# Cannes 2026: The Humans Strike Back > Source: > Published: 2026-06-30 05:30:25+00:00 I’ve been making the annual June pilgrimage to the Côte d’Azur long enough to recognize the difference between conversations that will still matter in September and those that evaporate faster than rosé in 95-degree heat. Threaded through every serious discussion at the Cannes Lions this year, I detected a growing consensus that humans in the loop are essential infrastructure in our AI-driven marketing renaissance. Not as a philosophical hedge against technological overreach, but as an operational imperative. In a world being agentically orchestrated at scale, human judgment isn’t the obstacle to efficiency we all seemed to think it was just 12 months ago. It’s the indispensable guardrail preventing us from optimizing right over the cliff. Never discount the value human perspective brings. With that in mind, here are a few more in-person observations from the Croisette. **Agentic standards must keep pace with innovation** Agentic AI isn’t a futurist talking point; it’s a procurement decision – build, buy or borrow. The industry stopped debating whether AI could automate media buying and optimization and jumped straight to deploying the infrastructure to do it. WPP Media announced a buyer agent for video. It also entered an agentic standards initiative for video buyer and seller agents involving Disney, Netflix, NBCUniversal and Paramount, under the enlightened-as-always leadership of the IAB Tech Lab. Meanwhile, Magnite launched its own orchestration framework to support automated campaign planning, inventory discovery and transaction workflows between buyer and seller agents. This is how industries reorganize themselves: through innovation and standardization. But who stays accountable when agents make decisions no human explicitly approved? That question doesn’t have a good answer yet, and the infrastructure is moving faster than the governance needed to circumscribe it. **Measurement is still a mess** OpenAI told the truth, and it should make media planners uncomfortable. ChatGPT’s Cannes debut [wasn’t tentative](https://www.adexchanger.com/ai/at-its-first-ever-cannes-openai-says-we-are-clearly-in-the-advertising-business-now/). OpenAI declared that it’s a media platform approaching a billion weekly users, with roughly one in five queries carrying commercial intent. And the platform is led by a head of ads who spent over a decade at Meta. It’s no secret what the company is building. But The Trade Desk’s Jeff Green has long argued that the attribution rules governing the last 20 years were wrong. ChatGPT’s coming-out party illustrated his point: It has enormous reach and genuine commercial intent, but without even the flawed measurement infrastructure Google and Meta spent a decade building. That measurement gap is where campaign value disappears. And no agent is going to flag it for you. Measurement is still the industry’s original sin, but there’s finally a confession worth hearing. The most consequential thing I saw at Cannes wasn’t on a main stage: The Trade Desk showcased outcome-based media activation as a live working pilot in partnership with marketing mix modeling provider Mutinex (where, full disclosure, I serve as senior go-to-market advisor). The system integrates real-time MMM signals directly into programmatic buying so brands can trade against what drives their P&L, not proxy metrics. Andrew Eifler of The Trade Desk made the essential point: Optimizing to incrementality rather than last-click changes everything about investment discipline – but only if a human being first defines the right business objective. As voices from across the festival made clear, AI pointed at the wrong objective gets you to the wrong place faster. The machine is only as good as the judgment upstream. Meanwhile, CTV measurement remains broken. Platforms still grade their own homework. The incumbent solutions were built for a world that no longer exists and extinguish more value than they recognize. **Brand safety is no longer news publishers’ biggest boogeyman** News advertising seems to be on an upswing. And the brands who continue to avoid it are paying a premium in lost campaign impact. Shenan Reed, chief global media officer at General Motors, confirmed the tide is turning in a panel discussion at Cannes with Pivot podcast host Kara Swisher: GM’s news investment, particularly at the local level, has grown double digits for three consecutive years, Reed said. She added that GM’s media buyers are operating with confidence enabled by news bias measurement tech that has finally caught up with human judgment about what constitutes quality context. On the same panel as Reed, The Trade Desk’s Green revealed the DSP has spent years building products to help brands avoid polarized and extreme news while accessing the incremental reach that premium