started on that. For some things. When I think about big creative and storytelling, it still needs humans.

I’ve asked you about GEO several times. I’m asking you now in lightning round format. Is this just another wild goose chase?

GEO?

Yeah.

No, I think for certain platforms, it’s a recast of search. We’re seeing this happening, where you need to be, instead of being found, you need to be known for, so that’s the GEO response. But I also think it’s a better curation of information.

I think it’s harder work for marketers because you need to be figuring out how you are leveraging Reddit or all these other different places so that you are showing up in a positive way with the LLMs. But I do think, if we’ve all been talking about the concept of personalization at scale, we should be delivering on that. GEO allows us to do that.

Have you had to change your SEO practice to account for that?

Talk about a practice that you thought was not going to be big. When you look at the capabilities you have and what you don’t think is going to be a high growth engine, our SEO team has exploded. In addition to new websites, this is a big one and that is really a conversation around influence. It’s how you’re showing up and how you’re also influencing LLMs when you actually get into that.

Is that something you can measure? I worry that LLMs are inherently non-deterministic. Every result is different. Do you have a system of measuring those?

We do. We do have an audit format to see what is your share of voice within that, so you can identify where you are in the moment, but it’s a movable feast in comparison to share of voice for search. It is something that we audit so we can start to see what the different levers we need to be pulling are. 

By the way, the LLMs are also fed by different things. Recently, one of the new ones is longform YouTube content. That makes sense — that tracks.

Why do you think we all make podcasts now? 

[Laughs] Right.

Everyone’s just trying to get to three hours of YouTube content. I don’t know if you can have a lightning round question that starts from a place of existential dread, but here we go. I feel like we’re all here. 

Did you all see Adam Mosseri’s post about customizing the Instagram algorithm two weeks ago? This is maybe one of the most important posts in the history of media. I’m not kidding. And of course, he issued it as an Instagram carousel, one of the least consumable forms of media that you can possibly have. It’s also on Threads. If your brain is broken and you use Threads, you can go look at it there.

It’s very long and it’s about how offering the ability to customize the algorithm was previously impossible because no one could describe the series of matrix multiplication equations that led to your algorithm showing you a piece of content, except LLMs can now. It can tell you why you’re seeing content in a very direct way. And then you can talk to the LLM and it can customize the algorithm for you. 

He said, “This is great and we think this will give people a sense of agency.” And then he went on and said, “Soon I will customize all of Instagram for you and the app will be different for every single person. Some of the experiences will be interactive. Some of the UI controls will literally be different. How we organize everything will be different. And you can see how this is the obvious future for us.”

He went on again and he said, “This might be bad. This might ruin the shared fabric of truth that we all rely on every single day,” which for a Meta executive is remarkably prescient, but he didn’t say he was going to do anything about it. He was just like, “Here’s what I’m going to do to you.”

I look at all of Cannes and I look at all of our talk about the creator economy, about measuring the data and I think, “Adam Mosseri is going to make Instagram different for every single person. That is his stated goal. He said it two weeks ago and he knows that this might distort literally our shared sense of reality, the media experiences we all have.” This is the lightning round question. It was a big buildup to a lightning round question. Is that good?

It’s terrible.

Okay. Is there anything we can do about that?

Not engage in it.

How do you not engage with Instagram?

If I told you about my oldest stepson, who is absolutely analog, that’s why. I think we are seeing more and more consumers [like that]. Think about it. If you sat down in front of your TV and it was like, “We’ve made all these decisions about you and you’re only allowed to do this based on…” It feels like Black Mirror.

If that happens to you, you would say, “I’m not going to engage in this anymore. I’m going to go read a book.” It’s also counter to the value proposition of a social platform around community. It was designed to make this connected world. So that’s the most disconnected world.

People are lonely and isolated. The more you’re just in your doomscroll, it will be terrible. We need shared community. One of the things that’s really interesting and a bright spot about creators is creators show up and they have a community, and they listen to their communities. They’re not influencing, they’re talking to their communities, in a way. Brands that do this right are really bringing the community along. It’s why we’re seeing the rise of IRL. People want to get together and talk about things.

Is it just going to be that competitive pressure that keeps them honest? I look at the creator economy and Instagram is a load-bearing part of the creator economy. Disrupting that, maybe you break the whole thing. What keeps them honest? What keeps them from going down this path that they’ve very clearly said they want to go down? Is it just people switching away?

I think it’s people switching away. When brands stop putting media dollars there, and all of those things come together, you might realize, “Wow, they’re not buying what I’m selling and this is not going to work for me.” There are plenty of platforms that are no longer [prominent], if you think about it.

Big blue Facebook. It’s there for my parents. It’s even on their own platform. Okay. Last question for you and then I think we’re going to take some questions. This one’s really easy. What’s next for Digitas? What should we be looking for this year?

What’s next for Digitas? We are very much focused on marketing systems and how we are helping brands build out their growth engines so that it’s not just about your media needs, your creative needs, your CRM needs. It’s how we can really make all of those different capabilities work together so that it’s easier for our brands to grow.

Great. Well, thank you so much, Amy. 

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