The Media Lab team oversees media strategy, buying, and planning for Google Marketing. Led by Joshua Spanier, VP of marketing, these media, measurement, and brand safety experts help Google’s campaigns succeed. Here, Spanier shares his key takeaways from Cannes Lions 2025.
For 15 years, I’ve been making the trip to Cannes Lions. The energy this year was unlike any other. Between discussions about what’s going to upend the marketing industry to which trend is here to stay, this festival serves as the largest and most vibrant B2B moment of the entire year. Every major player in the industry sets up shop on La Croisette, putting an absolute premium on time, convenience, and talent.
Here is my review of the week’s Top 5 marketing and AI insights.
1. AI adoption is still underway
Throughout every conversation with marketers at Cannes, artificial intelligence (AI) remained a central theme. Behind the nervous excitement about what this technology is bringing to our industry, a more complex reality emerged. Many marketers revealed a shared feeling of falling behind in the actual adoption of AI. While AI solutions for paid media integrated into major ad platforms are being widely adopted, it’s important to remember generative AI efforts are still fairly basic. Beyond just technological limitations, internal change management was frequently cited as the major obstacle to generative AI implementation.
2. AI is not a KPI
Many marketers are quick to conflate AI adoption and usage with actual business outcomes. While it’s great that we are excited to showcase these new efforts, it’s important to remember that AI is simply a tool to drive growth and performance. Too many of us, for now, rank the adoption of AI as more urgent and necessary than the actual business impact of AI.
3. External partners with AI expertise have momentum
While AI is going to radically impact agencies, it isn’t going to overthrow them as previously feared. The pressure to adopt AI coupled with internal obstacles standing in the way of projects and resources, marketing teams are going to have to turn outward to the agencies who have invested in their capabilities. There is an execution gap that these external partners are eager and equipped to fill.
4. Creators continue to be a winning strategy
Hundreds of individual creators made their way around the Cannes Lions Festival, and we certainly observed many ourselves on the Google Beach. YouTube creators and their communities were a prominent topic of discussion. While having a creator strategy is essential to modern marketing, a key challenge remains for brands: how to effectively engage creators on a larger scale. Creators are pulling the future forward through powerful AI tools, and we see evidence of this on YouTube every day. Whether it’s using Veo to create AI-generated backgrounds and video clips for Shorts or our automatic dubbing feature that translates videos across nine different languages, the possibilities between creators, brands, and AI are greater than ever before.
5. Creative opportunities are endless
The creative opportunities with AI are proving to be endless. Tools like Gemini for ideation, Imagen for visuals, and Veo for video are removing the traditional risks of experimentation. Marketers can now generate dozens of concepts and storyboards at virtually no cost, allowing them to fully explore ideas before ever committing to a single frame of content. It’s a liberating shift for the industry.
The energy at Cannes this year wasn’t just about the future of technology; it was about our industry’s resilience and the endless capacity to reinvent. I’m incredibly optimistic for what’s to come.
Taken from: Think with Google