news delivers. And it’s not a small incremental audience: roughly 11% of US consumers are unique to news environments, [according to Stagwell](https://www.stagwellglobal.com/future-of-news/). But the brand safety conversation is becoming beside the point as audiences find news through AI-curated feeds that consume content without returning traffic to the originator. The IP fight between news publishers and AI platforms isn’t just a legal story; it’s a sustainability story for ad-supported journalism. No buyer agent will make the case for investing in quality journalism. That requires a human being who understands that an informed public is good for business – and also good for democracy. Brands investing in premium news environments aren’t just efficiently buying reach with a high ROAS; they’re sustaining an ecosystem their own credibility depends on. **Commerce media’s creative conundrum** Commerce and content have collapsed into a single surface and, not surprisingly, creative conduits haven’t caught up. Retail media has crossed $150 billion. The infrastructure for shoppable video and conversational commerce is being built at speed. The missing piece is human creative expression. The industry built the commerce plumbing but largely forgot to bring brand expression along for the ride. Brands that find ways to tell genuine stories inside shoppable environments will own the next decade of consumer relationships. The ones handing that work entirely to automated systems will be indistinguishable from each other, and indistinguishable means commoditized. Consolidation is coming. **Creators control marketing’s future** The creator economy has already restructured the marketing industry. But, as Scott Galloway noted during a live taping of the Pivot podcast at Adweek House, the advertising industry “hasn’t yet recognized they’re no longer the protagonist.” That’s the most accurate structural diagnosis I heard all week. Creators are not a channel or a line item in 2026; they are where brand narratives live or die. What’s happening now is the professionalization of the discipline: serious measurement frameworks, performance and equity-based compensation and programmatic infrastructure connecting creator inventory to brand demand at scale. But the creator relationships that are actually working are grounded in genuine human creative partnership, not algorithmic matching. That distinction matters and will compound. One moment in this year’s Cannes experience stood out among all of the many others. Hollywood legend Jeffrey Katzenberg shared a rather interesting thesis at an exclusive breakfast that our mutual friend, AI futurist Shelly Palmer, hosted at the breathtaking Château de la Croix des Gardes overlooking the sea. Katzenberg had long arbitrated, with some combination of tedium and frustration, the tension between Hollywood’s creator community and the more commercially minded Silicon Valley industrial complex that wielded the power of the purse. Now, however, the advent of agentic solutions has enticed him out of retirement with the prospect of concentrating only on the most fulfilling aspect of his craft: finding the balance between the dreamers and the dolers. Katzenberg’s enthusiastic embrace of how agentic instruments could free his mind to focus on elevating the work of the entire creator community was emblematic of the prevailing mindset among the Croisette crowd this year. I used the word “instruments” above as an homage (“silent h” variation, please, as I wrote this from Paris) to another Cannes conversation that I had with my friend, Jay Altschuler, SVP of global media and agencies at Mastercard. He pointed out that AI is not a tool like a hammer that comes without instructions because there’s only one way to use it. It’s more like an instrument, something that is capable of an infinite number of musical notes and melodies that are unique to the person using it. It’s the best metaphor I’ve heard yet to define the role of the human in the era of agentic AI. The through line at Cannes Lions this year wasn’t AI versus humans. It was the recognition that agentic systems are only going to create inspiration or move the proverbial needle for consumers if people are taking the reins to design their objectives, shape and govern their outputs and assume responsibility for their decisions. The humans have indeed struck back – not against the enabling technology that is redefining every aspect of our marketing ecosystem, but in favor of it, clear in the knowledge that our taste, judgment, accountability and creative ambition are the true north stars that no agent can supply on its own. *“**Data-Driven Thinking**” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.* *Follow* *Lou Paskalis** and* *AdExchanger** on LinkedIn.* For more articles featuring Lou Paskalis, [click here](https://www.adexchanger.com/tag/lou-paskalis/).